Social Selling Tips n Tricks - Live Greenroom Broadcast 28 July 2021

All right, thank you for joining us here today for our Social Selling Tips and Tricks room on live on Green Room. This is episode 4 of our Social Selling Tips and Tricks brought to you by the Social Selling Warrior. Thank you for joining us and listening in. Once again, we have the great pleasure of having with us Craig Langley and Mac Leboucher. And I hope I said it properly. He's probably going to correct me, but that's okay. I think I should know by now. So what I'll do is I'll get the 2 gents to introduce themselves. And tonight's theme is going to be about how do we create a powerful profile, and in conjunction with that, how do we move on to creating an avatar, or what we might call an ideal customer profile? And then combining those 2, how do we go forward in trying to identify the right prospects via the platform, which is all about social selling? But social selling, the first pillar of social selling is creating a professional brand and then connecting with the right people. So, when we talk about social selling as those 4 pillars that LinkedIn has provided with us, they're those 2 key ones we all need to be aware of in the beginning. So, without further ado, I'll hand over to Craig. Craig, tell us a bit about yourself.

Thanks, Con. So, I'm Craig Langley, I'm in the UK, I've got a software degree and a diploma in marketing, and I've worked in international business development, since 1993, and I've run my own business development agency focusing on the automotive market for the last 10 years. Regarding social selling and LinkedIn, I've been on LinkedIn since 2007, and I've been also a daily Sales Navigator user for the last 5 years. So thank you, Con, and it's great to be here.

Magic. Thank you very much, Craig. It's always a pleasure to have you here with us. I'll hand over to Mack. Mack, tell us a bit about yourself.

Thanks, Con. My name is Mack Laubscher. I have multiple different things that I do. I own my own security company, consulting for emergency services, as well as looking at latest tech and solutions for both home and business security. Which is one of the things that I do. And that was what brought me to becoming so good at what I'm doing now on LinkedIn because of the frustrations that I faced paying tens of thousands of pounds out in marketing costs to various companies who promised the earth and didn't deliver. And I then went and, you know, I've been on LinkedIn and helping organizations since about 2008, 2009 with LinkedIn. But it was always for other companies. So I went out to research how to do it for myself and then how to build a system that can help multiple organizations, especially board members, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and coaches. And spent over 1,600 hours in 2020 just researching and doing analytics on what really works for LinkedIn. And yeah, then got dubbed the LinkedIn expert by one of my coaches, which I didn't really want to take the title, but eventually it got forced upon me and I was like, okay, I will take it purely because the domain was also available. So, you know, it was just one of those kind of— it was in the stars. So yeah, that's me and that's what I do and I just love connecting people globally.

Thank you, Mac. And why not take the opportunity if the domain is available? I always say jump on it. So, good idea, and it's worked out well for you, and it is a very strong brand. And that's what I've tried to do with mine too. I mean, very similar to yours, I started thinking about my branding, and no one suggested the Warrior to me, but I started thinking about what a warrior does, someone who actually, you know, tears through a jungle or maybe tears through and knocks down all the blockers and the barricades for others, for them to be able to, you know, clears a path for others to to have a clear pathway to what they want to achieve. So I thought warrior, yeah, why not? Not that I dress up in my warrior outfit much, maybe I should buy one in the first place, but I thought that'd be a good way to do it. So I'm Con, I'm the Social Selling Warrior focusing on 3 tiers. One is about creating a very powerful brand and profile on LinkedIn. Second is about leveraging that profile and brand in order to secure connections and get relationships formed and creating some content that will position you as a thought leader. And the third one is, of course, taking them offline as a lead and then taking them offline for conversation to secure a sale or have a further conversation which may lead to a sale, if not immediately, maybe down the line. So that's me. So thanks, gents. Tonight's theme, we'll focus on, like I said, we'll talk a bit about creating a powerful profile and the importance of that. So I'll hand over to you, Mac. I know you do a lot of work with individuals and businesses in relation to creating powerful profiles and brands. If I was to say to you, and I know this is about dropping some gems, and we are here to drop some gems for our listeners, what do you mean, maybe, sorry, what maybe is 1, 2, or 3, whatever you feel comfortable with, key aspects of a LinkedIn profile that you would suggest to our listeners?

So, Con, I'm going to preface that by starting with the why it's so important.

Imagine.

And, and, and, you know, I'm going to use a very simple analogy that I use all the time, and that is go and put your name into Google and search it. Now, almost guaranteed, in the first 5 results, you're going to have somebody either with your name or your name coming up with LinkedIn as the most trusted source that Google will look at. And if your profile comes up and your perfect prospect sees it over there and they land on your profile and you don't have a, you know, you don't have a banner, you haven't got your headline updated, it still shows your previous job from, you know, 5, 10 years ago, and you, you haven't got a an up-to-date photograph, then your credibility straight away has been lost. So it's that important that, you know, we all— we've all heard the saying first impressions, and this is where you get that opportunity to make that first impression. So it's vital that you make sure that when people land on your profile, that they're getting that right and the best first impression straight away. And if it's your perfect prospect, that they look at your profile and go, yep, this is the guy we need to work with. Let's have a conversation. So, you know, that is how important this is. It's more important than website. It's more important than, you know, anything else, I believe, when it comes to personal branding and your personal individual credibility. So when it comes to the profile itself, you know, photograph, really important. Just making sure that, you know, you fill that little circle of that that's available, you know, not having like a full body shot so that people can't see if it's you. Because one of the things. As an example, I went to a great networking event yesterday. And the problem that people have is when they try to network with you, you know, I look at my surname as an example, and I get hundreds of different versions of pronunciation. So, you know, for people to try and find me off my name, you know, is going to be difficult. But if they can find you with your name and scroll through and actually see your photograph, and it's crisp, and it's clear, and they go, oh yeah, that's Mac, then they know that, you know, it makes it easier for them to connect. I've very often gone to networking events, spoken to somebody, and then gone, you know, scrolling through trying to find them because the photo quality or the type of photos that are there, it just, it doesn't, you know, it's not crisp and clear for me to be able to find them. So that's a, you know, a major one is make sure you get that photograph right. The next one that most people don't get right is just that banner. You know, people pay tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of pounds for, you know, Google Ads and impressions on websites and, you know, other media sources, yet they don't go and use their banner, which is prime advertising space. And the beauty of it is, you know, if you don't like your banner, you can change it. But use your banner to tell people what you do. And, you know, if you've got a, you know, an event coming up, use it as a banner to let people know. You know, tell people what's going on in your life. Use that banner as advertising space because, you know, if you look at how many people are searching you and just go and look at when, you know, you look in your dashboard and you go, so many people viewed your profile, that's how many, you know, effective impressions you've had in the last, you know, say month that people have gone onto your profile. And that's how many people don't know what you're doing. So little things like that make a big difference. And then one of the bugbears that I have is contact info. Now, you know, people want to be found on LinkedIn and they want to come across as the professional, but then they make it so hard for people to actually connect with them. Now, you know, depending on how many people you've connected with, LinkedIn may give you restrictions and it will tell you, you know, you, you can't connect with somebody because you're not a direct connection. And sometimes it'll even prompt you and say, hey, can you put in their email address? So it's quite difficult for them to potentially connect with you depending on their own own settings as well. So the contact info, which most people just don't for some reason update, um, a lot of people will just have their LinkedIn URL in there, or they'll have their company website on there. Um, and if somebody wants to reach out and connect, make it easy for them. Give them a way to be able to connect, you know, either, um, you know, if you don't like people picking up the phone and calling you directly, you know, maybe just having an email address, uh, on there. Just having something simple so that people can connect with you. You know, now with so many other platforms like Twitter and Clubhouse and everything else, you know, putting those in there if that's where you spend a lot of your time. So just making it easy on your profile for people to be able to, you know, connect with you and reach out. And then your About section, you know, same thing is Give people a reason why you do what you do, why you're passionate about it. A lot of people go in there and they, you know, it tends to be like a CV. And as business owners, it doesn't need to be like a CV, but it must have some of your results that you've gotten and how you've helped other companies and why you do what you do. And please, you know, one of the biggest challenges that people have when it comes to reading block text is, for me as an example, I'm dyslexic. So when I see the About section from top to bottom, it's just this one massive block of text, I don't even bother reading it. So make it easy by allowing white space in between so that it's easy for all your readers to be able to go, because most people, over 67%, use mobile for reading your profile. So make it easy and searchable. That's me and I'm done.

That's some great advice, and I'll just pick up on a couple things you've said there, Mac, which is really good. I think one thing people fail to do is when they write their profile, they usually put a title in because we all still remember LinkedIn— well, LinkedIn initially started as a recruitment tool and then it morphed and progressed towards a professional networking tool. But a lot of us still put in CEO of this, or co-founder of this, or business development manager at this. I say to people, I can find that by scrolling down to your experience. Use that space up the front, as you rightly say, that's what Google loves to also pick up and read, in using some keywords in that space of how you help people, what you achieve, how you help people achieve X, Y, and Z. So find some keywords and put them in a sort of sentence or some sort of logical way in those first 2 lines of your profile. Because that's what Google is, one, gonna index and, and pick you up on, and 2, that's also gonna give people an idea of what you do and how you help them. If they want to see your title, they'll scroll down to your experience. They'll see you're a co-founder of this, they'll see you're CEO of this, or they'll see you're a business development manager or marketing manager for XY company. Use that space. The other thing you said there was about being identified, and that's why the The picture is so crucial. I think one of the social media influencers I listened to a long, long time ago, he said this, and I'll never forget this: social media has taken that first meeting from a handshake to a hug. Like you said, when someone sees you, that picture, and they recognize you, it's like they already know you. And if they don't remember your name, your surname, They'll know you because they've already seen you, they've already had some interaction with you, or they bumped into you somewhere. So we don't have to formally introduce ourselves anymore because they've already come into interaction with us. We just say, g'day, how are you? Just like we would say to another family member or family friend or, or, or friend we haven't seen for about 3 or 4 years from high school or something. We'd say, g'day, how are you? And that's what social media has done by having a very, very clear and very solid profile pic that will allow people to be able to interact with you in that sort of more social manner rather than having to make it more formal, uh, in relation to connection. So that's what I would add to those things you said, Mac, and they were very, very valid. Craig, I know you're doing some other things in between. Uh, would you like to add anything there about profiles?

Yeah, yeah, just to sort of, um, Add about the LinkedIn URL that you're given. You know, you're given, you're given a standard URL with a load of characters and numbers in it, so customize that to something short and meaningful. And also the About section, as you were both saying, you know, Tell, tell your story, but don't tell it like a CV, as Max said. Don't say, I did this and then I did that, you know. Tell, tell, tell your story, tell, tell your journey about how you, you come to do what you do now and what motivates you. And put some, um, emotional hooks in there, you know. Put a little bit of personality in there, you know. Add a few bullet points and emojis, professional emojis that make it readable. And put a bit about, you know, what you do outside of work. So give people a bit of personality to engage with. You know, in my profile, I've got in my About section, I'm a massive James Bond fan, and I probably watch a James Bond movie most weeks. And the amount of people that have engaged with me on messages and started talking about James Bond, and then it led to a business conversation. So you're giving people hooks, you're giving people opportunities to start a conversation with your About section. So it's one of the most powerful sections on your profile, Con. So back to you.

No, and a very valid point, and something that I suppose a lot of us don't talk about, which is very, very important, is that vanity URL, that URL of your LinkedIn profile, which isn't just numbers, but even if it's yeah, you can't find your name because there may be a lot of Smiths or Browns out there, just find something that maybe your middle name initial or something like that, or maybe something else that will allow you to use your name as the URL for LinkedIn, because that's very, very important. Because when we all get on LinkedIn, we're all given a number and it's a long number, and a lot of us don't go and change it. It's so easy to change it these days, and it's so easy, and you can change as many times as you want, I believe. And I've changed mine a couple of times. So, you know, if you want to promote yourself in the business you're in, or you want to promote yourself as a name, you can alter it and change it around. So that's great. So that's the pro. Yep.

Sorry, mate. I just wanted to jump in on that, specifically on the changing your URL, because I used to do that quite often. And then we ran some tests. Okay, and what we found was, because about a year or two ago, up until about a year or two ago, if you changed your URL, even if you changed your URL, whatever you changed it from would still reroute to your profile regardless. Now what happened about sometime last year, they made a change that once you made— you changed your URL The old URL was discontinued within about 72 hours. So what I found was if you've got marketing material like your website that reached to your LinkedIn or you know anything that promotes your LinkedIn profile, you know if you've got like a Linktree list where you've got your your LinkedIn profile on there, it's on you know maybe your Facebook page, it reached to your LinkedIn. or any other sources, the moment you change your LinkedIn URL, all of those URLs are then disconnected. So, I actually had somebody message me, one of my clients, and go, Mac, I've just referred somebody to you, but they can't find you. And I said, what do you mean? And I found out the hard way.

Wow.

So, I don't know, you know, for how long I'd been losing people that just couldn't connect to me or thought that I was no longer on LinkedIn. So just keep that in mind with your URL.

Good point, very good point, because I know I've changed mine a couple, but not many times. Mine's been my name now for a long, long time, but when I was in different sort of roles, I'd changed it a couple of times. But that's a good point. I really never noticed it, Max. So thank you for sharing that with us. So let's move on. So we talked about the profile there, and we can go on more about the profile. I think when it comes to social selling. And remember, we're talking about social selling, that's people that are not looking for jobs. Social sellers are people that are looking to garner some new leads or connections in order for opportunities to create business opportunities. So one aspect I think of the profile that is overlooked is— well, there's 2 really. One I think is overlooked is the featured section. I think people should look and consider to add a featured section into their profile and feature themselves in relation to what they do. So If you're like Mac and I, and Craig for that matter, that do speaking and training, take some pictures or get a colleague to take some pictures of you on the stage speaking and delivering a speech or, or keynote or in a training session, and use that in your feature section to show that you are someone who does train groups, you are someone who is a facilitator, you are someone who's able to coach and train others in your expertise. So these are the kind of things you can do in the features section. I think the other thing we have a look also in our profile— this is the last point I'll make, we can talk about skills and other things— is recommendations. I think recommendations are the social proof any entrepreneur, any solopreneur, any entrepreneur for that matter, anyone who's a coach, a trainer, a business consultant, needs recommendations from clients in order to verify, to confirm, and to validate that they have been able to deliver the results they say they can deliver to that particular individual. And I think LinkedIn is all about ourselves in the main, where we talk about ourselves. Recommendations is probably the only section we know of in LinkedIn where other people talk about you, where it's other people talking about what you've achieved with them, how you've helped them, get from A to B. So I think it's a very, very powerful section because someone can always look up that individual on LinkedIn and message them and say, hey, I see you've got a recommendation there for Con. You worked with Con. Tell me more. I'm looking to engage Con. I'm looking to engage Craig. I see you've got a recommendation there. Can you tell me how Con or how Craig helped you? How did Mac achieve those aspects that you talked about in your recommendation? So I think it's very important In that respect. So, Mac or Craig, any views on recommendations?

Go ahead, Mac.

Okay, Craig, thank you. Sorry to jump in there. So, with recommendations, it's, as you say, social proof. And one of the things that it's become more powerful than is, you know, the recommendations or testimonials We— I don't know if you could— there we go. Sorry.

We lost you there, Matt. Can you just repeat?

Can you hear me now?

Loud and clear.

Ah, brilliant. So with regards to the recommendations from a— they're even more powerful than testimonials that we tend to have on you know, our websites or other pages. Because what people tend to do is, you know, we've always seen, you know, nobody puts bad recommendations on their website, as an example. But, you know, when it comes to those recommendations, I know a lot of people that when they do a startup and they start their website, you know, the web designer just, you know, creates some testimonials for them. So, they don't even exist. So, the beauty of LinkedIn is it's the highest trusted source by most of the search engines, but also it's one of the places where you can actually go, ah, okay, so-and-so has recommended them, and you can check out who recommended them. So you can kind of see the quality of the people that are recommending them as well. What I would recommend for recommendations is when you ask for them, please be very specific. Unfortunately, most people will just send the standard LinkedIn, hey, would you please leave me a recommendation? And they might get something back that says, hey, Con is a great guy. And that doesn't really serve you. So, it's really important to ask specific questions. And my tip on that is I have 3 things that I ask. I always ask people, hey, can you, you know, number 1, please tell people why you decided to work with me and what you got out of it. Number 2, what do you think others will get from working with me? And number 3, 3, anything else that you feel is beneficial to people to know and relevant. And by doing that, your person who's leaving your recommendation also knows exactly what to say, because more often than not, people want to leave something nice. And they always— I found before I did those 3 tips, people would say, yes, would love to leave you a recommendation. Leave it with me. Let me think about something, and I'll come back to you. And more often than not, they didn't. And when I started being very specific, they they came back and they answered those. One thing to remember that if you do send out recommendations, a lot of people don't spend as much time as potentially we do on LinkedIn. So if you send them a recommendation request, send them a text message or a WhatsApp or whatever platform you use or an email and say, "Hey, I've just sent you this." recommendation request, would you please mind just checking it out on LinkedIn when you get a chance? And that will massively increase the chances of you getting recommendations as well. Very good.

Craig, do you want to add something?

Yeah, yeah. The other, you know, what Max said is absolutely brilliant and spot-on. The other thing about recommendations is they are keyword SEO active. So if people are writing LinkedIn, for example, as a word in your recommendation, that will actually add to the, the SEO of your, of your profile. So, so yes, so the words that are used in, in the recommendation are, are quite important.

I just wanted to That is amazing, Craig. I wasn't aware of that one, to be honest. So you're saying the recommendations, it gets picked up by Google as part of its meta crawl?

It gets picked up on LinkedIn search. So if somebody did a LinkedIn search and they were looking for sales or marketing or business development or LinkedIn, for example, you know, the word count goes up if you've got that in your recommendations as well. So for It is SEO, LinkedIn SEO active.

There you are, listeners. If you're listening into this via podcast replay, there is a really good tip there from Craig. So go back, rewind if you have to, and replay that and make sure you keep that in mind as part of when you're going out seeking recommendations. And Matt makes a really valid point that there's some really good structures there about the 3 tips, or the 3 ways you ask for recommendation. One is, why did you choose to work with me? 2, what would others get out of working with me? What do you believe others would get out of working with me? And 3, anything else that is relevant to you working with me as a client or a colleague, whatever the relationship was of the individual you're seeking a recommendation from. So really good tips there for everyone to keep in mind when seeking recommendation. And like Max says, don't just send out That asks for recommendation. People would like some guidance. I think they would be happy to receive some guidance. It's not you writing the recommendation, it's you guiding them as to what are aspects you'd like them to highlight as part of what you would like to have on your profile. Very, very good point there. Let's move on, guys, to now talk about, if we can quickly and briefly, about then how do we start creating an ideal customer profile, what we might call an ICP, or what others call an avatar, which is how do we start gathering some evidence and data and information about who our ideal customer is. So, Mac, I'll go to you on this one first. So what's one way you've gone about in identifying your ideal customer?

I think one of the things that I found and what works really well with my clients and for myself is just looking at your last 10 or so clients that you've worked with, looking at who are, you know, and doing a process of elimination. Because what you tend to do and what I recommend to people to do and what I do on a regular basis is I look at, you know, the ones that were profitable because otherwise you shouldn't be in business because, you know, that's going to cost you. So have a look at your last profitable, you know, 10 profitable clients. And then once you've worked out who those are, then you look at, well, who did you really enjoy working with? And that you jump out of bed in the morning to be able to work with more people like that. And look at the ones who you didn't enjoy working with and eliminate those from your list. And Then, you know, have a look at what industries and what, you know, look at the age profile, where they're located. Really look at the detail and what similarities they have. And that will give you a good starting point if you don't have one. For me, you know, those are the kind of things that I look at. And I look at what I enjoy and who I enjoy working with. and where I get the most and able to give the most value as well based on my historic experience. So hopefully that makes a little bit of sense, Con.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. That's great. Thanks, Mac. That's some really valuable tips there. Craig, do you have anything different?

Yeah, I think the American phrase, the riches are in the niches, as they say, is pertinent here. So niche niche down. So, um, as Max said, you know, a lot of LinkedIn trainers will, will niche down on small business owners. Um, I, I work with, um, automotive startups, so my ideal client is, is 10 to 25 people, um, working with, um, automotive software or, or electronics. that don't have an established sales force. So that's my niche. And I think that the more defined you can get, the more granular you can get, the easier it is to attract those people to you. And, you know, I think that, you know, the riches are in the niches, as the Americans Yep, Matt, go for it, buddy.

So I want to expand on that because Craig's, Craig's hit the nail on the head about one of the, the biggest things I, I see when people are trying to reach clients on LinkedIn is that whole fear of missing out. And so they cast their net so wide that they have no idea where to start. And it's overwhelming. And they say, well, there's no opportunities. LinkedIn doesn't work. But the moment they focus and they niche down and they become very specific. To give you an example, with my security business, I was like, well, hey, my team can serve anybody. They can protect anybody. But then, once I did that little exercise with niching down, having a look at who we serve best, who we enjoy serving, who we give the most value to, We found that for that, as an example, were, you know, GPs, solicitors, you know, business owners that did a lot of traveling. And the moment you niche down, and it's that old saying of, what's it, 2 inches wide and a mile deep, and then all of a sudden you've got a list to work with. So, you know, with one of my clients, as an example, she found working with a certain group of solicitors who had a certain accreditation was really handy and useful because there was just a dovetail into her services. And once we just focused on that, all of a sudden she had a list of 200 local solicitors that she could work through over the next 3 months just to reach out and connect and have a cup of coffee with them. And her business exponentially grew when she literally got that specific. as opposed to trying to reach out to anybody and everybody who might need your services. So, you know, to back what Craig's saying, it's so important to be able to know exactly who you, you go after. And just start with somebody. The reality is, if somebody outside of that niche comes to you and wants to work with you, you can always say yes or no. It's, you know, it's not like you, you're going to totally remove them from the planet. It just makes you, uh, have a very clear starting point. Um, and then you'll find actually on LinkedIn that's, uh, today's article— I think, Con, you've read it as well— uh, is now 774 million, uh, users. So, you know, when you niche it down to a few hundred, it makes it much easier to, uh, to know where to focus.

Just on that, for both of you then, The question I suppose some users might be asking is, well, how granular do I get? So, you know, we read a lot about creating an ideal customer profile, and there'd be certain people who say you need to get down to marital status, income levels, location, suburbs, children, schools, and so forth and so forth. So how granular does one get in relation to— I know you get granular because you want to minimize the number of results you have, so that way you can have a better opportunity of prospecting to a small number of results. But how granular does one get in relation to developing an avatar?

Can I answer that one, Con? It's Craig. You know, you can't search for ages on LinkedIn, but you can search if you've got Sales Navigator, even search for years of experience, so you can search for, you know, 10 years plus experience. But I think you want to define the skill set and the company size at least of your avatar and the location. And also try and define, you know, what sort of groups they're going to be in, what sort of hashtags they're going to be interested in. Um, and as soon as you can start to define that, the, the, your content strategy and your engagement strategy in terms of messaging, uh, starts to fall into, into place, Con. So, uh, I think, um, the more you can define it in terms of skills, location, and, um, you know, the type of thing that these people are going to be interested in Okay, so I want to unpack your mind there a bit more on these skill sets.

I want you to give me, if you can, Craig, I know you've got some great examples. So in something, in someone you're looking for, for yourself, for you to prosper with, to or with, what's the skill set you would look for?

Well, you know, I work in software and electronics. So in automotive software, there are some industry standards, so LIN and CAN, and then there are some automotive software autonomous driving standards called AUTOSAR. And I'm in a technical industry, so there are a lot of technical buzzwords and technical skills Um, that people have in their profile. And that's one of the things that, um, you know, we spoke about profiles earlier, and I think a lot of people miss the trick on, on, on skills by being too general. I think if you're in a, um, a niche industry, um, there's going to be industry terms, and, and get those in your skill set. Don't have your first skill set as Microsoft Office or Excel. Um, it's just too generic. Have something pertinent to your industry that will match with your potential client's skill.

Yep, thank you. So, Mac, when you're looking for your ideal customer on LinkedIn, and we, we had mentioned Navigator because that gives you a few more features. So, Craig mentioned skill set, he talked about industry, he talked about location. Are there any other variables that you would look at, Mac, in your business, in your line of business, in relation to searching for that ideal customer?

Yes, there are a few. I mean, depending on who you're looking at working with, I tend to look at things like the seniority level. So I will look at, you know, are they a CEO, are Are they a CFO, a founder, as an example? And as Craig mentioned, I'll look at geography, which is really important because when it comes to your settings and your own profile, I find a lot of clients, as an example, based in the UK, but they generally work with the US market. When they are, you know, posting or reaching out, they tend to do it UK hours instead of US hours. So it's just like logical basics that tend to go amiss. But there's also some features about, you know, if you're working with startups as an example, one of the nice things is you can even go and search who's joined LinkedIn within the last 90 days. And more often than not, you know, people right now are reviewing where they're at. So, there have been more startups in the last kind of year than I think 2, 3 years before that, purely because the pandemic forcing people into those situations and people becoming a lot more innovative. So, having a look at that as an option is really useful. But then also, one of the things that I like and like Craig, also use Sales Navigator. But it's, as an example, you can go and search what type of companies you want to work with, but you also have this wonderful feature of excluding certain types of people. So as an example, say you want to work with, you know, organizations like Microsoft, but you specifically want your search results not to include Microsoft. You can actually exclude anybody who is, you know, currently working at Microsoft, previously worked at Microsoft. Um, so you can really get very granular, and the smaller the list, the easier it is for you to know where to start, and it's less overwhelming as well.

Tell you one other feature that I like, guys, and it's in Navigator too. And I recall this feature, and it's helped me, helped me in fact prospect and get a few conversations happening in that feature where it tells you someone who's changed jobs in the last 90 days. And I always recall that, that sort of, um, that perspective that if someone's changed jobs and they moved into a new role, the organization that's hired them most likely has hired them for a particular purpose or need, be it short-term or long-term, mostly in the short term. And when they actually hire them and bring them on board. They've also usually allocated them a certain percentage of funds for them to initiate projects or to put things in place and to implement strategies. So it's always a good time to connect with someone who's changed jobs recently to congratulate them and say, well done. Congratulations on getting the role. Sounds like an exciting time ahead for you. I'd love to have a conversation when you've got your feet under the desk and had a bit of time to get your head around what's happening. and see how we can maybe help you in achieving what you want to achieve. I've always thought that was a— that's sort of a bit of a soft, not too salesy, but a bit of a soft intro and helping out. And they, mind you, these will be connections you've already got. So therefore, the intro is a warm intro, and it's someone that you may have worked with in the previous organization. So they already know what you can deliver. They've probably already tested your services. So when they go to a new organization, they're probably going to look for someone someone like you again to help them. Because the only reason they probably got that, that job at a new organization is because they did such a good job at the previous organization, and you helped them do a great job. So why wouldn't they use you again? So I've always used that approach where if someone's changed jobs and they're in a new role, reach out, say hello, wish them the best, wish them congratulations, and, you know, tell them, you know, that you're really looking forward to see how they go. But also extend the hand of Friendship and say, is there anything you would like we can help you with, the work we've done in the past, or anything we've done in the past that you think is valid going forward? Please let us know. I'd love to reconnect. And I think that's always a very good strategy to use.

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, Con. It's Craig. And, you know, just adding on top of the Sales Navigator discussion, in terms of granular searching. I work with a lot of startups, as I said, you know, 10, 10 sort of people, 15 people is my ideal. And one of the searches that has proved very, very powerful for me in terms of winning clients is number of followers to their company page. You can search for a number of employees to a company, but it doesn't tend to be very accurate accurate, but I did a search for people who have, you know, 200 to 500 followers to their company page, and it produced a really, really targeted list of established accounts, but, you know, are using LinkedIn actively, but have not got to the point of employing a large sales team yet. So that was really, really powerful. And then what Matt said as well—

sorry, Con. No, I was going to say, can you just clarify that for our listeners? And maybe someone's on their desk and they're looking at LinkedIn and they're trying to replicate what you're saying.

Right, well, this was a Sales Navigator search. So in Sales Navigator, you can search for accounts. Yes. So you can search for what's called leads, which is people. And you can search for accounts, which is companies. In the account section, you can search for number of followers, and that's the number of followers they have to their company page on LinkedIn.

Magic, magic. Thank you.

And that then finds people who are highly active on LinkedIn. You know, they're driving their company page followers, but they haven't grown to the point of having thousands of followers to their company page, so they're still in a startup phase. So that's been really powerful.

So therein lies a great opportunity for you to help them increase their brand and their profile to get more followers to their company page. Is that where we're heading with this?

No, it was the fact that they're a startup, and my client that I've just started working within Italy. They have 300 followers to their company page and 10 employees. So there was a nice correlation there. You know, they haven't got a sales team, that the CEO is still doing the business development. So they've engaged me to, to help with their business development.

Great, great. Yeah, I know we've touched on Sales Navigator here quite a bit. And just for our listeners, that is a premium feature. That's an additional feature you have to pay for, for LinkedIn. I suppose that's where LinkedIn makes some of their money aside from ads and other things like that. They also sell you premium products. So one is the actual LinkedIn Premium. The other one is Recruiter and there's Sales Navigator. I think there's one more that escapes me, but I think that the 3 key ones that most people that are on LinkedIn use, the Recruiter is of course to recruit. the Navigator for the salespeople, and the Premium, it just gives you a few more features than the standard one to be able to do some additional searches and send a few more emails if you require. So, Mac, do you have any additional Navigator type of tips? We are in Navigator, but that can support you in connecting and finding the right prospects?

I, I have one which I recently, over the last couple of months, started playing with because, you know, ultimately when you start looking at your key prospects, a lot of the time it's looking at that chain of events that happens for why somebody would work with you. You know, what else is happening? What typically would happen before they would work with somebody like you? So as an example, I'm going to use web developers as an example, because more often than not, when somebody's in that startup phase, they want to get the website launched before they go and, and go public, or they, you know, they, they start letting people know about the new business, and it's like, hey, here's our website. So as an example, if you are somebody who does, uh, say SEO, or you do web analytics, or you do, um, you're a, you're a business coach and you help startups and you know that if somebody's just had their website done, they probably— and you've defined a smaller company, so you know company size, and you know that you're not working with the big organizations who maybe revamped their websites, but if that's somebody that would typically be a good lead into working with somebody like yourself, you can actually go and have a look at connections of those leads. Say you've got a web developer that you typically work with and you get some business from them, you can actually go and put their connect— you can go put their name into the search and it will then look at connections of that person and also people like those people. So you can very quickly go, okay, well, I'm, you know, the web developers, I'm going to connect with 10 web developers and then search by those web developers' connections. And just, you know, start making sure that you start hanging out in those right places and connecting and reaching out and engaging with posts in those places because they will then see that you already have a common connection. So the risk and the trust goes up as well when it comes to wanting to work with you and your services. So yeah, a little one, go and play with that. There's a lot of possibility there.

Thank you, Mac. So just quickly before we wrap this up, we've talked about Navigator and using that as a premium tool. Any thoughts or suggestions or tips for our listeners who maybe don't have that premium product in how they can hone in and identify some prospects? Craig, I know you—

Yeah, there is some hidden searches that you can use on a free account. We spoke earlier about skills. And you can actually type into the search bar skills colon and list a particular skill, and then you can combine it with Boolean logic. So you can use the, the OR, capital OR, or AND, AND, or NOT, NOT, and you can make quite targeted searches And then you could save those as a URL, or if you've got Navigator, you've got save functionality. But if you haven't got the save functionality, you can bookmark the URL and then just change the skills. And you can combine that also with job title, so you could put and title colon. So you might want to search for director, for example. So, you can search for people who've got a certain skill set like Java, or, you know, we were talking web development earlier, and you can combine that with a title, CEO or chief executive or director, and get some very, very targeted searches on a—

So, how long can that search string be, Craig? So, can I add country? Can I add language?

Can I add name? Country, you can't do country, but you can add 3 OR statements. It will work up to 3 OR statements, and then I think it'll work with 3 ANDs as well, and then it'll probably work with 1 or 2 NOTs. So you can get probably 7 or 8 statements into a search. And as I said, save the URL, bookmark the URL, and you can go back to that and just tweak it.

Yeah, good. That's really good. So listeners, there you are. That's a really good strategy, whether you have a navigator or not, a great strategy to deploy. And I've deployed that since I've been speaking to Craig a number of months ago, and it gives me some amazing results. And like Craig says, I tweak it a lot. Relation to title. I'll put director, I'll put VP, I might put manager, I might put quality assurance or something like that in that title, and I get different type of results. So do one of them and then start and save it like Craig says as a bookmark, and then start tweaking that and save those as additional bookmarks depending on the results you get, if they're what you're after. So great, great strategy. There from both Craig and Mac. Mac, I'll give you the opportunity— any free tips you might have for our listeners in relation to searching?

All I want to really say is, you know, please go and connect with Craig and have a look at his profile. He did one of the most simple videos on the search function, and if you go and watch that, it will literally take you step for step through what what Craig has just mentioned. And I think that that little video, he doesn't realize how much of a service he has done to the LinkedIn community by showing them how that works. So, you know, go and connect with Craig and make sure that you get access to that little video.

And dare I say, it's probably— Craig, dare I say, it's probably one of your best performing videos, or if it isn't, it will be by now.

Over over 100 comments. It got wow shared in in quite a few of the the LinkedIn groups. So yeah, I didn't realize people weren't doing this. I think in my search I used the keyword the the search filter headline, which is another hidden hidden filter. So you can do headline colon and yeah.

So headline what does that mean?

Video. Craig, what does headline? Yeah, headline is another, another filter.

Okay, and that will search your— those first 2 lines of your profile?

Yeah, that's right. And I did a demo for LinkedIn trainers because LinkedIn trainers tend to have LinkedIn in their headline. So, so yes, yes, it tends to be a much more targeted search if That's great.

That's really good. And that's a good segue because we're coming to the end of our chat today, Jen. So just want to finish off, where could our listeners find you and find those beautiful videos, tips you have, all those other posts you've got? So Craig, I'll start with you. Where can our listeners find you if they want to connect and have a look at some of your videos?

Yeah, well, they can find me on LinkedIn, Craig Langley, or Or my URL is my company name, which is HJSAM, Hotel Juliet Sierra Alpha Mike, HJSAM. And I've got an open profile so people can message me even if we're not connected. And I've got that video there in my, in my featured section.

Magic. Magnificent.

Mac.

So for me, I've tried to simplify it. So I now have the URL thelinkedinexpert.com. If you go to that, it will direct you to multiple ways to connect to me on LinkedIn and, you know, booking a call with me, etc. So it's all, all there in one place. Or if you want to connect with me on Clubhouse, I have got thelinkedinexpert.club. And that will take you to one of the clubs that I run on there as well. So I still have to work on the Green Room and put that in there as well.

And Craig is also active on Clubhouse and under HS—

HJ Sam. Yeah, HJ Sam on Clubhouse.

Yeah, and Craig, guys, runs some great rooms on Clubhouse and he probably is late for one or two at the moment, but we'll find— we'll roll up soon. I will wind up soon. So thank you very much. And if you're looking for me, ladies and gentlemen, I'm Social Selling Warrior is the hashtag. So if you search that hashtag on LinkedIn, you should be able to find me. Website is currently up for development. It will be finished soon. socialsellingwarrior.com will be the website coming soon. And when it does come, you'll see it plastered all over my LinkedIn profile in various posts and YouTubes. So once again, thank you very much. I want to say thanks to Craig and also to Mac for being with us here tonight. A great conversation. Hopefully when I have— we won't have any technical difficulties about to get this one as a recording. We'll be able to post it on our podcast site and we'll be able to get people to listen to it. Thanks again, everyone, wherever you are listening, whether you listen to us live or whether you listen to the podcast. We really hope you enjoyed tonight's episode. episode, which was episode 4 of our Social Selling Tips and Tricks. And please join us once again, same time, Wednesdays, same, same date and time, which is Wednesdays at 12 PM BST on Greenroom under the Social Selling Tips and Tricks room. And next week will be episode number 5. So thank you very much, Craig. Thank you, Mac. Have a great day wherever you are, and we'll talk soon.

Thanks.

Thanks, Con. Thanks, Craig.