0020: LinkedIn Social Selling Index and how you can benefit from it with Social Media Marketing & LinkedIn Consultant Brenda Meller

Ea interviews, episode 20, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Welcome Expert Authority world. I'm excited to be here with another great episode for you. I have none other than Brenda Meller from Meller Marketing and she's going to be talking about social selling across the platforms. Now there's a way to do this and there's a way to not. So I'm excited to have her to share with you the proper way to do it. And, and I already asked her, but I'm going to have her touch on something you may or may not know about on LinkedIn. I don't want to take that from her. I'll let her jump into it right after we thank our sponsor. So you want to go live on Facebook but you're not sure where to start or what to do? Some people say just grab your phone or buy all this expensive software. Well, I have a better option for you. Check out marioficcini.com BELive BELive is the simplest and easiest way to go live on your Facebook with a professional production. Once again, MarioFaccini.com belive All right, here she is everyone. Brenda Meller from Meller Marketing. Brenda, how are you doing today?

I am great. Mario, how are you doing tonight?

I'm having a lot of fun. Great to have you here. So what inspired you to start Meller Marketing? I mean, you could be doing anything. Why this?

Well, it's kind of funny. I started as a side hustle. It was really something just as a side. I had a knack for marketing in my career obviously, and then was picked picking up a lot of work through social media, just doing my job and kind of started blogging on the side and I needed to have some pages just to play around with different settings and things. And I decided just to create a Mellor marketing page. And in the beginning it was really just a place to put articles and blogs and almost a bookshelf where I could find things later. And I started having some side engagements here and there in addition to my full time job and decided to set up an llc. And you know, one day the universe nudged me forward and I had the opportunity to really lean into it and give it a try full time. And one year later, here I am.

Well, congratulations. I'm glad you're still doing it. So tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you help people.

Sure. So what I tell people is what I do with Mellor. Marketing is I help people and businesses with marketing and social media and I specialize in LinkedIn. So if your organization doesn't have somebody who's a full time marketer on staff or somebody with depth of how to use social media and how to use it effectively, I can come in and help your organization. And I have some organizations that work with me on a part time, almost like an hourly basis. I come in and provide them coaching and consulting and I have other organizations where I do complete social media management. But as you know, Mario, LinkedIn is my passion. It's the network that I have the greatest level of expertise and it's really been the platform that's helped me to launch my career.

Very good. So with all your expertise and years of knowledge with it. I know some people go to Facebook, some people go to LinkedIn, some people go to whatever. One of my favorites is YouTube because I've been known to maybe or maybe not do things on video. I love LinkedIn also. And LinkedIn I've noticed, has been doing more stuff with video. I want you to share with the audience what is the biggest transformation you've been able to provide someone?

Biggest transformation in terms of a profile?

You're saying, let's say they were stuck with where they were and they were just spinning their wheels. Whether it was one week, one month, one year, and then you came in and then because of the help and advice and coaching you gave them, they're at this new point.

Okay. And I don't know if there's one client, one success story I could speak to. Often the individuals that I work with are at an executive level. And what I like to say is these are individuals who are experience rich. You know, they have been working in their industry, in their profession, their job title for, you know, sometimes 15, 20, 30 years, but they did not come up in their career with social media. So sometimes there's some apprehension with how to use sites like LinkedIn. And what I like to refer to this category is experience rich and maybe tech averse or tech apprehensive. And.

They are a bit hesitant on how to use LinkedIn effectively and fully because they don't want to do the wrong thing and look like they don't know how to use social media properly. So instead what they do is little or nothing at all or they're not using it effectively as a social selling platform. They're really using it as a one way channel to try only to sell to their network and they're getting zero results. They're not getting A lot of good connections. They're not getting conversations started and then they come and they find me and they say, okay, I'm on LinkedIn. It's not working. I can't figure out why it's not working effectively for me. So there's a client I'm working with right now, he's a lawyer, he's in Florida. And I've just been having a lot of fun working with him because he's got a huge network already and he's very successful, he's very well known in his area. And I've been helping basically to crack LinkedIn open for him and figure out how to use it more successfully for himself as a professional and then for his business as well. So it's been a lot of fun.

Well, that's great. So what I'm hearing is that's how you're providing the transformation for people. Because I can understand. You know, my first business, I got started when I was 12. There was no social media back then. It might be dating me a little bit, but there's no social media back then. But you still have those relationships, you still have those connections, and that's a huge transformation to be able to bridge that gap. So why don't we speak about that a little bit more? When someone's coming to you, you know, they might not be a 14 year old, that's super sharp.

But you know, maybe they've been in business for 30, 40, 50 years.

Right.

What is the best thing you could say about someone to bridge that gap that might be tech averse that doesn't have that background or didn't grow up with it?

Yeah. So, you know, I usually start the conversation with, you know, communication is an ever evolving process and there's a variety of different communication platforms that exist. And you know, back in our day, we had a phone that was attached to the wall with a cord and it was the greatest thing ever when we got call waiting or when we had a second line that you could click back and forth to. And I don't know about you, Mario, but in my house we still have like the plugs for the landlines, but we don't have a landline anymore. I mean, we were paying 40, $50 a month for a year or two. And then we said, why do we even have this anymore? And it seems that, you know, social media is this next evolution of communication. And it's really that blend of communication and technology and, you know, this broader reach into community and into communities. We've never had access to before. So what I tell them is it's an evolution. It's just like, you know, when we were communicating with memos and making photocopies and sending those around the office before. And then one day, this thing called the fax machine was created, and we were faxing information, and then we had email addresses and the Internet. So we have had to learn all these different technologies along the way. And now we're at this phase where we have social media, and it can be both a personal tool and it can be a business tool. So we have to kind of figure out how to make the blend of that work successfully for each of us as business professionals.

I love that you're touching upon that. And yeah, the landlines, I still have a rotary phone.

Do you?

Don't use it a ton. Can't go online with it, but it's pretty trendy or vintage or whatever.

The word is coming back. It's like the. The vinyl record players. You see them got those two? Yeah, they're coming back.

Actually have Chipmunk Punk from Elvin and the Chipmunks, one of the only albums they released.

A lot of fun. So blending the old school with the new school.

Yeah.

What would you say to someone who doesn't want to get on it? Or what about the privacy issues?

Yeah. So there's varying levels of what you're going to be comfort with on social media. And, you know, some of the clients I work with are anti Facebook or really not wanting to share any information about themselves anywhere. You know, those people usually aren't talking to me because the people that are approaching me are, how do I. How do I understand how to use this? But I do have some people that are almost in a lukewarm category, meaning they know that it's a tool that they need to use. They're apprehensive about how much information to share about themselves personally, professionally, how much of their information they want to put out there. And, you know, even there's. There's really. Sometimes there's a segment within this group, women, we tend to be a little bit more private on amount of information we want to share about ourselves. And even myself on Facebook, I don't accept friend requests from everyone because I do share pictures of my family. Now, my husband, you know, he's more open. He might share some pictures of the family as well, but I'm a little bit more protective about that. So there's not really a one size fits all that works for everybody. I think each one of us has to figure out how Much information we're going to be comfortable sharing, why we're sharing that information, which networks we want to participate in or not participate in, and then figure out how to make it work for you. I don't know about you, I'm not on social media 24 hours a day. You know, sometimes it feels like that, but that's the part of, part of what I do for my job and it's part of what I do for my clients. But I still have to set boundaries on what I share, my privacy settings and use each of the networks for the way that they are intended to be used. And I think the real cool thing about LinkedIn is it's a purely professional networking site. So I always tell clients too, it's not a social site. So you're not sharing family pictures, you're not sharing personal information, you're not sharing your marital status.

All of that is more in the social settings. And Facebook and LinkedIn is purely professional. So we're sharing information about ourselves, our career, our network and our organization and our industry. So we have some kind of guide rails that we can work off of in LinkedIn.

Yeah, and I think that's an important thing to realize because some people go onto LinkedIn and I don't see a ton of people just sharing random stuff, but I'll see a few people putting some comedy stuff. I'm thinking of someone right now that, you know, he's always putting out funny stuff no matter where he's at. And I, I kind of do the same thing. It depends on my mood. Sometimes I'm like, there's a live event going, you should go. It's educational, it's informative. And other times I'm like, yeah, what can I get away with today? But it's absolutely important to realize that everything has its place. If you're trying to upload an hour of video on LinkedIn, it won't work. That's what YouTube's for. I've tried it with a lot of these episodes and I'm not, I'm on it enough to utilize it, but there's sometimes I just walk away from it. I mean, when I'm shooting, you know, the episodes, there's times, there's days I don't even check the email or social because it's like, you know, we have our shoot today. You know, I have other stuff lined up later tomorrow. I'm not getting bogged down with it. But then other times it's nice to go, hey, what's everyone doing? And you connect with it. So it really depends how you use it personally and professionally. So I want to dive in a little bit deeper. You talked about the social selling aspect and a lot of people might not know about this. I've looked into it myself. But I want to know your thoughts on the Social selling index with LinkedIn.

So what you're referring to, for anyone who's listening and who may not know what this means, LinkedIn has this tool that will create a social selling index for you. And basically it is a score that they give you on a scale of 0 to 100 and it's your level of proficiency with the concept of social selling. So my way of explaining what social selling is and it's blending a little bit of LinkedIn's definition as well. It's your ability to connect with the right people on LinkedIn where you're sharing information that is seen as having some level of value and worth. So you're getting engagement for the information that you're sharing, you're sharing with. You're rather connecting with the right types of connections that you might be doing business with on LinkedIn. You're active, growing your network. So there's a lot of factors that they have that go into your score of what your social selling index is. And I have heard some people say that you can't get a score over 90 unless you upgrade to LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And in fact the Social Selling index score is on the Social selling or rather on the LinkedIn Sales Navigator area of their website. So it really is a tool for people who are using LinkedIn for business development. Sales Navigator helps to increase your score a little bit higher. So I know you and I talked about our scores, so just frame of reference, when you're just setting up your LinkedIn profile, you'll have a score of zero very quickly after you start populating things, you'll get up to 17. So it's kind of in stepped approaches and I've even worked with clients going from 0 to 50 and it's exciting to see. I've been monitoring my score for the past couple years and I've always stayed around the 80s. The highest I have gotten to is 84. That's what I am right now. I'm at 84. It was at 83 for the longest time. And one thing I shifted was the people that I'm connecting to on LinkedIn and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So I do get a steady stream of inquiries that are always coming in and I always screen them trying to Build dialogue with them. But in addition to doing that, I shifted, and I now start to every week go out and target the people that I want to send invitations to as well. So in addition to the regular stream of people that are coming to me, I'm now going out and targeting those people that are good sales prospects for me. And my index went up by one point by doing that. So having said that, recently, I did this where I think I sent out 10 to 20 invitations to my target audience. And one of those inquiries, we had a few messages back and forth. I didn't go right away into the sales pitch, but a few messages back and forth planted the seed. And this gentleman replied back and said, actually, I may be in the market for your services. Let's set up time to talk. So that does prove to me that, you know the Social selling Index, in some aspects, I think it is. It is. It's a number. It's a tool that LinkedIn provides you. I don't live and die by it, but it does help to assess if your effectiveness of using LinkedIn. Now, what is your score? Is it 84 right now, too, or where are you at?

So when I first saw it maybe a year ago, I popped in and it was 80, 81. And I hadn't even really been doing anything. And then, well, it's a score, and of course I'm gonna get 100%. So I was like, okay. And I start researching it, diving in, and the more I looked, it's like, okay, do this reach out to people? Because I hadn't been on in a few weeks. I was traveling and speaking. I looked, and it's like, you haven't talked to anyone this week. I'm like, well, of course I was doing real business. I wasn't sitting online. So I go, okay, I'll send some messages out. And it bumped it up. And then it went to like, 81, 82, 83. And then it kept going like 84, 83, maybe 85, 82, 81, 78. And I'm like, there's quite. I did. This is like homework to me. And I never did that in high school.

Yeah.

But I was always on Sales Navigator, so I'm curious why it didn't bump it up more. But I think it's the engagement with it. But I will say this. I think it's great. But you said the key. We exchanged a few emails. We saw there was a value add. We knew we could help each other. But here's the thing. The second you got on the Phone, where did the relationship go? Text, email, phone, Offline.

Right.

So I think part of it personally is I jump into that and I do the same thing, talk to people on the phone and, you know, actually give them value instead of exchanging 101 messages. So I think part of it is they want people to stay online LinkedIn longer in the natural course of business that's best for actually profiting and helping people is you have to take it offline at some point. Would you agree?

Absolutely. I mean, you can transact to a certain extent, but even the clients that I'm working with only online, at some point we move off of LinkedIn and we're either on email or on the phone or in person. And that's where the contract is really made or the partnership is established.

You know, could you do everything online without ever communicating with another form of technology? Sure. But I don't think that's realistic. I think most of US are using LinkedIn as, as a tool to help us to get to that business.

Yeah, I don't think anything will ever replace face to face, but I do believe too many people are under using everything that's at our fingertips. I mean, for reaching people globally 24 7, if you wanted to. It will never replace face to face, but I still think there's people that their mindset is stuck 30 years ago thinking every last action has to be face to face. Yeah, I think there's a happy medium in there. Speaking of the face to face, what do you do when you're speaking to audiences? What tips do you give them for best practices?

So with regards to using LinkedIn, you know, there's a couple things I cover in every session that I do. Regardless if they say there's a, an advanced audience or these are beginners. There's a few things that everybody has to do on LinkedIn and starting with filling out your profile. And I kind of call it optimizing your profile. So making sure that you have every field filled out, but little things along the way. There's a field that's called Headline and by default LinkedIn puts it as job title at Company. And I was doing some research for a client today, and it's a person in a sales role. And if you look up VP of Sales and other profiles on LinkedIn, the search results you get, every person has VP of Sales at ABC Company, VP of Sales at XYZ Company and there's no differentiation in the search results. And then you come across that one profile that says I make business happen. VP of Sales at xyz, whatever, then that person is kind of standing out. So I think filling out every area of your LinkedIn profile is a good practice, but it's beyond that. It's not just filling it in. It's thinking like a, you know, think like a human being that's reading your profile. And then also think about the algorithm that's running and how it's pulling up certain things from your profile to have you come up in search results. So that's one thing optimizing your profile. Another tip would be personalizing every invitation you send to people on LinkedIn and keeping in mind that your invitation, the goal of Your invitation on LinkedIn is to. To get that invitation accepted. It's not to get business from that. And what I recommend that you do is visit the person's profile, look for one or two things that you either have in common or that are interesting to you about their profile, and then send them the invitation. So in my case, it might be, hi, Mario, we haven't met, but I see we're both fellow members of Motor City Connect, and we both have many common connections, including Terry bean connect on LinkedIn. And that's all about you. Nowhere in there have I said my business is Miller Marketing. Your LinkedIn profile needs some help. Let's, you know, talk. I'm not selling there. My goal is to get that accepted, right? And then after that, we continue on with the dialogue. So if you were to accept it, you know, you have a message back to me, great. But if not, then I would say, hey, Mario, thanks for accepting my invitation. Then I do. This is a very soft sales push, and this is the only place I do it. I would say my business is mellow marketing. I help people in businesses with marketing and social media specializing in LinkedIn. Let me know if I can ever be a resource in those areas and tell me a bit about you and how you're using LinkedIn. If I can ever leverage my network to help you, I'd be happy to do so. So right away, I'm going back from. I'm kind of putting it off. And this is what I'm using LinkedIn for. How are you using LinkedIn? And I'm trying to keep some. Some engagement and dialogue. So that's another. Those are. I mean, the profile optimization, the personalizing invitation. And the third element is community engagement and keeping presence on LinkedIn and keeping a lot of dialogue going with your connections.

That is so valuable because so many people. I can't. I have three of them sitting in the box right now. And it seems I give people credit when they're starting a business, but it's like you have to remember you're dealing with people and humans and relationships and connections. And I'm glad you brought that up because I will never forget the times when people were like, I just started a business. It's like, you should have this weight loss thing. And I'm just like, you're saying I'm fat. Like, it's, you're not even making a conscious connection of what you're saying.

Right, right.

You know, not. Do you want to feel better and have more energy?

Yeah.

Oh, you look like you need this. Good luck online or offline. Good luck. So thank you for telling everyone to be human and think about what you're doing. Those are great tips. I always make sure it's a personalized message and ask them. You, I, I, I'm more take an approach of like, what's your goal for this quarter? What are you looking to achieve? This, you know, I got to keep it interesting for my own benefit. I can't do normal, which is fine, but you got to do what works for you. And it sounds like your approach is working for you.

Yeah, and I've even, I've tweaked and modified it over the years, too, you know, asking different questions. And in the other flip side of that is, you know, the invitations you get from people that you don't know on LinkedIn, you know, most people look at those invitations at face value and they decide right away, is this going to be a good connection or not? I look at every invitation I receive. That's a good connection for me. But first I'm going to screen them in, create some dialogue, and you never know. Sometimes those conversations lead to business partnerships or relationships. Other times they just become a connection. But I'm now breaking myself out from the clutter of all the other invitations they have on LinkedIn because I have some conversation going back and forth with them. And even in my screening with them, you know, I have a short version which is, you know, hi, Mario, thanks for the invitation. Have we met? You know we haven't met. I know we haven't met, but it's more polite than saying, who the heck are you and why do you want to connect with me on LinkedIn? I also have a longer version and I've tweaked and modified that a little bit over the years. But I agree, you have to figure out what approach works with you. What is the natural language that you would Use and, you know, even the techniques of figuring out what is scaring people away, you know, they're not responding at all to what is engaging them. They're always responding back to this message. You got to kind of test things out a lot.

Yeah. I would encourage anyone who's doing. I've noticed a lot of people don't do a lot of stuff on LinkedIn. Even some real prominent business people, they're on Facebook, YouTube, even Instagram. And they're like, what are you doing on LinkedIn? Yeah, like, oh, I use it once or twice a week. And I found out when I started producing, producing this show, everyone I know in real life, we're not connected on LinkedIn. And my theory is when we met.

The business card thing, we exchanged numbers. I think we just jumped to the phone call and email, where LinkedIn, when I get people's business cards, I look them up on LinkedIn, Facebook, everywhere I can, and connect.

Yeah.

Just to see. It's like, you may have been nice to me last night, yesterday or the morning event, whatever the case is. What do you like over seven days?

Right.

So I find that real interesting because sometimes it's like, maybe I want to talk to you, maybe I don't. But it's interesting because almost every single one of the guests for this show that I've hand picked, we were not connected on LinkedIn, but I hear personal cell numbers and personal email numbers. It's the craziest thing in the world. So one of the things also is you touched on the keywords in the title. The second I put host of podcast, I started getting people that were talking about, hey, you have a podcast, so do I this and that. I was like, that's weird. And I wasn't doing a lot of keywords. Can you touch upon that? What are your thoughts on keywords on LinkedIn versus Instagram?

So, you know, I'm not going to go into the Instagram because it's really more focused on hashtags and. And there's different things that are working out there. But LinkedIn, if you're trying to be found for certain types of words and phrases, you have to use them throughout your profile and in multiple places throughout your profile. So if you want to be found for podcast hosts, having that in your headline field, having it in your summary description, having it in your experience section, and then maybe even having it as a skill on your profile, all of those things are going to help you. And in fact, what I always tell people is redundancy works in your favor. On LinkedIn. So if you want to be found by other people for the Words podcast host, you actually have to be using those words and phrases multiple times throughout your profile and you even may have it multiple times in your summary, multiple times in your experience section. That's okay. The other thing is, and I think you're probably similar to me, I'm of the abundance mentality. There's more than enough work for all of us to go around. So why not connect with people who are doing the same thing that we are doing? Because we will learn from them, we will learn different techniques and possibly provide referrals back and forth. So I will often connect with fellow LinkedIn coaches and experts from across the world and I learn techniques from them and I also learn LinkedIn strategies and LinkedIn updates. I'll hear things about LinkedIn from my LinkedIn coach community before I hear them on, on LinkedIn. So that certainly helps out.

It absolutely does. And I have similar groups for video and people reach out to me and I reach out to them for publishing books and publishing videos, for launching, you know, different types of marketing. But it's absolutely vital to be around a group and a mastermind where you have basically Insider info. And LinkedIn is very powerful. I'm thinking of one of my future guests I'll have on the show. She built a multimillion dollar company using LinkedIn only. And she's the one who encouraged me to reach out to people in my field like you just did. Because so many people, I think they're looking to branch out and how can I get leads? How can I get leads? How can I get leads?

Right?

They never stop to realize how do I strengthen the relationships and collaboration with, like you said, within my case, book publishing and video marketing, how do I strengthen these partnerships where we can all grow together instead of looking at it as competition? And it's one of the reasons I started doing this because I know great people like you and I literally want to connect the world and there's plenty of great people in it and everyone seems to be, you know, they're in, you're in your corner, I'm in my corner, they're in their corner. And there's no synergies being created with it when we have the entire world at our fingertips. So I love the fact that you're talking about LinkedIn and online, but I also knew you did offline. So if you could elaborate on how speaking has helped your business.

Speaking of something, I never thought I would be a public speaker or presenter. I was always an introvert and I will always be an introvert at heart. But I remember earlier on, you seem.

Pretty shy right now.

I'm okay because it's one, you know, one person in the camera. I'm actually, I like public speaking now, but even when I do a speaking engagement now, I beforehand I need quiet, not to talk to anybody for a while. And then afterwards I'll need like an hour of quiet just to not talk and to re energize myself. But earlier in my career, I realized that if I wanted to move up into management, I needed to get comfortable speaking in front of groups. And I asked my manager at the time and he said, check out Toastmaster. I said, what's Toastmasters? And he explained, it's this public speaking group. It's international. You practice speeches and presentations and people evaluate your speeches. And I said, why do I want to go to a group of people who know how to do public speaking and then tell me I'm terrible at it. But it was actually a great program. I was involved with the group for about five years and found my voice, found what my speaking style was. And then when I had the opportunity to do so, I started doing presentations on social media and LinkedIn, you know, webinars in person and started really just practicing and getting comfortable to the point now I love public speaking. I love being in front of groups and you know, that moment when the audience, they're leaning in and they're smiling and they're getting it and it's really rewarding. And I've mainly been speaking in Michigan, but I think, Mario, with this speaking engagement that I'm going to be announcing soon, it's out of state. So I think I get to call myself a national speaker now right outside of Michigan.

You can. Absolutely.

So soon I will be a national speaker. Right now I've been focused in metro Detroit, but soon be announcing something that's coming up. So very exciting.

That is very exciting. Congratulations. Alright, last question before we go to the imperfect action round. How is using video helped your business?

So video is an interesting, I think a very powerful tool that can help to amplify the message that you're doing.

Both with the live speaking engagements. You know, sometimes we'll videotape them. Sometimes I know you and I both do this. We'll do a Facebook live stream of those events. And a lot of times when I'm doing a Facebook Live at an event, I'm not doing the Facebook live for the audience that's in the live session. You know, If I get a couple people in, that's great. But really why I do that Facebook Live is so that I can have it archived. You know, pull it down, play it back for future audiences. Oftentimes use that as a marketing communications tool sometimes to help provide messages to prospective clients who may not have heard me speak in person. They have a tip and I'm like, well, I have a video on that, I'll send that message over to you. And I think we're now in this age where video is just really exploding. It's a tool, it's a feature that's on just about every social platform. We have videos on our phones, we've got videos on our computer screens. You know, it's much more accessible. You don't have to have a camera, big setup anymore. So it's much more accessible there. But I think it's creating greater dimension for each of us. You can, you know, read a person's blog or website and assess their personality and maybe the expertise and what they have to offer. But when you see them on video, you really understand, you know, what are they passionate about, what's their personality? And you can't fake that on video you see who the genuine person is. So I think, you know, as a marketer I've always really appreciated looking at other tools and I think video is this huge area of growth opportunity right now.

I would have to agree. Video, if you're not using it, maybe look into it. So thanks for sharing with us, Brenda. We're going to go to the imperfect action round and we'll be right back right after we thank our sponsor. Instead of trying to get your prospects attention, why not be so captivating they can't look away? That's quote from my first book, Video Marketing for business Owners. And I'm saying it again today because the truth of the matter is if you can't get your prospects attention, they're not going to pay attention to you and they're not going to receive your message and you'll never be able to help them. That's why I love Belive. Before it even launched, I was using it in the beta phase. And it is the simplest and easiest way to do Facebook lives. To reach your audience, to interact with them. You can cue the comments up, you can take questions, you can answer them live. There's live polling features. You can make a professional looking production very inexpensively and very quickly, which is important because you don't want to be spending your time messing around with computers and hardware and all this other stuff. Live streaming can get very intense and there is literally nothing else I would recommend to start off with that is simpler, easier and more affordable than belive. So check out marioficcini.com forward/belive. Once again, that's mariofachini.com forward/Belive. All right, everyone, we are back for the imperfect action round. Brenda, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I have no idea what this is. I'm a little scared right now. Let's go.

Awesome. Love the energy. So what I'm going to do, I got three rapid fire questions for you. 60 second answers. Keep it short and speak from the heart. What is the biggest problem you see your audience make and how can they fix it?

Biggest problem that my audience makes is not embracing social media to its fullest extent and really not focusing enough on their community, focusing too much on themselves.

One technique they can use to fix that is shifting from selling to telling. Really easy to do. So rather than saying, hi, this is what I offer. Buy, buy, buy from me. Turn it into more storytelling. You know, here's tips and techniques that you can use in your business. Here's case studies here, success stories, talking more about your community and people that you engage with and you do about yourself. The whole social media karma concept at play there.

Very good. All right, the second one, we're talking about business and profits and entrepreneurship. What is the fastest path to the cash in your experience?

So I think it's asking the question. You know, I'm going to use the speaking engagement just as an example. We're frequently asked to speak for organizations and I've learned now to ask every organization, even if I don't think they're going to pay me, I will ask the question, do you have a speaker budget? And sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised and they'll say yes. And then approaching it the same way you do negotiation. The first person to offer up the number of. So the second question I would ask is what is the typical fee that you might pay? And they give me a ballpark and then I plug it into my program and figure out what would my fee be for that. Second would be chasing after your proposals and being assertive but not aggressive until you get an answer. Sometimes it's just, it's at the bottom of their email and they don't. They're not giving you a no. They just haven't moved it high enough up the list to make it a guess yet.

I love it. All right, so the last question I have for you, Brenda, is what is the Best way to maximize the customer lifetime value. It takes a lot of time and energy to get your first client, get your second, get your fiftieth, get your hundredth. How would you say is the best way to maximize that once you have them for you and them?

Yeah. So I would say as a consultant, it's asking questions, it's having conversation with them, really understanding what their needs are. And it's not always about what can I sell them to meet that needs need. It's looking at the bigger picture and it's really building upon that relationship and partnership, earning their trust and helping them to think of other solutions to help support their business. Because I think that in turn, again, back to the whole social media karma, that business will come back to you. And sometimes it's by those clients and sometimes it's through referrals, but certainly asking questions and really listening and being open to feedback, good, bad or indifferent. You know, being open to coaching as well.

Very good. So the last question I have for you is what is one book that has made the biggest difference in your life?

Gosh, there's so many. But the one that's really coming top of mind for me. I started reading Mike Michalowicz's series and it's really almost like a MBA for entrepreneurs. The book that's made the biggest impact for me is called Profit first. And it's really helped me to think differently about how I manage the cost structure of my business and build profitability into the equation. So it's been. It was a book that was referred to me by, I think it was Tammy Pereira. And I keep telling everybody I meet about this book. I think it's just the greatest thing, if you're an entrepreneur or consultant, to read.

Very good. Well, I appreciate you for being here and sharing with us. Why don't you let the audience know where they can find you, Brenda?

Well, I work in social media, so I would say look me up on all the major social networks. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. You can go to mellormarketing.com if you're hiring somebody to help you with your social media, make sure you check them on those networks and see how strong they are there, because that's going to be a good way to assess how effective they're going to be for your business.

Very good. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thanks again, Brenda, and we'll see you soon. God bless.

Thanks, Mark. Thank you.

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