Josh Turner - A LinkedIn Strategy Guide

Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

Hey, we're back again, back again. And today we're talking about the almighty LinkedIn.

Yeah, LinkedIn is actually something we've had past guests talk about LinkedIn and when we had them in the past, we still didn't take their advice and actually get too active with LinkedIn.

We're hard headed, damn it.

Fairly recently we've been kind of looking into LinkedIn a little more just, I would say within the last like month or so.

We've been hearing what talks, chatter from our friends and colleagues saying how they're getting some really highly qualified, high paying leads, you know, from LinkedIn.

Yeah.

Pairing it up with a sales team or even just with like a local kind of meetup group. It seems like a pretty dang good way to find some targeted folks that you didn't know about before in like a different space.

I always took the Pokemon approach to LinkedIn where my big goal on LinkedIn was just to try to collect them all.

Well, that's. Yeah. Don't you do that in life with all your friends too? You have no. I'm just kidding.

Sort of. I mean, to be honest, this is, this is 100% true. That's how I see the podcast. Like I'm just trying to collect as many awesome people as possible onto the podcast. It's like this podcast is my pokeball. We need.

If there's a designer out there listening, I really want a meme of Matt with a big pokeball. A pod ball, we'll call it. I don't know what's in there, but. Or what it looks like. But if you can design something with Matt's face on, it'd be great.

Yeah, for sure. Please. Anyway, today we're talking with Josh Turner, who is just a LinkedIn master and we cover a lot of ground on LinkedIn because we, you know, our impression of LinkedIn has always been that it's expensive with the advertising and, and that we've never gained much traction when we try to do organic stuff with it. And he sort of broke down all of his processes on this episode. He broke down how to, how to grow a following organically, how to actually sell stuff to that following, how LinkedIn groups work, how to actually effectively use LinkedIn ads, how to do cold email outreach after you've got them on LinkedIn.

Yeah. Follow up with them to make sure those leads don't dry up.

Yeah. Some really cool stuff. Yeah. Retargeting with LinkedIn.

Didn't even know that existed on LinkedIn, but it does. And. And everyone should be using it is what he said. But there's ways to use these ads. So. Yeah, he'll. He breaks down so many things. He gives a lot of tools, you know, some specific tools he could download. He. He runs Linked Selling, which is more of his agency. So if you like wanted him to do stuff. But Connect365 and this boot camp, it's actually Connect365io hustle is this pretty sweet boot camp that he takes you through and it kind of ties in with a lot of this conversation. So I think it's a pretty good prerequisite to go sign up for that.

Yeah.

Either right now or right after you finish listening to this. Yeah.

Wait until after the episode. Okay. After. After. Yeah. We don't want you to get distracted from the content that's here.

Yes, yes. Just know the link exists and it will exist after the show too.

Although we do have something for them if they do get distracted.

We do. Yes. So we have these things called notes. Companion notes.

That was such a build up. You have these things called notes.

That was on purpose. Pause. Yeah. So let's be honest, there's going to be a lot of tactics in this freaking episode. This is one of those episodes where we get in the weeds.

Yeah. No, this is a fire hose episode.

Yeah. And you know, these come. I feel like it's like every few episodes are like this. So. But each one is important to get the notes. So if you go to Evergreen Profit, you can go to evergreen profits.com but don't do that quite yet. Go to hustleandflowchart.com c o m p comp.

Yep.

And you're going to get these free companions. If you act quickly, you'll get the one for this show. There's always going to be a handful in there and they kind of rotate. But what we're doing is taking notes for you every single episode so you don't have to. And they're very thorough and done for you.

Yes.

So you should go get them for free at hustleandflowchart.com comp c o m.

P. And all of the tactics and strategies and all the tools and resources, all that kind of stuff that he mentions, those will all be available in the notes so that you could kind of follow along like a checklist. So hustlingflowchart.com comp they're there for a limited time, so make sure you rush over and get them rushing.

What does it sound like when you rush on a keyboard, Matt? No, no, it's like I can't do keyboard sounds because I don't have a keyboard in front of me.

Oh, I do. Okay, let's. They get the idea, Joe. They get the idea. I'm rushing.

I'm rushing over to hustleandfluechart.com comp it.

Looks to me like you're just smacking a computer anyway. Crap. Josh Turner.

Hey, Josh, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Yeah, so we got connected, I think like, I don't know, a little while ago. David Gonzalez, I believe it was so mutual. Buddy of ours.

And yeah, we're kind of looking forward to this for a long time because we haven't had a lot of LinkedIn talks. And I know you're doing a lot of cool stuff with software and follow ups too. So this is going to be an exciting one. Kind of probably in the weeds kind of talk here, I'd imagine, which a lot of people like. Yeah, man. So just kind of give us a look at. Just not to get too boring, like we were saying about that story that you probably told a million times. But what are some highlights that, you know, going through your career that led you to this point? A lot of LinkedIn stuff. Now you're kind of doing a lot more of the software. It sounds like doing some boot camps and stuff.

Yeah, I mean, our business has definitely evolved and we've got some cool new things that we've been doing. But you know, I really, I started because I was working for myself, you know, in early 2010 was when I started my first business where I was like full time all in. I had done some kind of like side hustle things for a number of years before that. But in 2009 I worked for a construction company. I ran their finance department. I had been there for six years. They were hit really hard by the downturn in the economy in 08. And then by the end of 09 they were just like totally out of work. And so this company, I started there when we were doing about 5 million a year, grew it to about 23 million in 08. And then it went down to almost, you know, we just totally ran out of work and had to shut the doors. And so I was then faced with the decision and a lot of people have been in this, you know, position that are Listening to this, I'm sure of, you know, I want to go find another job or is it time to try my hand at doing my own thing? I was 29 at the time. I didn't really know what I was going to do. And I thought, well, I built up this network in St. Louis and some people kind of know me for, you know, being the finance guy at this consultant construction company. And I'd made some contacts over the previous six years and that. So I said, I bet I can get out there and start and get a few clients working kind of as like an outsourced CFO. And so that was my first business. In early 2010, I started that. And the one thing that worked for me to get clients was LinkedIn. And.

So that business grew slowly but surely. I got it to about a six figure run rate within my first year, feeling really, really great about myself, making more money than I had ever made before. And then I started getting. I had a couple clients ask me, hey, this LinkedIn stuff that you've been doing? Because they saw me on there posting a lot of stuff and I created this group and I was just really visible. And.

Two of those clients that I was doing finance stuff for asked me if I could help them do on LinkedIn what I was doing for my business. And that was a real turning point for me personally because I fast forward a few months from there. One of them ended up hiring me to implement an entire LinkedIn marketing campaign for them. At the time, I wasn't even sure if it was really going to work, but it did the same thing that was working for my business, worked for this business, and now it's worked for thousands of other businesses that have hired us. And so it was in early 2012 that I went all in with Linked Selling and wound down the finance business. And so what Linked Selling is, is where agency companies hire us to help them generate leads and sales appointments using a process we've developed for marketing on LinkedIn. And so we have an agency where we do it all for you. We also have a.

Training program for people that really want to learn how to do it themselves. And you know, the business I didn't have, I had no intention when we started this company of creating a company that was going to be multiple years on the Inc. 500 and over 50 employees and million in revenue every year and all that stuff that we all like to brag about. But you know, when I was first, when first starting, I was just like, you know, just trying to make a good living you know, and it's really been amazing to be a part of this journey. And we've got an amazing team here. We've helped so many businesses around the world and done some really cool things, and it's allowed us to now start looking at, you know, doing stuff that proper businesses do and looking for opportunities to serve our customers, our customers in more meaningful ways. And that's kind of where the software side of our business has, has come from. And we've expanded our services to, you know, we have a division now where we manage ads for clients as well on LinkedIn. LinkedIn ads, as well as Facebook and some other things. And, and that's been a great area of growth for us as well. And so we're just, you know, really blessed and grateful to be where we're at, but we got, we got more work to do.

Yeah, man, that's awesome.

I'm curious with the, with the agency side of things, how does, how does that work right now? Do you guys earn like a commission on sales made off the leads? Do you, do you sell the leads? Do you work on a flat retainer? What does the agency look like?

It's a flat fee.

Gotcha.

Yep. Yep. So most of our clients started at. For any, you know, for as many accounts as we manage for a client. So some people come to us and they're just like the business owner and we use their LinkedIn account to go out and get them sales appointments with amazing prospects that are a perfect fit for their business. Sometimes it's a company as multiple people on their team that they need to feed with leads, a sales team. And so we will run multiple campaigns for them. Right. But you know, the down and dirty of it is if somebody wants to hire us to do our thing, we typically generate on average 10 to 15 appointments a month for them. And that level of service is going to be about 2,500amonth, flat fee. No sort of like, you know, percentage of sales or any of that kind of stuff.

Gotcha.

Cool.

Walk us through. I'm kind of curious because you said you, you know, that whole system, kind of a basic. I don't know about basic, but it seems like a systematic way that you take people through. Started with your company and you started applying it to others. What does that system look like?

Yeah, so it's obviously evolved since I kind of stumbled into it for myself. But really what it is is figure out who your very best prospects are. Then figure out what do they actually care about? Because they probably don't care that much about your business. But if you can speak their language and stay in front of them with content that really speaks to the things they are interested in and care about the stuff they're reading, the stuff that keeps them up at night, then they're gonna be, you know, more likely to stay tuned into you as opposed to people who just like go on LinkedIn are constantly talking about themselves all the time. And when you're constantly talking about yourself all the time, you've gotta be either you're gonna be amazing and you're gonna be, you're gonna have like a ton of great stuff to say, and you're like a Gary Vaynerchuk, which is a rare breed, or you're gonna be like the financial advisor who's just constantly talking about like their products and services. But it's. No one cares because you're a.

Right.

And so what we find is, is that you just have, you do much better if you have a good mix of, you know, it's like the 80, 20 rule, right? Like talk, you know, share good stuff from other people. 80% of the time, 20% of the time, talk about yourself. So once you know who your best prospects are and you know what they care about, then what we do is we usually will include a LinkedIn group as part of our strategy. And that's what I did when I was first figuring out this stuff for myself. And the group is usually going to be something that your prospects would actually want to be a part of. So not all about your subject matter expertise. So like a client of ours who runs an IT company, we don't go start a group all about it. The only people care about that are his competitors. Well, for this one client, I'm thinking of here in the Midwest, he works with manufacturing companies. We created a group called Midwest Manufacturing Leaders and he is the one running the show. And when he invites CEOs and CFOs to be a part of this community, it's actually something that they're interested in. And then they want to receive this content on a regular basis. And he's the one running the show, his name stays very top of mind with them. And so that group strategy, when Tom Swift, who is the president of Swip Systems, an IT company, when he can position himself as not only the president of Swift Systems, but also the founder of Midwest Manufacturing Leaders, then when he reaches out to these prospects who they're not interested in getting connected to, someone that's just gonna hump their leg and try and sell them something. But now they see him as more of a peer and a leader in the market that he's trying to serve. And so they're much more open to connecting with him. So in some ways the group can be a bit of a Trojan horse just to get your foot in the door. And so we use the group to get lots of prospects in the group, but then we also get our clients connected to lots of prospects, lots of new first degree connections, and then we nurture them for a while. We don't just go for the kill and try and invite people into sales conversations right away. Typically, that's what gives LinkedIn a bad name, is all the people that we all see who we connect with somebody and they immediately start pitching us, right, those are the people we call leg humpers.

I gotta start using that. I bet that's probably in. You might have seen this or have some theories too, but I know, like for Matt and I, and I know this is probably like the worst thing to do is kind of just forget about LinkedIn. Because of the leg humpers. Yeah. A lot of people have been fricking kind of shot in the leg. I don't know. Basically, you know, it's like there's this bad experience with LinkedIn. They're like, I don't know, everybody's just trying to be their friend, not communicate.

Yeah. I mean, to be quite honest, you know, us, and I'm sure a lot of people listening, their impression of LinkedIn is, you know, I go on LinkedIn, my inbox has a bunch of people that pitch to me. There's not, there's not like as much going on in the news feed like there is on Facebook. So, you know, I know for myself, I would check into LinkedIn like once every two weeks. And that was about the extent of what I do on LinkedIn.

But we gotta squash that belief. Yeah. So how do we.

Well, I think that there's, there is a lot of that out there. And it's unfortunate that a lot of people have given LinkedIn a bit of a bad name for some of that kind of activity. But here's what I would say is one, that that stuff doesn't work. So that's not what you want to be doing. If you are trying to get, you know, if you're trying to build relationships and generate leads and get new clients off of LinkedIn. And so just really quickly to wrap up what, how our process works is, once you then build these databases of connections, build this database within a LinkedIn group, then you spend literally a couple of months, nurturing those relationships, putting good content in front of them, and then inviting them to have a conversation. And so once you build up the goodwill and you lay the groundwork and you position yourself as one of the good guys or gals, then at that point, a couple months in, when you invite someone to a conversation, the take rate on it at that time is significantly higher. Way, way, way higher than when you try and go for the kill. Too soon, in a nutshell is our process. And so we work prospects through messaging campaigns that last three, four months and really play the long game. But then once we ramp up and get there, the results are really, really great and we're able to get the most out of it. Which for the types of clients who our process makes sense for.

They'Re companies who they can't afford to churn and burn prospects. So they need a strategy that's really going to have the long game in mind and get the greatest conversion percentage out of these people we're connecting them to on LinkedIn. And so that's in a really, really quick way that's, that's kind of what we do on LinkedIn. And in addition to that, though, of course, LinkedIn ads are really taking off over the last couple years and there's a lot of other stuff going on with LinkedIn that is really exciting. And so to your point.

About, you know, hey, you're only going into LinkedIn once every couple weeks, et cetera, et cetera. It's interesting. I hear that from people, but I'm hearing a lot more people lately who are talking about that they're seeing, like, LinkedIn becoming more valuable.

Agreed.

There's, it's like LinkedIn was hot for, you know, a few years, and then maybe 2014, 2015 or 16, people started kind of being like, I don't know if it's worth all the hype. And so. And then now, though, it's like having a resurgence again. And like, I heard Gary Vaynerchuk speaking of him again. I heard him talking the other day at a conference where he was, he was saying right now he thinks that LinkedIn is the best thing happening on social media for B2B. And you know, he's, he's like, he's all over it right now. He's really, really investing.

I believe it. Yeah.

And there's just a lot of cool stuff going on. LinkedIn reported that the engagement in the feed and engagement overall on LinkedIn is up 29% over the last year. And that's not like Their user base is up 29%. Their engagement from users has been increasing pretty significantly. So they're doing a lot of the right things.

Yeah, no, I do find myself checking into LinkedIn more and more often because we are hearing more and more people talking about it. I mean, just doing this podcast, you know, we're interviewing eight to 12 people every single month, and LinkedIn seems to be coming up more and more often. So there's definitely a trend there.

Yeah.

You guys know Dan Martell, right?

I know the name. I don't. I don't. We don't know him personally.

No.

Well, Dan's a great guy. For anyone in the SAS world, you need to be following Dan because he is really a genius and he's the got one of the best programs for SaaS founders.

Who are really looking to scale their businesses. But Dan and I have known each other for quite some time. He was telling me the other day that right now his LinkedIn ads are outperforming Facebook ads two to one. And so that's just. He's not a client of mine. That's not like a pitch for anything. But there's a lot of people who are finding LinkedIn ads working really, really well right now. And so why is that happening? I think it's a couple things is that one, more people are spending more time on LinkedIn than they used to. At the same time, Facebook ads are increasing in cost. Certainly in a B2B market, LinkedIn ads just can make more sense because you can target in more specific ways that you necessarily can't always do on Facebook. Then at the same time, it's just that LinkedIn's ad platform.

Has become far, far more robust and effective over the last couple years. It's legit now. You can do retargeting, you can have sponsored InMail is ridiculously cheap right now and effective, and there's a lot more going on there that's causing it to be a lot more effective.

Gotcha. Yeah. I'm curious about ads, but before we touch on ads, I actually wanted to ask a question, quick question, about the process that you explained earlier. You mentioned that you create a group and then you put people that would be your ideal client into that group. How are people discovering that group? How do new prospects find that group and get involved in it?

Yeah, so they can find it organically if they're entering certain search terms, but we don't really count on that. Primarily what we use the group for. First and foremost, our number one priority is to use the Group as a Trojan horse to get people to connect with our clients. Then some percentage of those people that we connect with, we're going to invite all of them to the group and a percentage of them are going to join the group. So most of the people joining the group are people who we're connecting with and then sending an invitation to be a part of the group. Then on an ongoing basis, we continue promoting content in the group to all of our connections, and that continues to bring awareness to the group and drive more people into it. As the groups then reach a few thousand members, usually in most niches, then they start taking on a life of their own and don't need as much push from, you know, as much of a manual push. And they just kind of start having this snowball effect and growing more organically. But aside from that, there's other things you can do too. You can use ads to grow a group. You can promote groups to your email list, you can put a little widget on your website about your group and all that kind of stuff.

Oh, I love it.

That's cool.

What's so, yeah, so I know groups have changed over the years. Like, has anything drastic changed on LinkedIn? Because it seems like, I mean, social networks, things are always changing. Are there things that we should probably know of that might have changed since, like, even last year?

Yeah. So one of the things I hear a lot from people is like, LinkedIn groups, do people still use those? And it's a valid comment because Facebook groups really took off and kind of left LinkedIn groups in the dust in a lot of different spaces. And so because of that, LinkedIn knows that about a year ago they came out and said, we're going to be doubling down, we're reinvesting in groups. We're going to really be making a push here to try and catch up. So I think that really soon we're going to be seeing some exciting new things with groups. And LinkedIn has said that it's going to be a priority to reinvigorate and energize them. But really, there haven't been any major changes that anyone would see at this point. And with our clients and the people we work for, they really don't care that much about engagement in their group. Because, look, when you start a LinkedIn group and you get a few hundred people into it and you're targeting business professionals, maybe CEOs, potentially very busy people who are not just like hanging out in LinkedIn groups, comment posting stuff, right? And so you're, you're in a lot of spaces. You're just not going to see a bunch of people like in your LinkedIn group commenting and posting and stuff like that. Right, but, but you will find though that people are seeing the content in there in different ways. And then like I said, like, it's really just the main priority is using it as a way to position yourself in a different way to get people to connect with you. And so we usually don't care about the engagement as much happening in the group. But of course there's a lot of different strategies that you can implement if that is important to you. There's a lot of LinkedIn groups out there that are really thriving today and you can just go kind of, you know, poke around and find great examples of that.

Yeah, I remember a few years ago, Joe, do you remember Carl White? I don't know if you're familiar with Carl White, but he used to actually teach people to go around and buy up LinkedIn groups. Find LinkedIn groups that are very active, that are sort of in your niche and then go and buy them up and, you know, continue the interaction, but then also place offers in front of them inside of that LinkedIn group. Is that, is that something you've ever experimented with? I'm just curious.

I haven't. Right now is not the time to do that. That used to be more.

Applicable and effective and LinkedIn has kind of changed some things to where like for example, you can no longer send an announcement out to a LinkedIn group, which you used to be able to do that, which was effectively like a one time email they would send. You could do it once a week to all your group members and they disabled that feature. I don't know if it'll ever come back or not. But.

Not having that feature almost makes that strategy not as lucrative or potentially lucrative. And so you would have to have a different strategy for how to monetize the group to make it worth doing that. And there are some, but it really just kind of depends on your business. But as an overall strategy, I think for most people that's not where to focus now.

Gotcha. And then I have one more question about groups and then we can move on. I don't know if Joe has more or not.

You're good.

But with the groups, how are the groups at driving traffic? If, let's say we wanted to curate podcast episodes or blog posts or something like that into our group, is it actually a pretty decent traffic driver or is it more designed just to, you know, interact on LinkedIn and build rapport with people and then obviously follow up once you've built that rapport.

For most people, it's not going to be a good traffic driver from a traditional standpoint of like driving lots of clicks for most people's groups that if that's your objective, I would do something different. It's more of a tool to really position yourself as an authority in your space and to build relationships with these people in your group. It's not really like a traffic strategy.

Per se, it's more positioning. That's good though, because there's a lot of folks I know with, maybe they're trying to break out in different niches, maybe they're stuck in one. It seems like LinkedIn would be a good avenue to explore business leaders in other spaces that you might have say a traffic program or our podcast and start establishing that credibility, that authority to those folks in this group manner.

Yeah, it all. It also sounds like it'd be pretty effective for, you know, maybe more on the higher ticket end of things. Like if you've got an E. Comm business and you're selling $10 widgets or something. Yeah, it doesn't seem like it'd be the most effective strategy there, but if you're doing, if you're like coaching or consulting or have agency services and something in that, that higher ticket range where you might want to get on a phone call with them, it seems like that's where this, this type of strategy really would excel.

Yeah, I would say that that is accurate. 100%.

Cool. Now two kind of two party question here because I'm sure there's a lot of beginners that don't really have a lot of LinkedIn experience listening. They're just like, okay, cool, so where do I start? And then there's probably some, I guess more like established people, I would say, like us, we have followers connections, but maybe we're just not taking it super seriously as part of our business. Like what are some things that we should probably do to our profile? Because I'm sure there's probably some stuff that we have on our LinkedIn profiles that's like outdated or just like that's not good, doesn't look good. Like are there some essentials that we should all be doing maybe starting with the profile and the way that we connect with people on there?

Yeah, I mean it's a broad question that is going to be unique for every business and it kind of depends on how you're going to be using LinkedIn. Like if you are going to implement our entire strategy. You might approach your profile different than if you're just like, hey, I'm not going to really do much on LinkedIn, but I want to make sure my profile is looking decent. Right. And so if you're more in the latter camp, I would say that the basic things that you want to make sure you're doing is make sure you have a good headline that really speaks to the types of businesses you work with and how you help them, what kind of results you get for them, and package that into a really succinct statement. As opposed to having a headline that just says like President at Matt Wolf llc. Yeah, nothing to nobody, right? Or just having your headline say Financial Advisor, which, you know, yeah, that tells people what your job is, but, you know, doesn't make them want to click through to learn more about you. Doesn't in any way separate you from the crap ton of other financial advisors that are out there. So that's kind of a generic headline strategy, if you will. And then from there, I think the next thing you want to do is look at your summary section and you can position different elements on your profile in different orders, but basically you want to make sure that below the fold or below your image. So when you go look at somebody's LinkedIn profile, if you come up in a search, they're going to basically look at your picture. So make sure that it's not something stupid and goofy, make sure it's a decent looking headshot. And then they're going to look at your headline and possibly your current job title. And that's basically the main information that pops up right there. And so you want that headline to then get somebody to want to click to learn more. So then the headline is kind of like the, the email subject line to get them to open the email, you know, and then so once they do open that email, you want to give them some sort of next step. And your summary section is where you can basically write whatever you want to be featured on your profile. So that when somebody clicks through and they scroll down just a little bit, boom, you hit them with that summary section and then you have the opportunity to drive them into some next step with you. So, you know, I like to use my profile to do things like invite people to go to a link to get a free book or to go to a link to sign up for one of our webinars and stuff like that. So to get people to then, you know, move from checking out my LinkedIn profile to opting in for something to then get deeper into our funnels and whatnot. Right. And so that's, in general, that's usually what I recommend.

Nice. Okay, cool. And this is always like something that Matt and I have talked about too, and I think we talked to someone in LinkedIn about it. But you know, like, you get so many connection requests from all walks of life. It's kind of like Facebook. But I don't think LinkedIn blocks or, you know, like caps you at a certain amount. What's your strategy? Like when you see all these random people and you're like, I don't know who this is, they're not related. Like, are you in the camp of just accept them all, like collect them all for connection's sake, or do you have a process for that?

Well, so when I, when I didn't have a lot of connections earlier on, I tried to connect with anybody because it's important to build up that, that you know your level of first degree connections so that you have more second and third degree connections and you show up in more search results and all that kind of stuff. And then once you kind of have tackled that to some extent, you know, at this point, if somebody doesn't include a personal note telling me, like, where they found me or why they're reaching out to me, or why they think we can benefit from being connected, or like, hey, I read your book, or anything like that, if I just get a random connection request that has no personalized message, I just ignore it. LinkedIn's done something over the, in the recent past to where now I'm getting like a hundred connection requests a day on average. And the vast majority of them are just, they have no message, they're just random people. And so what's happening is that I have a lot of connections and because of that I'm showing up as a recommended connection to lots of people. And LinkedIn now is making it super easy for people to just click invite on lots of people's pictures, that they're almost encouraging people to do that, to send lots of connection requests to people that they don't know with no personal note or anything like that. I don't think it's a, I don't think it's great. And it's weird because LinkedIn also says you should only be connecting with people you actually know. So the way they've set up the system is kind of contrary to that. But that's okay. I'm not getting bent out of shape about that.

But I'm at a point now where I can't keep up with it. And it kind of sucks because I've got so many pending connection requests in my inbox, over 2,000 right now that I know there's some legit ones in there, and I just haven't been able to get through it to get to them. And so that's maybe a little bit of a personal problem, but I'm not a huge fan of the way they've got it structured. But I would say that in general, it's not going to hurt you to be connected with more people.

And, you know, because the more people you're connected to, then the more people you have access to. But at the same time, you know, some people just want to only keep their LinkedIn profile, you know, and connections to people that they actually really know. And that's fine, too. You know, we kind of all have our own preference.

Yeah, yeah, no, you're in good company. Because I think that's what Matt and I, every time we go in there, we're like, oh, my God, there's so many connections. And it's just like, it gets overwhelming at some points. But like you said, there's probably some gold in there, and most people just don't have a message. So that's probably a good rule of thumb is like, you know, if you don't recognize them off the bat or if they don't have some kind of note. Yeah, maybe not, Adam, but yeah. Yeah, so that's. That makes sense.

That's how my Facebook looks. I think. I have, like, 2,000 friend requests on Facebook that I've just ignored for, like, five years straight. But that's a whole different story for a different podcast.

Yeah, well, that's a. I want to.

Talk about LinkedIn ads because that's something anytime LinkedIn ads have ever come up with almost anybody I've ever talked about, the general consensus is, like, they're way too expensive to even get involved with now. Like, I don't know how many times I've talked to various people that do a lot of media buying that have never touched LinkedIn ads, because their perception of LinkedIn ads are. They're just. They're the most expensive option out there. But it sounds like that's not true anymore. So, you know, what do you see as, like, some of the biggest benefits of LinkedIn ads right now?

Well, it actually, in a sense, it is true still to this day that it is the most expensive click that you're probably going to buy.

But what we're seeing is that first off, not all clicks are Created equal on LinkedIn and there's a few different types of ads that you want to consider. Some we're getting clicks at a really, really low cost, others is very expensive. But what we focus on primarily are companies that want to use LinkedIn ads to get more sales appointments. And it's not getting cheap ebook downloads or it's not about getting people to sign up for a webinar at five bucks a pop or that's really not the best thing that you're going to get ROI with on LinkedIn. It's more for people who have higher ticket offers, need more sales appointments either for themselves or their sales team, and are willing to spend a couple hundred bucks a piece for those appointments. And so I throw out the number for $200 per appointment. That's a range. On the low end right now with sponsored email, we're with some campaigns getting appointments for $50 a piece of wow.

With, you know, with other things that we're doing on LinkedIn. And for, in certain niches, we've got some clients who are spending $500 plus for an appointment and then we've got some in the middle who are, you know, 150, 200, 300 per appointment. And so really, at the end of the day, some people might be hearing some of those numbers and saying that's expensive. But for people who have high price points understand the lifetime value of their customers, if they don't care about, you know, if they're going to spend, they're going to get an appointment for $200 a piece and they can close 10% of them.

Wow.

And it costs them $2,000 to acquire that customer. And so at that point you just have to think about, well, at what price point do you use? Does your lifetime value of a customer have to be to justify spending that kind of money? And so like you said earlier, if you're an E commerce company selling $10 widgets, that's not the right thing for you to be doing. But you know, if you're running an agency where clients are worth six figures to you, if you're a consultant, if you're, you know, an IT company, you know, any of that kind of stuff, it's, it makes total sense.

Yeah. And it's, you make a good point in that like no click anywhere is created equal. You know, it's the value that, you know, it's, there's all these different qualities to it. And it seems like LinkedIn just has that higher echelon of leads Especially if you already have, you know, if you've nurtured them, kind of establish some credibility through a group or maybe through your profile, your connections and stuff. It makes sense.

Yeah. I mean, that's something that we harp on all the time on this podcast, is that people get hung up on, on cost per click. And in my opinion, cost per click, it doesn't matter at all. I honestly don't even know the cost per click on most of the ads we're running on any platform right now. Because all that really matters at the end of the day is the lifetime value of the customer and what you're willing to acquire that customer at. If your lifetime value of a customer is 100 bucks and you're willing to spend $90 to make $10 profit, then you know, you can do that all day long. But the cost per click is pretty irrelevant. But people just seem to get hung up on it. So I'm with you there.

And how about with. Have you seen any specific strategies with retargeting? Is it pretty much all on the same, just more of a cleanup second touch, or do you have some other strategies around that?

Yeah, yeah. So first off, I think for anybody who is.

Considering doing something with LinkedIn, one of the things that almost everyone should be doing is having some basic retargeting setup and have a small budget allocated to it on LinkedIn. Because one of the coolest things we're doing right now is retargeting site visitors, people who have visited your website or a specific page on your website, retargeting them with a sponsored InMail, which is a message that they get in their LinkedIn inbox. And the cost per message right now is really low on that. And we're getting just. We're booking appointments off of that specific strategy at a really, really low cost. And it's cool because somebody visits your website and then at some point in the near future, after visiting your website or going to your sales page or whatever it is, then they get a message from you on LinkedIn saying something like, hey, I saw that you recently were at our website and I wanted to share a bit more, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, call to action at the end, which could be whatever you want. Usually we're offering to book a call, have a conversation, and very few people doing this right now. And because of that, I think it really, it stands out and it's working really well now. It's not like a huge scale thing for most of us, but it's kind of A low hanging fruit type thing.

Yeah. If you have the profit margin in there and the offers and maybe the sales crew behind you, it seems like a no brainer. Especially if you just want to position your product differently outside of a different, into a different niche. Maybe charge something different too.

Now, is retargeting typically cheaper than driving cold ad traffic or is it typically more expensive than driving cold ad traffic?

It's typically cheaper on LinkedIn.

Gotcha.

I mean, you know how it is. Like you can't always say it's always going to be a certain way for everybody, but in most cases what we're seeing is that it is generating leads at a lower cost. And so just like Facebook, you can retarget your site visitors with ads that show up in their homepage feed. On LinkedIn, you can have text ads that are based off of retargeting. You can retarget email lists. So you could like upload your email list or you could go scrape a list or whatever it is. Right. And you can target those people with different types of ads or InMail on LinkedIn. Right. So there's similar to Facebook, there's a few different options of how you can play with it and such, but.

I think that for most people it's something that they should absolutely be doing. Especially if you're like running Facebook ads already, you should be doing some retargeting on LinkedIn?

Oh yeah, yeah, for sure. That's like the first place we always tell people to start with just retargeting. Yeah. If you're Facebook, Google, doesn't matter. LinkedIn. I didn't even know they had retargeting. So this is perfect. Added to the mix.

Yeah.

Matt, did you have anything else on ads?

Yeah. So I was, I was curious, do you have any specific best practices for when you're running ads to colder audiences? You know, not retargeting. What, what sort of things are, are you looking at and you know, how do you get your targeting? I know it's a very broad question because every company is going to be different, but is there any like specific best practices that you're kind of looking at each time you set up an ad?

Yeah, I mean the biggest thing is going to be coming up with a compelling hook because we could talk about like all the, you know, the little nuances of like image and copy and design and all this, but at the end of the day you got to understand your prospects well enough to come up with a hook that is going to get them to take notice and want to take some next step with you. And so that's the biggest challenge that we face when we work with new clients, is coming up with that hook. And it can be difficult in businesses that are, like, really kind of stodgy and not sexy.

People like you guys probably wouldn't have any problem with it, right? But if you're, you know, if you're in IT recruiting, it's a little bit more challenging sometimes. Right. So you just got to come up with a good hook, a good offer, a good lead magnet. And at the end of the day, that's really what's gonna move the needle. Right.

And then.

And then from there, it's just a lot of basics. A lot of the same stuff that works on Facebook and whatnot, and other ad platforms that people are more familiar with are working on LinkedIn too. And in a lot of cases, there's a lot of people doing stupid stuff with LinkedIn ads that is got to be just a huge waste of money because a lot of big brands are using LinkedIn ads, and they're. They're just garbage, and they're just not. Well, they haven't. They don't understand direct response marketing, and that's just not how they market. So they're more in, like, brand awareness and, you know, spending money just to get people to go, you know, look at some website or whatever. And, you know, so when you show up with an ad that is just far more compelling than the stuff people are seeing in their feeds. And in some cases, you know, you can. You can just do really well because the competition's not as great. Like, there's a lot of really, really smart marketers on Facebook.

Yes.

It's really like so many marketers are using Facebook. So many companies are using Facebook. Every ad I see on Facebook, pretty good. Like, there's like, you know, a lot of people putting together compelling copy and images and, like, offers and hooks that are really good. And.

On LinkedIn that's not the case. You scroll through their feed and look at all the sponsored posts which are ads, and you'll be like, most of this is not good.

Yeah.

So it's a good opportunity for people to kind of know how to do that stuff.

Yeah, yeah, no, we've been really into Reddit lately and experimenting with Reddit ads. Same thing on Reddit. You just see these people that are just that apparently just trying to do branding campaigns, but have no clue what they're doing.

Smart marketers haven't really made that transition. Like you said, they're mainly on Facebook, which actually is a good opportunity, it seems like for folks trying out ads on LinkedIn, maybe they want to go search up an IT company who might be running some ads and you know, check out their info and ads tab and their profile, then like check out their angles.

Although I do believe Facebook recently removed that.

They just removed it. I didn't know that.

Or they moved it or something. But anyway, so the last question about LinkedIn ads, is the targeting fairly similar to Facebook, like interest targeting? I've actually never been in the ads platform on LinkedIn, so I'm just kind of curious how it compares from a setup standpoint.

Yeah, yeah, very similar. So you would target based on job titles or age or geography or industry or interests, things that people have been endorsed for. Groups that people are in company size is a big one that we use oftentimes. So yeah, all that kind of stuff, it's kind of like.

If it's in their LinkedIn profile, you can target it.

Gotcha. That's pretty cool. And you said, yeah, ads can grow groups, which in Facebook you cannot do. So that's an advantage as well. And I just love the whole analogy of like, if you bring people together, you're kind of the point person, then they all look at you as a trusted person, as their connector. So you have already. Your value is just like elevated compared to everyone else there because he brought them together. So I love the whole thing that.

You can do with the group strategy is like the client I was sharing with you earlier with the manufacturing group. Well, he decided after a couple years of doing the online LinkedIn thing, he said, what if we turn this into a real world group and actually invite these people to an event every once in a while.

Yeah.

And fast forward to today. They have a Midwest manufacturing leaders group and they have, they hold a, they have this event once a quarter where they invite all the group members to get together and they always have like a featured speaker. And there's just a two or three hour meeting every three months and they're getting a couple hundred people to show up to every one of them. And that's, you know, that's moving this stuff to a whole nother level. And it's been huge for them.

Love it. Yeah, the whole local meetup thing, there's like so many people doing it. And like, I know we have a lot of friends that hold these groups and we really don't know about them because, you know, they're these little pockets, but there's so much potential there within these small Groups. And it sounds like a perfect thing to translate the local folks into these groups. And, you know, even the IT person can hold it, bring together all these people, bring an expert in there, and then guess what, you're probably going to sell some clients or maybe broker some deals in that room every single month. So a lot of lateral stuff you could do there. Now I want to move over to that funnel you told us about. You have like a lower price funnel for to a boot camp and you're doing some cool stuff to drive traffic to that. Can you give us kind of like the overview of that and then we can dig in on how you're doing that?

Yeah, man, thanks for asking. Because that's really an exciting area of our business, that we're seeing huge results for our clients in that and it's just growing like crazy. So essentially a couple years ago.

We decided to build our first software product. And the reason we decided to do this was because part of our LinkedIn process, historically and still to this day had been if you make enough touch points on LinkedIn and you and you don't break through to somebody, why not move the conversation to email and try reaching them there. And when you do that, you can really get a whole slew of additional leads from people who are not paying attention to their LinkedIn inbox. And so with our LinkedIn strategy, we would work people through this LinkedIn process and anyone who didn't respond would get moved over to email. When you're talking about hundreds or thousands of prospects that you're working through, we don't want to be manually messaging these people, if possible, with these emails. What we were doing was something that you guys have probably used at some point in the past called mail merge, where you essentially take a spreadsheet of people with their name and their email, and then you take that spreadsheet and you connect it to your Gmail or your G Suite account and you plug in a script that has some merge fields and it sends hundreds of emails to all the people in the spreadsheet. And they look like personal emails that you just wrote to a friend. And no unsubscribe link, none of that kind of stuff. Those kinds of emails, they actually get responded to. They get opened at a significantly higher rate than like an infusionsoft or constant contact type email. Right? And it looks like a personal email that you sent to somebody. And there's a way to do it right, so that it's, you know, not considered spam. And so you give people a way to say they don't want to receive the emails anymore and all those kind of basic things. But it is a really effective strategy for outreach. And so for years in our agency we were doing it using spreadsheets and we decided that why don't we build a tool that automates this? And so we created what eventually we call still to this day connect 365. And it is a tool that automates the entire process really of sending batches of emails to people in a way that is really warm and personal and gets a huge response rate and a huge open rate.

And really as the tool evolved over the last couple of years, it's really become so much more than just a cool way to email people, where it's now become really sales automation tool. And one of the things that we learned with this and it's been quite a journey, but in the first year we really were just figuring out like how to create a good product. And then once we knew we've got an amazing product, then we had to turn to how do we get more people to know about this? And so what we did was we did a few things that didn't work at all. Like this is the way it always works. And this is like the probably the greatest lesson that I feel I can ever share with people is like the success that we've created in our company and anyone else who's out there doing well, it's not because they tried something and it worked amazing. And it's just always sunshine. Right? Like we all are trying things that aren't working all the time and then, then you, every once in a while you stumble into something that does well and then you step on the gas with it. Right?

Right.

And so for us with 365, eventually we stumbled into this concept of having a boot camp, a five day boot camp to teach people how to automate their sales process, how to automate prospecting, messaging, outreach, to have lead gen happening in an automated fashion, to have sales follow up automated.

And that boot camp has really just been crushing it. It was, I don't know, five months ago when we did the first one and now we've been doing every month. And we've gone from having.

A few hundred.

People who are members of Connect365 in six months. Now we've got, I believe over 1200.

Nice.

It's really been, it's been an amazing thing. And the reason why so many people have now been joining Connect365 through this bootcamp, because we, and this is so this is a. Now that I've given you all that background, you know, here's the cool part about it that maybe can help some people is that the boot camp is all about teaching people how to automate their sales process. And the tool that they need in order to do that is Connect365.

Right.

And so throughout the Boot camp, though we're not selling them a tool. We give them a free trial as soon as they sign up for the boot camp. And then throughout the boot camp, it's all about make sure you sign up for your free trial of Connect365 and then you're going to have 14 days to implement what we're teaching you in the boot camp. And if you don't get results by the time the free trial is over, and in fact you should be getting results within just a couple days of the boot camp starting. But if you're not getting results, then we don't want you to stay on and we don't want you to continue.

Pass the free trial.

Dude, that's cool. It's like an onboarding sequence, but you're essentially giving this really killer offer, proving out the value. And you're giving even way more value than any onboarding sequence probably would ever give. And then at the end of it, it's a risk reversal right there for them. So there's really no risk at all to sign up.

Sure, yeah, that's well said. And it's really.

That specific funnel has been really a real turning point for the growth of that part of our business and is really, really exciting for us. And.

The initial thought for why we structured it to your point was because we wanted to figure out a way to get more people to actually use the product. We had found in the past when we were doing free trials, that a lot of people would take a trial, we could give them different reasons to take a trial and make that sound exciting, but then they wouldn't actually go in and do the work to use it. And so they don't stick. But with people who go through the Boot camp, it's all of the content is really helping them get the tool set up so that they get the results. And so the number of people who actually activate and stick has been better than anything we've done in the past. So I think it's a pretty cool thing we stumbled upon. Maybe there's some other people doing similar things, but it's working really well.

Super cool. I may have missed it. You may have said it. And my brain blanked out on it. But how are you getting the emails that you're plugging into Connect365 and mailing to. I know you mentioned you're hitting them on LinkedIn first and the ones that don't respond go over there. How does that connection work? How do the emails go from LinkedIn over into this tool?

Yeah, so there's all sorts of ways to.

Get prospects into Connect 365. There's a couple ways that are more automated so using you can import any CSV file, you can do a sync with your, with your Gmail contacts. There's a couple other things that you can do like that. But so for example, with LinkedIn. So unfortunately with LinkedIn you used to be able to export all your LinkedIn Connections emails.

I remember that. I thought that was kind of crazy.

Now you cannot do that. You actually can still export all your connections data, but most people, their email doesn't show up anymore. That's the long and short of it. And so what you can do though is there's a lot of tools. Like one that we recommend is called Get Prospect. And Get Prospect is a cool tool that can.

Essentially scan your LinkedIn connections and then find their emails.

It's kind of, you know, I actually am not even sure exactly how it works, so I don't want to call it a scraper, but check it out. And so like tools like that give you a lot of ways that you can actually still get the emails of the people you want. You can use it to do the same thing with people who are in specific LinkedIn groups, all sorts of different things that you do with that. There's one called Hunter I.O. out there. There's a lot of tools out there that can help you find emails in really targeted industries, niches and groups and websites and all that kind of stuff. But I would say that.

What we teach in the boot camp on the day where we focus on.

Messaging and lead gen is that yeah, cold outreach is one way to do it. But connecting and reaching out to people that you've already been connected with for a while on LinkedIn or people who you've maybe talked to in the past, but they just didn't move forward for one reason or another. Those people who you've had touch points already with at some point in the past are the best to start with. And most of us have a lot of them that we don't really realize that we have. And so we help people kind of uncover those hidden databases. And usually that's the best place to start and then from there, man, there's all sorts of cool things that you can do with this tool. There's a lot of use cases for people with sales teams or people who just need more sales appointments because emails that come from Infusionsoft and Constant Contact and Mailchimp, etc. Their open rates just are not very good anymore and people know that it's a marketing email and so the response rates are also low. So what if you could pull out meaningful segments from your infusionsoft account and have a campaign from one of your salespeople that sends emails through a tool that it actually comes across as a personal warm email from that person. So what happens when you do that is you get a much higher open and response rate and it's a great way to generate sales appointments. Another cool thing that we're doing with it is.

In any of our online funnels where we have like one click upsells, we will, anyone that doesn't take any upsell, we will then an hour later have an email trigger from somebody on our team to reach out to those people and ask them why they didn't take them and make sure they saw them and give them one last chance. That is crushing it.

That sounds amazing. Yeah, it's a personal retargeting call.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's really cool. And so like, yeah, could you set that up to happen in infusionsoft? Yes. But then people know it's an automated email so it doesn't as good of a response.

That's super cool because I've been hearing more and more, you know, I have some, we have some colleagues that have said they're hiring. There's kind of twofold but like a sales team that has some kind of LinkedIn connection like of where they get their leads and they all kind of seem to claim that they can, you could charge way more. You know, you have a higher amount that you can charge LinkedIn folks, especially if you've kind of nurtured them. You've, you're really talking to the right people. It's just a great way to really zero in on a higher quality of customer. Is that something? I mean, it sounds like that's kind of what you're hitting on through this whole follow up process here.

And it's generally speaking, I think if, you know, if you're B2B, then yeah, you're gonna probably have great success finding really quality people on LinkedIn.

Yeah, yeah.

And then you know, if you're finding great people on LinkedIn, you need to have a strategy to keep yourself in front of them for a long time. And you know, this is. This is a good way to do it.

Nice. How can people go join that bootcamp of yours?

I will put together a link for your folks and you go. If you go to connect365io.

Hustle, that will take you to the page to sign up for one of our next ones coming up.

Sweet. Thank you, man. Appreciate that. You named some tools Git Prospect, I think it was Hunter IO. And we'll link all that stuff in the show notes too. Any other tools that are super necessary for either you or your team to execute all this stuff, then obviously we got Connect365 too.

Yeah, sure. Well, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is one of LinkedIn's premium accounts, almost every one of our clients uses Sales Navigator, and many of the people on my team use it as well. So that's a huge one for us. Aside from that, I'm just a huge fan of all of the G Suite products. I mean, we use Google spreadsheets and Google Docs every freaking day in our company. That's a big one. We use Slack a lot, really, lately. Here's one that maybe isn't talked about as much, but Barometrics is a cool one for our software products and for any of our continuity products, it's a really, really cool one. I just love how they present data and make it easy.

Yeah. And they're dunning features Nice, too, because we used to use that for some of our stuff. Yeah. Good stuff. Then what's. What's like, where do you see it going? So, like, with LinkedIn and maybe your involvement with LinkedIn, where do you see it headed in the next. Or do you have any goals for the next year or beyond with what you're doing?

I mean, really, in.

The most simple terms, for the next year, our focus is just on continuing to grow the business that we've got right now. We don't have any plans of innovating any new things. We think there's a lot more businesses out there that we can help that don't know about us yet. And we're trying to reach more of them. So that's really our focus here, continuing to grow and, you know, bigger picture and where LinkedIn's going and all that kind of stuff. I'm excited about it. A few years ago, I was a little skeptical of what kind of, you know, staying power will this thing have? And I'm more excited than I'VE been ever because it's really, it just feels like they are so entrenched in the business community now. I think Microsoft has done a great job with the acquisition and everything they've done since then and I think that they're going to find more and more ways to make it sticky. LinkedIn, Microsoft CEO, I can never pronounce his name right, so I'm not gonna try it. But back they came out with, there was an article that came out revealing that he has eight.

KPIs that his job performance is based on and one of them is related to the growth of LinkedIn. So the CEO of Microsoft, one of his primary objectives is continuing to drive LinkedIn forward.

That's pretty good insurance then that it'll stick around for a bit.

I think so.

I hope so. Yeah. Interesting. Cool, man. Yeah. Because I know for a period of time I think Matt and I, why we checked off and checked out of LinkedIn for a bit was probably that we're like, I don't know about the longevity of this. Should we really apply our focus? But the fact that you hit on all these points and like you just said, the longevity sounds like it's going to be there too. It sounds like a platform we all got to be on.

Yeah. So one, one quick last question before we get to our sort of wrap up questions. You mentioned this sort of premium version of LinkedIn. What are some of the benefits of actually being like a premium member? And do you recommend pretty much everybody go and upgrade their LinkedIn account?

So I don't recommend everybody do it, but if you're going to be really actively using LinkedIn to prospect and connect with people and try and drum up business, then you're probably going to want it and you can get a free trial to kick the tires and see. But yeah, I think if you're serious about using LinkedIn proactively, you're probably going to want it. If you're not, then don't get it. You know, it gives you the ability to search for more people, to see more people, to just do a lot more. You get more filters for searching, you get more free inmails that you can use for reaching out to people that you're not even connected with. There's a whole sales navigator, has a whole different.

User navigation that you see that most people have never seen before. It's like this hidden part of LinkedIn that most people don't know exists. And when you have sales navigator, that's what you use to search for people and view people and save contacts and all sorts of stuff. It's just a more advanced and more functional.

Way of using LinkedIn.

Very cool. Okay. Yeah. Sweet, man. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of stuff here, so, you know. You guys listening? Go check out the show notes. Go check out Connect365IO Hustle for that bootcamp. Anywhere else you want to send them, Josh?

No, man. I mean, if you want to look into the work we're doing with LinkedIn specifically, you can go to linkedselling.com so, like LinkedIn, but linked selling.com. and I'd love for anybody who listens to the show to reach out to me on LinkedIn, send me a connection request, and tell me that Matt and Joe sent you, so I know where you're coming from.

Yeah, put a note in there. Damn it. Don't be lazy.

Love it.

Thanks, dude. Cool, man. Thanks for your time. And we'll hit you back up if we. We see some big changes on LinkedIn and we gotta. We gotta showcase you here for everybody else here.

Cool, man. I appreciate you guys having me.

All right, have a good one.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com, find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

Go get it, Wiki Wiki.

We love you.