INBOUND 2016 Viveka von Rosen "Bust Through LInkedIn Lead Gen Myths"

That's awesome. I didn't have the usual awkward listening to myself and how fabulous I am. So, yeah, we're going to talk about lead generation myths, which really even more so than I thought when I created this presentation because LinkedIn. So this release last week, my latest book, who here works at LinkedIn? Yeah, you're not raising your hand because you know I'm fixing to come over and bust your butt. Yeah. So the last time I wrote a book, six years ago, what happened? LinkedIn changed its whole UI user interface the first time, like since ever. So my book comes out last week. Guess what? They announce frickin new user interface. So a lot of what I was going to show you today won't be applicable in two weeks. So I'm going to try and get what's working right now. And what's going to work in two weeks in 45 minutes. So thank you for the short intro. I'm going to get going. We're going to cover a few things today. And they didn't let me change this at the last minute. I was talking actually to Marcus Murphy of Digital Marketer. Do you guys know Marcus? Freaking awesome, right? Ryan Dice is secondhand man. And he's like, oh, we don't call it social selling anymore. We call it conversation selling. I'm like, I like that so much more. So imagine social crossed out from now on in all my slides and it's going to be conversation selling. There's a couple myths, like I'm an all star and that's enough. It's not. There's no good prospects on LinkedIn anymore. How many? Well, you're in this room, so hopefully you don't think LinkedIn's dead. But how many. How many people are like LinkedIn? Meh, it's better than Twitter. And then my network's too small to be useful. How many of you are working at agency or agency owners? And how many of you have customers or clients who have like five connections on LinkedIn and they want to use it to make money? All right, good. I'm here for you today. And how many people think publisher is an enormous waste of time? Oh, good. You can raise your hand. It's okay. I'm here to change your mind. I have to know how much work I have. So there will be ninja tricks today. And I just want to point out that this is an exact replica of me. Yes. Short. The wig. I didn't have the wig. Oh, my ninja guy is not here for my video. Oh, here we go. See? See? Just like me. That's it. I just had to do a little something interesting, show you my smooth moves. So, social, conversational selling and why it's important to your lead generation. That is myth number one. Actually, that's not myth number one. That's just what we want to talk about today. Conversational selling is the process of using your professional brand. You can tweet, by the way, anything you want to. A process of using your professional brand to fill your pipeline with the right people, insights and relationships. That's our dear friend Coca Sexton, who is working at LinkedIn at the time and has now gone on to crush it as really the thought leader in social selling. So yay, Coca. Social selling or conversational selling works with anyone in social who is willing to engage with you. How many B2B in the room? Probably most of us. Oh, thank you. You're my peeps. How many B2C and government nonprofit. Cool. It works with everyone. And a lot of people think, and this is what Gary Vaynerchuk was talking about last night, that social engagement works best with B2C. But we are engaging with human beings, right? And so this presentation is going to be about uncovering and making relationships with those human beings. And while LinkedIn is an excellent lead generation machine, as Gary was pointing out, this is not something where you grab a connection on LinkedIn and stuff it into some automated selling process without people's permission. Because in Canada at least, that will get you sued. So don't do that. So please take everything I teach you today and use it for good and not evil. Political joke not inserted here. The recipe to conversational selling success. Right? We're going to talk about building your credibility. Research, engagement tools, conversations, top of mind awareness or thought leader positioning, which is a big one. The ability to close is on you. But actually, you should go. See, I just talked to Linda Swindling, so if you can get into her presentation after this one, she can talk to you about selling or closing. So Here are the four LinkedIn myths. If I build it, they will come. How many people have an all star profile on LinkedIn and is the work just pouring in without you making any effort whatsoever? Right. How many of you work with like CEOs, C suite, executive suite people and they're like, yeah, can you build my LinkedIn profile? And then they get pissed off at you when the leads don't just pour in. You have to make an effort. Obviously it's not enough just to have a profile on LinkedIn. You have to make it easy for Your high quality prospects to contact you, not just connect with you. So here's a couple solutions. Now you hopefully would agree. I kind of know LinkedIn a little bit, Couple books, been speaking about it for 10 years. So when LinkedIn came out with this background image, I was like, right on. Finally, you know, Facebook has had one for seven years. Twitter's had one for four years. Even YouTube has had a background image. LinkedIn finally comes out with one. And you know, I pretty much just grab my banner and pop it up there. My banner from my website and pop it up there. It looks good, it's branded, but it wasn't getting any kind of business. So duh, right? Simple. This is really simple, guys. I'm going to give you some really simple tips and then some more sophisticated one. Put a phone number and email address on your background image. Put a phone number and an email address on your customers and clients background images. Maybe if they're a bigger corporation, you can create a unique phone number, a unique email address and then you can track where those leads are coming from. I get four or five people a week calling me and I know because this is actually my Google voice number calling me. So I know they found me on LinkedIn. It drives traffic. It is a lot easier, would you not agree with me, to convert somebody on the phone than it is through a message trail or an email trail. Right. So if you can get them to phone you, how easy is that? But people just don't do it. Now speaking of the changes that LinkedIn's gonna make, the dimensions are different. So right now it's 4, 1400 by 425 pixels. I think the new dimensions are like 1530 by 530 pixels. I will get you that information. Oh yeah, that reminds me, if you want these slides, there's going to be a opt in at the. Not an opt in, but there's just going to be email address to go to at the end, which will give you all the tools and the resources that I talk about today. And I'm going to pop these slides in there too. So by all means, take copious notes, but just know you don't have to. The other thing that you need to do to drive that conversion is put a calendar link in your profile, an appointment link somewhere in your profile, whether you're doing it for yourself, whether you're doing it for your sales team, whether you're doing it for your marketing team, or whether you're doing it for your clients. Simple. Most of them are using a pointly or time trade or I use calendly. I prefer calendly. You can put the link in the websites. You can put the link in the summary section. I would highly recommend when you respond to people who are reaching out to you, that you put the link in your correspondence. The only place you really can't put that link is in your initial invitation, which, let's face it, with the user interface as it is right now, most people don't even know when they've been sent a customized message or not. Hands up if you use the mobile app more than you use the desktop app. Oh, you know, and I thought it was going to be all the youngsters. So the main reason why LinkedIn is making these huge changes. Well, the main positive reason why LinkedIn is making all these new changes is so that it's more aligned with the mobile app. The real reason is Microsoft bought them and they want to monetize. Can I say though here, Can I say though here, knowing that this is being recorded? LinkedIn came out in 2003, right before Facebook, before Twitter, before Instagram, before all the other ones. MySpace was around in match.com so it was a business tool. Why aren't y' all paying $79 a month for a business tool? Okay, I understand that the free account on LinkedIn traditionally has been all you need. With this new user interface change, I'm hoping you'll understand you probably are going to have to pay for LinkedIn in order to make it work. LinkedIn doesn't pay me to say this. It really drives me insane that you have to. But all I'm asking is how much would you pay for a business tool that would give you access to pretty much anyone. You need to have the ability to see what they're doing on LinkedIn and have the ability to reach out, connect, and potentially engage with them. And if it's not your key prospect, how about the people who know them? And so just consider, if you don't have a premium account already, that it might be worth working into the budget. Okay, so put your calendar tool. Now I'm off my soapbox. Put your calendar tool in your websites, in your summary section, in any kind of messages that you send back and forth. And for those of you who use publisher, by all means, put a link down there. Now. It doesn't have to be an hour long calendar link. 15 minutes is just fine. But think about it. If someone takes the time to read through your whole publisher post and they get down to the bottom of your profile and they're interested in you and they're interested in that post and they're interested in that content. Don't you want them to be able to reach out to you? And, and if you're too important or your clients are too important, then please put a salesperson's calendar link in there. It's really so simple. People don't do it and it drives an enormous amount of traffic. I'll talk about how to get more traffic with publisher near the end of this presentation. Myth number two ring of truth. My prospects aren't on LinkedIn. There are enough high quality leads on LinkedIn, I promise you, to make it a viable tool for you. Almost all of the Fortune 500C suite is on LinkedIn. Pretty much every CEO of every mid sized company is on LinkedIn. Any vendor worth using is on LinkedIn. Your potential future employees are on LinkedIn. Your contractors are on LinkedIn. Your strategic partners are on LinkedIn. If you're not finding your ideal prospects on LinkedIn, it's because you do not know how to look for them. But that's why I'm here. So here's the real story again. This is going to change with the new user interface. Here's my friend Neen, international keynote speaker. Fortunately, she and I have the same audience. So one of the things that I was able to do for her was just share one of the searches that I'd already created up until two weeks. This is going to be a really good strategy for you too. One of the things that you can do as an agency for those of you who are an agency or for yourself. How many entrepreneurs solopreneurs in the group. Cool. You're my peeps too. You can absolutely on LinkedIn right now for free use the advanced search to find absolutely the exact right people with a key called Boolean Search. Now apparently with the new user interface, they're getting rid of Boolean Search. You are going to have to have Sales Navigator. They're getting rid of the advanced search. So you're going to have to. You're probably going to have to upgrade to Sales Navigator. I'm going to give you some other tools too. But right now using the advanced search and then Boolean and or not, how many people don't know what Boolean Search is? I need to know if I need to explain it. Ok, so Boolean Search is just a matter of if you don't know who you're looking for. It's or so CEO or founder or owner. If you definitely want to include a specific industry or keyword. It's and. And the most important one is not, please, for those of you who are using advanced search, who have saved searches, please, please, please copy those URLs right now. So when you do that search and you've got those saved searches, go to that top line, that top browser line, grab that URL and copy it into a Word document, potentially, you'll still be able to use those URLs and get those results with the new user interface that will no longer have advanced search. So save your searches right now with the premium. With the Sales Navigator account, you'll still get LinkedIn letting you know when you've got new leads. But with the free account, you're not going to be getting that in two weeks. Once you've saved a search, LinkedIn sends you, like I said, new leads. But only for the next two weeks, you can use Google to do Boolean search within LinkedIn. Hey, Mitch. So if you know how to do Boolean and you want to play around with this right now so you can perfect it in two weeks, when LinkedIn gets rid of free advanced search, it's site LinkedIn.com in. You've got to have that in or LinkedIn's going to look on the site itself and not on the users. So the in is what's really important. And then you put that Boolean search after the colon space, right? So site colon space LinkedIn.com in and then you put your Boolean search in there. It is so much easier to create that Boolean Search first on LinkedIn while you've got advanced search. Once they get rid of it, it's going to be harder to replicate this within Google, but it'll still work. So I would urge you all, at least for your biggest customers and clients, if you've created safe searches for them, or encourage them to go in and grab that URL so that they can more easily find these ideal clients on LinkedIn or upgrade to Sales Navigator. Now, what I will tell you, thank goodness, is with LinkedIn, the sales navigator tool now has tags and notes. Did you know that? Just brand new. So tagging and notes, which you'll see in just a second. One of my favorite features on LinkedIn, for some reason, their most premium membership didn't have it for the longest time. They've now got it. And if you have been using tagging in notes, or you're going to for the next two weeks, you can import those tags and notes into the Sales Navigator. Again, if you're using Sales Navigator, please Please do this immediately so that you are able to make the most of all that work you've already done. All right, myth number three. I don't have enough connections to make LinkedIn work. I've only got 20 or 30 or 50. But what was.