From Digital Introvert to Digital Extrovert on LinkedIn - How to approach B2B event social selling?

So let me just get started and then we'll get cracking with the rest of the panelists. So Bribel's framework to build influence on LinkedIn is based on three key stages. Okay, We've got the first one is listen and react. So what is all. What is that about? So listen and react is the way we see is the way that you're going to teach LinkedIn's algorithm or you want to, based on your behavior, you want to teach the algorithm how to show you. What you need is how you want to get more awareness of the conversations and the right conversations that are taking place. Okay. And the way that you will go about that is simply when you look at your feed on LinkedIn, you're going to start looking at, okay, is this individual, whatever is being shown to me, is that within my network, or is that within my level of influence that I really want to build trust? And then you're going to have to start literally reacting to that. So you're going to say, I like this, or I, you know, basically an applause. That's a reception reaction, a digital reaction. So then the algorithm is going to start understanding that you're engaging more with certain type of content and less with other type of content. So the next time you start using the platform, you will likely start to see more of what's happening. Okay. Now the other element is that many people don't use is if you start seeing stuff on your LinkedIn feed that is completely irrelevant, you have the ability to click a button and say, do not show me more of that stuff, or you want to say, hide or unfollow this certain individual. And I think it's kind of an important element to do. The way that you need to start, if you haven't done that, is to start connecting with the people that you are intending to sell to, first of all, gain their attention. So the ideal scenario is that you connect with them, send them an invitation, do not sell. Then once you build that connection, then you're going to start seeing more information from them on your feed.

Okay?

And you want to be able to. The reason why you're connecting with those individuals is because you want to keep an eye on their profiles. You want to keep an eye on their company profiles to see if they are posting certain news, to see they're posting something that it's important that they need to say. And you will not have to keep an eye on anything that you see that rings bells that is aligned with the type of, the types of products and services or events that you sell, start reacting. Number two is you have to participate, right? Participate in those conversations. And what does participation mean or participation in those conversations mean? So one, when you see something that is of interest, again, you react. So you like it. But if you think that you have something that is of value to add, you participate. And you participate by adding a comment or you participate by tagging someone that you think might be interested in that. So it might well be that you had a conversation with specific prospect. Then you come across a conversation on LinkedIn or a discussion or an article or a piece of statistic that you think is relevant. You might then also tag that person. So, hey, Mr. Prospect, this is about what we were having a chat. Have a look at this. What do you think? If you think you have the ability to, to share something that is of value, then you just don't make your comments. By the way, you don't have to necessarily be an expert in order to participate in conversations.

Okay?

That's kind of fundamental. And finally, you have to post, post and post, right? So it is about sharing value content on your profile. Value content is going to come from topics that might have been discussed at your event in the past. It might come from surveys that your organization have been doing. Your marketing team should be able to provide you if you're in sales or if you're in a commercial environment with information that has arisen from your confidence.

Okay.

One of the key elements is when I'm saying post, post, post is the message is you have to be consistent. If you're not consistent, then you're not going to be rewarded in the sense of getting that visibility that you sometimes need in front of your audience. So share the content of value. You have to be you. Do not pretend. I know many people in commercial environments say, oh, but I don't know what to sell. I don't know how to react. Just be you. Okay. And don't pretend to be someone you're not. Don't pretend to be an expert if you're not. Yeah, but there's also a lot of valuable things that you can share. It might well be something that you read. It might be something that you found in a publication or something that you, you know, when you're trying to get an understanding of your audience or your industry, you might come across articles and there's no reason why you can't share that within the profiles and ask questions. What do you think about this? I just read this article. What do you think about this? The final thing, before I introduce you to Ashanti and to finalize this post, post, post Stage is that LinkedIn and any social media platform wants you to stay in the platform. So if you're trying to post things and put links that are going to go outside your website, outside LinkedIn or outside the social media platform, the algorithm doesn't like it. The algorithm wants just to have those convers within the unit. I understand that we're all selling. I understand that sometimes we might need to put our events in front of someone, or we might put our products and services in front of someone. And the suggestion is that you can still put the links in the commentary. It's okay to put the links in the commentary. It's okay to put the links every now and then. Okay, so that is our framework and I hope that that's kind of been useful. Now I want to introduce you to Ashanti. Ashanti again. I know of Ashanti for probably about two, three months when we started doing a lot of our own LinkedIn kind of acceleration and progress. And Ashanti became very visible to me and I just kind of started to get curious about it. And we've connected and we hit it off immediately. We had so many conversations about all this topic and I thought, Ashanti nix to be here to share her story. Ashanti, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you very much. So, I mean, you know, with Ricardo actually even saying how he met, that is really the output that is a testament to having some type of strategy. So I always, you know, I feel good when people like, I noticed you on LinkedIn, because that's the whole point of my presence on LinkedIn. So the main thing to think about that I'm about to share with you is that the importance is I can't see my screen anymore. But the importance of creating an experience for those in your network, okay, People you're inviting into your network and people that you are already having your network, especially if you do want to build relationships, build trust, and of course, at some point, you know, create an exchange and sell to them. And so the key thing here is visibility. Okay? So I think there's something like nearly 700 million users on LinkedIn. Only 20% of them or so are actually even using the platform regularly. And I think the Percentage is under 5% for people who are using it daily. So there's a massive opportunity here for you if you can bring up your levels of visibility and then later on you can profit. So that's why we use what we call the visibility profit framework. The idea is that the more visible you Are with value added content, which is the first pillar of the framework, then you can later on profit in some type of way. Okay, so Ricardo, did you want to.

Yeah, no, no, sorry. No, I'm saying.

So there are four key pillars, okay? Very simple. It's all about providing an experience, letting people into your world as a business, as a brand, or as an individual. If you're a consultant or you're trying to be an influencer, for example. Now your content needs to be a mixture of two things. I would say what we do is we have what we call evergreen content, and that is existing content that we use in the course of our business. And examples of that are blogs, PDFs, white papers, research, they could be old videos, webinars, that kind of evergreen content that is still valuable, accurate, relevant at any point in the year, for example. And then what we have is what we call organic secondary content. And that content tends to be far more seasonal and topical. So for example, you would have seen over the last seven to eight weeks, everyone talks about COVID but in 50 years time, unless you're looking back as a historian, that content might not be as relevant. So that's why we call it kind of organic, topical content that you can use to stay relevant, stay connected with your network and stay visible. Okay, so that's that first pillar of content. And if you're wondering about what kind of content, so we've just talked about the type of content, it really has to be your expertise as a brand. Okay, so value added expertise. How are you helping people in your network? What problems do you solve? What are their problems? Can you give suggestions? Can you signpost? Can you help? Okay, so that's that first pillar of content. If you don't have content, it's very hard to even get started when it comes to your LinkedIn visibility. So sometimes we'll look on people's profiles and we'll see that they haven't posted anything in weeks, maybe months. Now, the absence of content also says something about your profile and your business. Okay, so if you think about it, your LinkedIn comes up probably highest sometimes on a Google search. And it's probably the most up to date way of people getting to know who you are and what you do as a business. Okay, so it's really important if you can, to keep your LinkedIn updated by posting regularly.

And I think Ashanti just sorry to interject a little bit of that. So what are the ways in which people can find that evergreen content versus the organic one?

And sure, yes. So most People. So actually there's a couple of ways. Most businesses and brands will have blog posts sitting on their website and they just don't think to share them on their LinkedIn. So that's like one of the most basic go to's, look at existing content you have on your website. Blogs, PDFs, maybe webinars, maybe videos, white papers, research. If you produce any of that type of content, recycle it, refresh it, strip it down, cut it and use it on your LinkedIn. Yeah.

Okay, good.

Okay. And if you don't have existing content, find other people's content. Some people's LinkedIn strategy is to be a curator and that's okay. So maybe you don't want to produce your own content or you don't do that in the course of your business. Curate the best content in your industry for your expertise and share it on your LinkedIn profile. Yeah, good. So that's that first pillar. The second one, I believe. I can't see my screen, but usually it's one of the two of community. I'll just. Because I know they're all seeing.

I'll share the screen. Ashanti.

Sorry.

I just kind of wanted the audience to see your face.

That's okay. So community now this is really important. This is when you start to really blow some air into the funnel, right? So what you want to do is create community. Now you can do that by interacting with other people's posts. So Ricardo talked about commenting on people's posts. So you want to engage and interact with the posts of your prospects or people in your network. It's really careful, depending on what your objective is, to think carefully about who it is you're paying attention to. Sometimes because of traditional LinkedIn habits, we tend to interact with people. We work with people that we knew already. But the problem is you're not trying to sell to them. You're not necessarily trying to build trust them. So you want to be keeping a track of your prospects or people that you're interested in or want to be noticed by and comment on their posts. Okay. That's the way you can create community because it becomes a communal experience. You are being seen by people in their network as well. So always remember that. That's how you start really building this community. Okay. And creating a tighter group hug. So you have to be community in your engagement with other people. Now if you don't necessarily have an existing network, maybe it's not very large, they're just starting out. That's fine. Get involved in existing communities. Okay. So go and find relevant LinkedIn groups and again, track people who have a lot of engagement on their posts and start engaging with them. And then that will help you get involved, get noticed and be seen. And you find when you do that regularly, what happens is you get lots of requests for connections because people notice you in the midst of conversations, they notice what you're sharing and so they will want to connect with you.

Yeah, just one thing, Ashanti, that I wanted to add on that part was that if you, when you start getting into your habits of being on LinkedIn, you gonna start to see a lot of people that are becoming very active or very common. The best way for you to do is just start engaging within their own communities. Because whoever, whoever, if you engage, for argument's sake, in Ashanti's posts, in the commentary or in any way, shape or form, then the people that are reading those posts, the people that basically Ashanti's audience was also going to have a visibility to you. So sometimes it's also important to participate in conversation. Wherever the conversation is, that's kind of where you need to be. So I just like that.

No, it's really important because you have to remember it is the beautiful thing about it. It's a window into your business. But it's all public. So every action and interaction is seen by others. And so you're either strengthening your positioning in their eyes or not. So it's really great if you can interact publicly. And I always say stay away from sharing your expertise in the direct inbox, unless this is a prospect who's interested in talking to you. Right. So be public about sharing your expertise. The next one is about creativity. So this is where we talk about using video, uploading slideshows. So vary the format and type content you're sharing. Sometimes you can have written posts, sometimes you can use an image, video slideshows, you know, be creative with the type of content that you upload onto LinkedIn. So there's variety in your posts and you will catch the eye of different types of learners because people like to consume content in different ways. So I would really be quite creative about what you're posting and the type of format you're using. And then that fourth one is collaboration. This is really, really key. This is how you start creating one more visibility, strengthening that community pillar because you're working with other people. So collaborate. So this is a collaboration in many ways, right? This webinar that increases your visibility, your thought leadership in your network and community. And so you want to look at ways you can collaborate to create content. Okay. Or collaborate in terms of sharing other people's content. So sometimes I'll see something useful that Ricardo has shared. I will also maybe comment and reshare that post. And by doing that, I achieve all of those things in the pillar. And that's all pushing up my visibility on the LinkedIn platform as a whole. And also more importantly, in terms of my positioning with my network, which is full of people who I would like to work with.

That's good. And I just really wanted to add on the element on creativity. And please, guys, don't get too bogged down into the element of creativity and how beautiful or color or anything. I think the fundamental element of the creativity, I'm just simply being very conscious on sales and commercial people or people that are, you know, that obviously are not in the marketing field. Creativity is more mean. You need to vary it, you need to mix it. Especially because that would allow you to see when you're reviewing, based on your posts that you've done in a given week or in a given day, then you will evaluate what type of content is sinking more. A personal anecdote. For some bizarre reason, people say LinkedIn says that videos are very good for engaging. On LinkedIn, my videos, either I'm really bad at doing videos or they're not engaging. But I get more engagement when I put stuff that has an imagery and I get more engagement when I get an image that has a photo of an individual that is a human individual, not necessarily stock imagery. But many things will work for you. And then we'll see. Probably Daniello, he gets a lot of engagement when he gets posts of his pizza takeaway, but we'll see that a.

Few orders as well.

So Ashanti just. We wanted to. And we could speak for four hours, but I wanted to ask you a question from your. From what is your daily routine? If you could kind of share that. What is your daily routine? And also what. What have you seen that does not work? And what have you seen that works for you?

Yeah, sure. So I'll start with what doesn't work. First of all, not posting at all doesn't work. I've said to you before, your LinkedIn is like a metabolism. You have to feed your metabolism. I have a very slow metabolism in real life. So if I don't eat healthily or exercise for an extensive period of time and nothing changes. And LinkedIn is like that. It's very fickle. Very, very fickle. If you don't feed it, it won't give you anything. So it's really important to post. That's a basic number one. Number two, interact. So if you don't post and if you don't interact with people, you just won't get any results at all. And the point that you made very early on, which is overuse of external links in the body of your post, it doesn't seem like the visibility of those posts doesn't go very well. You don't get a lot of engagement. So if you're going to link to maybe your website or an external place, put it in the comments section and then it tends to, it doesn't disrupt the engagement that you get on your posts. So those are things I'd say don't work.

And then what would you say is your personal, I guess what is your secret soul? And let's just now that you talked about what doesn't work, what does work for you specifically?

What works very well.

And then routine.

Yeah, sure. So for me the biggest two things for me have been community and collaboration. So I collaborate as much as possible. Okay. And the key with collaboration I will say is that that's why you have to be in a category. For one, you have to have like a Lighthouse offering which because it makes it much easier to find people and attract people who want to collaborate with you. Whereas sometimes if you all do the same thing or there's lots of companies that do the same thing, it can be harder to find kind of mutual, win win collaboration opportunities. So collaboration and then the community. I literally, I curate great content from my peers and I involve them in my feed as much as possible because it improves my visibility as well.

That's a very good tip is collaborate that, that curate curating something that you've seen is working for someone else. It's okay, it's permissible. And so you again, when people say, oh, what should I post? That's kind of a thing.

No secrets here. You just honestly, nobody's doing anything extra special. Even if they've got premium on LinkedIn that isn't a guarantee to a know engaged network that actually brings you profit. So don't worry about those things.

And by the way, just for clarity purposes, what we're talking about here is it's visibility. What you're looking at when you become a LinkedIn extrovert is trying to get or become visible to the people that matter to you. And the visibility generally is measured at a personal limit. When you go into your personal profile and you check your activity and you check on your posts to see how all that's working, right? So you will see how many views that has shown and that's where you actually get that understanding. And I love when you talk about metabolism, I love that word LinkedIn metabolism. Because it is a metabolism. You need to feed it. You need to, you need to, you need to. Sometimes you eat something, it doesn't agree. Sometimes you have to eat something else it doesn't agree. Or sometimes you do a lot of pizza. You might need to then have lots of water and kind of like salads. And the next day, what is your. How do you feed that? LinkedIn metabolism. What is your daily routine? We all have to eat, for instance, every single day. What is your daily routine?

So first thing in the morning I check all my notifications and my messages. Okay. Secondly, I then upload my first post for the day. I upload the first post of the day every single day. I do post regularly throughout the day. So early in the morning we'll post the first post. By the way, there is no perfect timing. There really isn't perfect timing. So don't again get bogged down in what time should I post? If you're just starting, just post. Get into the habit and rhythm of posting. First that I like to keep an eye on their content. So I'll go and look on their profile, see what they posted. If it's of interest or if there's something I can add of value, then I will comment on their post as well.

That's great, Ashanti. Only if they. Only if they did something you will then engage, right?

Yeah. So look, yeah, if their post is about something totally unrelated or left field, then I won't. There's nothing of value that I can offer to that post. So I won't post or engage with them. Does that make sense? So yes, it's all about the objective in mind.

Thank you, Ashanti. I'm sure there are people gonna have.

A lot of questions.

Guys, I'll encourage you to use the Q and A panel to ask your questions. And I now want to bring in my very good friend Daniele Moreschi. I know Daniel for probably the 20 years that I've been in this industry and when we were young and beautiful, we still are. We were young and beautiful back in the day and yeah, 20 years ago. Daniele. So we've gone a long time and so Daniele is the reason why I like Daniele's input in this session is because Daniele is a sales director and he manages a team of 20 plus individuals for WBR and one of their divisions, that's called ProcureCom, so it's a big community. It's already kind of standardized. But then, you know, obviously WBR has been in our industry for a while and it's been widely known for, you know, for its events and everything. And Danielle has become a LinkedIn extrovert. And again, it's been a long time since I haven't seen him. And then he started to become more visible to me. Right, we're connected. And then I started seeing what he was looking and me, I've been extremely curious over the last seven years how social media and how to engage with social media. So seeing Daniela coming from the depths literally of social media to them becoming a highly visible individual, I was extremely curious. And I am grateful to you, Daniele, for showing up here today and sharing your story. Let us know, Daniele, what happened. And I just wanted to start with something. Here is with a statement that you've made that kind of stuck with me that you said that I wasted 11 years of my sales career on LinkedIn. I was doing it wrong. That's what your realization. So welcome.

Thank you. Well, thank you for the introduction that was, you know, I don't think anyone can beat that introduction, so thank you for that. I think I joined LinkedIn in 2009, I think 2008, where like many people did at the beginning, was a virtual copy of my cv. And I think it was flattering when you had the odd email from a recruiter, eventually you realize you don't want to change your job. So no point of having those kind of conversations. And over the years I was trying to sell through LinkedIn, I was asking my sales team to do their sales through LinkedIn, go on LinkedIn, find prospects, tell them about the event and close them. And that didn't work the same way. It wouldn't work if you go into a network event, there's a group of people having conversations and you go and take one of them, pull him aside and say, by the way, here's my profile, here's my service. You wouldn't do that in normal life. And LinkedIn is a networking platform and you've got to behave on LinkedIn as you would in any normal networking activity. Now, I Believe you got two choices on LinkedIn. You can use it passively and it's totally fine. Then you would use it for content to learn. You can use it for prospecting, find leads, find out who could be your potential client, but you can't directly sell to them. So if you want to use LinkedIn as more of a selling tool, you need to join those networking conversations. And I think both you and Ashanti have covered pretty much everything. But here's been my experience, right? So I've been having been very operational for the last four years. I was primarily managing the teams and I wasn't doing much of the selling. Then about 12 months ago, I had a member of the team going on maternity, so I had to take over some of the accounts and I started becoming more operational. And when the lockdown happened, I had a bit more spare time and I thought, let me see what this LinkedIn is all about. How can I use it a little bit more? And I started posting. And what I've noticed is that LinkedIn, as you described earlier, plays on the algo, plays on your connection. And 90% of the people viewing my post were people in sales, people in the event industry. None of them are people I wanted to sell to. So I started to think, okay, what can I do to reach out to the people I want to sell to? Which in my case at this stage were procurement professionals. And I did exactly all the steps you guys described. I started to engage with some of the key influencers. I Googled it. Who are the top influencers in procurement? 50 LinkedIn profiles came up. Connected with all of them, started engaging with the post, started commenting, started asking questions, and started posting regularly every day. And the ranking of how many procurement people were viewing my post started to catch up with the salespeople. Now, I know that if you're a salesperson or if you even a producer, I know there's a lot of event business people here. You might not necessarily feel like you're an expert, that you can go out there. And I could never post anything too technical about procurement. I wouldn't be able to be credible. So what I started doing is to engage in conversation, ask question. If I have a good call with a prospect, something is discussed, I might put a statement on my post and ask the audience what they think about it. And I was amazed by how many people started to engage. I think a lot of people use LinkedIn for the very same reason we discussed in here, to raise their own branding, their personal brand. So if they see an opportunity to share their knowledge and their expertise, they will jump on it. So if you're new to your industry, if you're doing, if you're at the research stage, researching a new product you want to launch, it's a good opportunity to test the market, put yourself out there, ask question and you'll be surprised how many people will start engaging with that content. Because I think the danger here is that a lot of people will fear that imposter syndrome. They think, well, I'm not an expert, I can't go out there and share content. What do I share? You talked earlier about articles. One of my best posts this week was simply a statement about where the industry is going and you know, ask the audience are you for or you're against? You know, this was about robotics, whether procurements need to be fully automated or still keep some of the human touch. I don't have the answer. I don't know what they should do, but I've asked it. And yet, you know, very good engagement, lots of likes, lots of comments and lots of views, all from procurement professionals. It wasn't from any of my usual peers within the event sales sector.

Yeah. And I think Daniele, one thing that like you said, and I think that when you're talking with someone that is responsible, you're talking with an event business owner, they have certain views, they generally are very, they know a lot about their industry, etc. When you're talking about someone that's putting conference programs or event programs, they know a lot about all product directors, they know a lot about the product but sometimes the sales individual doesn't kind of feel that they are experts. And as you rightly said it, but I just wanted to add to your element is you're not an expert but you are very likely talking, prospecting with a lot of experts and you being able to connect one on one or one to many or at least share the voice of an expert, I wouldn't say makes you an expert but entitles you to have a proper conversation about it and you can, you can just bring in that in. And I just really wanted to make that clarification because I know that there's a lot of people in sales that will do that. So sorry Danelle. So one thing that I wanted to ask as well, like you manage so you're, you're a LinkedIn extrovert. I will call you that. You wouldn't call yourself that. I will call you that. You manage a team of 20 plus individuals. What's I guess is there any directive from your point of view? Is there an encouragement or what would be the tips or how would you train? How would you encourage your teams to engage in social.

Well, first of all, we need to stop doing what we traditionally do and this is posting about your product. You know, discount deadline coming up, last few Places left so and so just registered for a couple of reasons. One is because again it's not, you're not giving anything to the audience. You're very self centered to what you want, not what the audience want. And two, because unless you previously engage with your prospects in a normal conversation, that post will only be seen by your colleagues, by your former unimates, maybe by your mom and your dad. I used to have, I always used to find amazing, amusing how people would like into someone else's. Some of their colleagues post about the colleague's product and I think, well, why you bother liking someone else's product if you're not selling to them? Your audience will not understand why you're sharing the content. The reality is just keep on doing it because your audience will not see it anyway because you're not, you know, engaging with them. Just stop doing all of it. Some of the worst posts I had in terms of traction where the posts were copied and pasted a piece of content from one of our events, cold posts, just place it there. Nobody looked at it, nobody engaged it. But what people need to start doing is doing the things that we do normally in life, which is it's networking. If I'm having a good conversation, like you say with you and then I go and talk to a new prospect, I will mention that conversation on the phone. So nothing stops you from mentioning that on LinkedIn and bringing people together. I had a very good call this morning with the head of procurement from big retailers and just by being able to reference some of the conversation I had on LinkedIn I had such a very good, enjoyable conversation. He led to a very easy sell because I was talking his language. But the only way I was able to talk to his language was because I've been listening to his language on LinkedIn from his prospect. So that's the first thing that people need to do is just so you're part of your industry ecosystem, share what you know. It might not be much if you don't know much. Ask questions, if you read articles, just post what you read. You gotta become part of that ecosystem online to use that networking platform that is there. If I come to you now and I say listen, five o', clock, you finish working. There is the, at the bar next door there are 50 procurement people or whoever, 50 industry leaders in the industry. You're serving that, they're having a drink, you want to come and network with them, you would and you would go there and you would join conversation. You will listen to what they have to say. You will ask questions. You would do what you normally do in networking scenario. Now you're talking about LinkedIn extrovert. A lot of people sometimes are introvert. Not just on LinkedIn by normal life. LinkedIn gives any introvert, and I'm one of them, the opportunity to engage on their own terms. One of the things I dread the most is when my wife comes to me. So we've been invited to a wedding and it's like I don't know anyone and the last thing I want to do is to sit at table with a bunch of strangers. Had to be nice for four hours as the thing I dread the most. And another couple of people on the participant list, including one of my former boss, I'm sure he will share the same feeling. Now on LinkedIn you can network in your own terms. If you're getting bored of the conversation face to face, you can't walk away. I mean you try. Sometimes you're just trying to look for familiar faces and trying to get out of it on LinkedIn you can just do it, just stop typing. You know, you could be busy. No one expects you to be online 247 so you can unexpectedly stop the engagement. That is your own term. You can control that. So if you're A natural introvert, LinkedIn allows you to network on your own rules. And I think that's a very good opportunity that people need to embrace.

I think that's an interesting thing. One thing that I wanted to say like so I love that analogy. If 20 people of your audience are having a drink in the pub next door, would you go yes even because you have to. And then I think digitally when you're in a conversation, the nod that you're looking at Danielle and nodding or looking at Ashanti and nodding. The digital version of that are likes pauses and you know, it's just the like that just gives you lets you know to have that visibility in that front. And I think that's kind of very, very, that's very interesting. I think Danielle, one element that you've highlighted, can you explain? Because I like when you've mentioned that before you used to copy your event program or excerpts of your event program or your value proposition and post it on LinkedIn that didn't work. Now how do you still then so the million dollar question, how do you sell then on LinkedIn? So if you're being okay, I'm a sales guy, you need to meet your quota. How do you bridge that being seen being visible to selling your sponsorship deal or selling or meeting Your quota that you need to meet.

I don't think you can go on LinkedIn with that end goal. Can't be too specific. I think it's LinkedIn is like a marketing strategy for the person. It's a pull marketing rather than a push marketing. I mean you can still go and try to sell your product but only after you had a conversation. So again if you're in the publisher networking with your audience, you're not going to go in and break the conversation. Whatever they're talking about, they might be talking about the currency fluctuation. You're going to say oh by the way, I got solution for that. You're going to follow that conversation, then you're going to follow up with your product services either later on offline or if the situation allows it then and there after a couple of drinks. And the same will be on LinkedIn. So you just follow the conversation and when the time is right, you pre qualify your audience by talking to them. And when the time is right you will start probing a little bit more and find out if they're ready to buy. Now I had people on LinkedIn and only been there for two months. I've been invited to join a vendor demo which then led to them inquiring about sponsoring one hour event. I had two independent consultants contacting me about sponsoring one hour events. I had a situation where someone just been promoted to CPR. I congratulated this person on LinkedIn. You got that facility, you got the notification so. So it's been promoted. Just one simple message. Congratulations. She replied, thank you very much. Asked her question, listen, I'm hearing that you know, in your market, everybody now, everyone now is facing this challenge. What are you doing regarding to that? Are you feeling the same? She replied, we engaged in a conversation and then I felt I had the solution, mentioned what I was doing, very interested. She asked for more information and eventually she became a client. But if I went in with the objective to get a client within within a week, within a month, again I would have been a bully in a China shop. I would have been that kind of guy that goes in, here's my brochure. Please buy. Please buy. Sales leaders, managing directors here. Where is your producer? Where is your sales team? I would be careful whether to give them too many metrics on what to achieve on LinkedIn in terms of sales results. That's going to be organic. It will happen, it will happen organically all the time. But it shouldn't be the main objective to be on the platform. You know, you Come from a marketing background. You got your direct mail strategy, that's fine, but that's not what LinkedIn is for. LinkedIn is for branding. LinkedIn is for poor marketing. And the same from a sales point of view. You know, you want to go and message 50 people a day, do it. But you know from experience, if you do a direct marketing campaign, the ratio is not in your favor as a salesperson. You don't have the luxury to sit there and copy and paste the same message hundred times a day. And even if you do that, it's very impersonal. You can have three, four powerful conversations. You build relationships, and when you feel that the bias is ready, you present your solution. You might get referrals. But for me, what's been very powerful is actually being able to speak the client's language on the phone. The conversations I'm having now on the phone are much more powerful. I feel much more competent to talk about the industry with prospect, with very senior people than I was ever before. I mean, in our industry we get briefed by the producer. We've been told, listen, this is what the product is about. That brief gives you 1% of what two weeks on LinkedIn will give you to understand how to position your product, what the pain points the clients are.

And I think you mentioned something very good when we were doing the pre webinar conversations where you said, I might have connected with certain amount of people on LinkedIn and I might have not necessarily been a situation where one guy connected and then I sold him a delegate place or a sponsorship deal. But when I'm having a conversation with someone completely different, they would have seen all my behavior that I've had on LinkedIn and that has definitely helped me and helped build that trust with that person as a person of influence. So your activities and I think is very clear for sales individuals. LinkedIn is not about prospecting and copying, as you said, KPIs 50 people sending outreach emails in the same way that you would do, or emails in the same way that you would do. Email is about being visible because by the time you have some sort of conversation with someone, that person would have seen you. Or if they have not seen you and if that conversation was good, they're gonna go and check you out on LinkedIn and then they're gonna go and check you out on LinkedIn. They realize that, oh my God, this guy is kind of profitable. So this guy knows what he's talking about. I think that's an important element that I wanted to kind of to highlight.

Trust is the key word. I think you become a person of trust. There's a brand that people recognize. Like, I mean, a lot of the audience here I believe is UK based, probably London based. If you look up for a plumber and you hear pimicro plumbers, everybody knows who they are. And you probably think, yes, it's a trusted plumber. If you get someone knocking on your door that you've never seen before, asking you, do you need any plumbing, you probably must be a dodgy individual. No badge, no uniform. Yeah, what's the difference?

Yeah, I think that's an important trust and that's kind of what will make you or any person in sales or any actually person putting a program together is when they know that you are actually connected with other people in the industry, then that's what's going to kind of. That's what sets you apart from the many people that are trying to be kind of doing cold outreach now. Daniele, just the same question that I asked Ashanti. What do you think didn't work and what do you think does work?

Well, so we touched earlier about copying and pasting from a brochure or from. From a brief. And I think the reason why that didn't work is because it was. It wasn't me. I think, you know, Ashanti has their own business behind you, got your own business behind you. Using it from. From sort of like a business point of view, I'm using it more as an individual. But still, when you go on it, you're gonna be you. People need to know Ricardo, people need to know. Shanti need to know me. So the conversation has to be personal. The same way again, if we go back to the knowledge of being on a normal networking opportunity, if you are in your. In the pub having a conversation with you, with your audience, you're not gonna, you know, regurgitate your corporate material, your company website, talk about you. You might crack a joke. You know, that's why at the weekend I like to post something light, something that maybe I'm doing. Like, you know, I know that everybody, everyone knows now that I make pizza at the weekend. You know, I think I'll be. People know me more for my pizza than from my, you know, conferences. But people like that, because they get to know me, they get to know the real person. If you copy and paste something, people can fill it. I used to post lots of articles at the beginning, you know, again, going back to the fact that I didn't feel like I had enough knowledge to share I was sharing the articles I will find online and again ad algo doesn't like it because again you put an external link but the audience doesn't like it because probably the articles they already seen themselves anyway. So they think, well thank you very much but we all have Google and we can all find our resources online. So being you is the is the key thing. That's what I think works. I feel like Ashanta say posting every day, having a routine, have your own routine. One of the things I'll do is I prepare my post at the end of each business day for the following day. I mean, should I always know what I'm going to post tomorrow? I don't log off until I know what I'm going to be doing tomorrow. Second thing is you guys covered everything already. But second thing is find the people that you want to engage with and keep on checking them out. Make sure that you got five, ten people you're constantly engaging with because they are sort of like loudspeakers. They will amplify what you're trying to do because they have bigger connection within your industry. So if you engage with them, their connection will see you and they will start noticing. You mentioned earlier I mentioned I think on the slides or one of my posts that yeah, the increasing views I had on my profile think it's come down to that because I'm engaging with people of influence and I can reach out more people way beyond my own network. So it's your second network that becomes important by engaging with them. And yeah, when again when you go into the these people post you might not be able to, you know, here's what happens. Sometimes I put a question on my post people comment and they give me some very technical answers. I don't necessarily understand all of it. I'm going to be honest. I just ask them to elaborate more. That's interesting to tell me more about it. They again using the platform for the same reason we're using it. They want to promote their expertise. The more questions you ask them, the more they will come back with answers and helps my profile because the post gets most traction. The more traction the post gets, the more LinkedIn likes it, the more LinkedIn publish it, push it so more people will see it.

Great, great. Daniele, thank you very much. Daniele. I mean again we can continue talking.

And can I ask. I think Ed has got a good question on the less is more and I think.

I was going to go into questions time actually Daniele. So let me just kind of put that question down to both of you, Ed Lawson. Thank you, Ed. So is there a case? And that's the question for both of you. I'll probably let Ashanti answer it first. You and I, Daniele, are gentlemen. So we'll just let you do this first. Is there a case of less is.

More.

In the case that Ashanti. Basically they say Ashanti sports are every day and probably we all do. Yes. So what would you say to that?

So I think that it depends on your objective and the stage you're in when it comes to using LinkedIn. Right. So if you're right at the start, you need to do a bit more. Remember I talked about that metabolism. So if you haven't been using your LinkedIn and then you only post once a week, it will be, it will take longer to get that momentum and rhythm in terms of, you know, your network even noticing or responding to your posts. And that's really important to remember. I think Danielle talked about this. You know, never post thinking that people actually care because you will be disappointed. LinkedIn is not like other social media platforms. It's not like Facebook and Twitter where you know, there's. You get this rush of endorphins, many people from having likes, retweets and that's not really how LinkedIn interacts and functions. And so I would say if you're at the beginning, you need to post more often to just put some air behind your interaction. Feed the metabolism. As time goes on, you will know what the natural rhythm is for you. There are some. There are weeks when I'm very busy with client work and I will only post once a day or maybe three times that week and it doesn't hurt my engagement. Okay. So but I would say if you're at the beginning, do a bit more.

What about you, Danelle?

Yeah, I agree. I think, you know, especially beginning, you got to put the leg work for all the people. I've been talking with people that have been doing this for much longer than I have and they got a much bigger follower group. That's what I said. You know, start every day, especially for the first year to get yourself up there. Eventually, yeah, you can afford to do a little bit less often and you become a big brand by the beginning. Yeah, you gotta push. There are ways to do it. You can have, you know, you can have automated website that will do it for you if you, if you don't want to actually put yourself reminder and doing every day, you can plan your week and there are websites that will post at the set at the set time that you selected, some of them are free. They're not going to be able to post every day for free, but with the premium accounts, you will be able to do it. So if you look at it from a company point of view, you might have the budget. If you're an individual like me, you might not have that budget to do it. Although I think it's something about like £20amonth and nothing extraordinary. But yeah, I guess on the, on the less model, I think what I've noticed is on the post length, sometimes less can be more, depending on how engaging your, your content is. Again, like I said two days ago, I just posted one question. You know, probably the least amount of words I put in a post and he had a very good traction, much better than maybe a longer post. That's empty words that doesn't really resonate with the audience.

And I would like to add my bit of that. And Ed or to anyone that is asking, less is more, unfortunately, on social media. No, you have to be there because it's my personal case. And what we've seen, when you stop posting, the frequency and the cadence of when you post goes down, then the algorithm kind of brings you down and all the work that you've done, it's just literally gone crazy. It's gone out of the board. So, yes, I would say every. I would say my suggestion is every day because you become visible. And the other reason why you post every day or as much as you can, just to give you a personal anecdote, we, when we're promoting our virtual events, generally post every day about the same event. My change in what Ashanti said, I would change the color of the banners, I would change the theme and the tone, but every day. And the reason for that is the people that your post has been put forward yesterday might not be the same people that your post is going to be put forward later on in two hours or the next day or the next three days. So essentially you're accumulating. See your post, even if it's about the same event or the same. I'm talking about a specific event in this case. So we're promoting an event. It doesn't harm you if you're posting three times, four times, or every day about the same event. The key is vary what you post. You cannot say event, event, event. No, if you probably would have seen, I'll encourage you guys to go and look at my profile and see how, how we have managed the postings of all our webinar series is actually a case study. So you will see how we have managed to do our postings every single day about the different events that we have. All of them have a content elements to it. One thing that I wanted to ask, I know that we've just gone past the hour. If you guys, with your permission, you're happy to stay another 5, 10 minutes to answer the other questions and to the audience, if you're happy to see stay so that we can answer the rest of the questions, that will be greatly appreciated. Is that okay? Danielle and Ashanti. That's good. So we have one question from David which is how can direct messaging prospects fit into branding and should this be limited? Even if the message is very personalized and addresses pain? Let's just start with you, Daniela, that you've.

Well, I used to be all for it and like I said earlier, that's a direct marketing strategy. And you know, if you do direct mail marketing, the closing ratio, I mean the last time I checked was something like one in a thousand. David here obviously saying, if it's personalized, I mean, would you personalize it on. If you haven't spoken with the individual based on their profile, how much can their profile tell you? You're going to be making lots of assumptions. But most importantly, again, I go back to the analogy of the pub. You walk into the pub, you can't, you know, people are there to have a conversation. People go on LinkedIn to have a conversation. They don't go on LinkedIn to be sold. So you're going to be that guy that when somebody's on LinkedIn having a conversation, you go in and pull your prosperous side, hey, look at my product. I've done a bit of research about you, so it's personalized, but I want to only talk to you about my product. Most people will push you away, say, leave me alone, I'm enjoying my time here. Some people might say, you know what, David, thank you very much. I couldn't wait for someone like you to come here today and sell me that product because I was desperate for it. That might happen, you might be in luck that day. But most people will push away. That's why the majority of people will not reply to your messages. You have to then work on volume. You'll have much better chances of join that group of five, six people having that conversation. Talk to them. And then if you feel like, oh, hold on a minute, you guys might need something that I got, let me tell you what it is, then it will be much more powerful. You Will not wasting your time. You will not come across as, you know, the usual pushy salesman that we still got that stigma and you will save yourself some time. Doesn't mean you shouldn't be using your Sales Navigator license to do that. You can still do it because sometimes the person that you targeted might not be engaging in content. So you might not be able to find them. But if you have, if you have engaged in content, at least when you message them, they will see who you asked. They probably would have seen it. They might be that passive user. They will know who you are. So when your message pop in, say, okay, I recognize David. He's that guy that was talking about X, Y and Z on that post the other day. Okay, let me read, let me scroll down. What is he going to say? Why is he reaching out to me? Then you might have a chance. So still do it. But if you only do that, bear in mind that the closing ratio, the conversion ratio is going to be very high. So be prepared for lots of late nights on LinkedIn. Type it away.

Thank you. Danielle Ashanti, what's your answer on that?

So I think this is all about objective. I think first of all, because we've been talking about visibility. So if you want high visibility where there could be a number of outcomes and benefits, then you don't need to necessarily do direct messaging, right? If you just want to be visible, build a strong network and build relationships, then you don't need to direct message because you'll be achieving that aim of being visible by not by putting into practice some of the principles we've all discussed here today. I would say the only thing I'd say it probably depends on your industry and what you're selling. So I think people who sell products, there's probably a way to do that. Because I sell a service, I have found that combining the two, so being hyper visible on the platform, adding value. But also there is that thing that Daniel said. Some of the prospects, some of the people I know that we can work with are not active on LinkedIn. So sometimes I have to pull them into my world. And how I would usually do that if I choose to direct message them is, is by leading with content. So what will happen is sometimes I'll share a post that I know is highly relevant and valuable to them. So I'm not really messaging them and saying, hey, buy this. I'm saying, hey, I saw, I don't know, we take a, you know, if it's Orange plc, I'll say, I saw Orange PLC was In the media last week, you know, you've got this great thing going on. I thought this would be really useful to you. So I think it's the way you do it is probably what matters and when you do it, because there are some prospects, as Danielle said, who aren't active on LinkedIn but you still want to reach out to them. But then I always reach out with content or value added content and usually they always respond at the very least, and then we start to exchange messages.

Yeah, and my contribution to that, David, was that is that again, in my case, I am selling a service. I am selling kind of thought leadership. I'm selling kind of particular product and service. But like the way when I have used the direct messaging element to someone, one is personalized. I either use. I notice that you're having the conversation about this. It would be great to learn more about that particular aspect. Are you okay to expand on that? Can you, can you expand on that through here to this message or. I'm happy to have a chat about it, but again, it's not a sales conversation. Then I also say for those that are like the deeply introverts that don't engage but are like passengers, they're literally on LinkedIn browsing, everyone reading everything. So I might say, Dear Mr. Prospect or Dear John, there's a big discussion going on about this industry. I mean about it. I probably haven't seen you around, but I know that you're an expert in or that you might have a lot of experience based on what I see on your profile, you, your career has a track record on it. And I put a link to the discussion. Probably it might not be mine, it might be someone else's, but I just put in that link in that discussion. And sometimes the person more likely decides to engage in conversation within the messaging tool, not necessarily openly. So I think that would be the answer. One final question that I have is then I think so Ednika, if you're still around, so you've mentioned, what do you think about the opinion between LinkedIn company event pages versus LinkedIn groups versus personal profiles and posting in that. And I know, Daniela, you probably use predominantly your personal profile, but like Ashanti, what's your view on that?

So again, I think it's the stage you're at in your journey and the size of your company. If you are an individual and you're just starting out, maximize your profile. Because people connect with other human beings. It is a lot of work to build a following and get engagement on a company page. And if you are just one person and you don't have resources, that is Other people in the team or whatever to push into building that page, I would concentrate on the profile first. But absolutely there are more medium sized to larger sized companies who use pages to great effect. Or maybe if you've been on the platform for a long time and been building that following on your company page, fine. But if you're just starting out, I would actually just drill down and concentrate on the profile.

Daniele, I appreciate that you might not have something to add to it, but do you have anything to add on that?

Answer as a LinkedIn user, like I wouldn't go out there and follow a company unless I follow the person who works for that company. So if I engage with Ricardo and I like what Ricardo is doing and then I realized that Ricardo works for Bright Bull, I think, oh, let me follow Bright Bull because it's where Ricardo works and I know they're doing some exciting stuff, I wouldn't do it the other way around. So you need both and everything serves a purpose. But people go there to network with other people. That's the premises of LinkedIn. That's the starting point of everything. Then it's normal for that. The LinkedIn groups, I found them, I'm starting to feel they're becoming a bit more pointless because unless you actively go into the group.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't see, you don't know what's been shared. So if I share something in a group today, none of my connection will see, none of those group members will see it until the actively go into the group. And I'm sure we're all members of multiple groups. When is the last time you went into a group to check what's been shared? I don't remember the last time I did that. I don't even remember how many groups I'm a member of because especially at the beginning I was joining every single group under the sun. Yeah.

One thing that I wanted to add on that is that you need. So from the marketing point of view, from the strategic marketing point of view, now thinking about it and sharing kind of from the way we approach it strategically is you need your personal profile, you need your company profile. And allegedly I didn't believe into this of LinkedIn groups, not a big fan of LinkedIn groups, but actually that's what the topic of our discussion for next week's webinar, which is about how to create, how to build a community within the LinkedIn groups. And apparently it works and there's a lot of reasons why, why that works. But I'll invite to join to that webinar. But I would say you need both. You need both. But if you look at it, if you compare it, you as a company are the company that can say we've got an event, create an event. Yes, we've got this. So as a company you broadcast, you said this is my brochure, this is my event, this is my thing. As an individual you engage. So you will always see as a marketeer that engagement on your individuals profiles are is much higher and the visibility is much higher than it is in a company page. But sometimes you can weave the boats and that would be the answer.

I think also we need to make a difference here that what works there's two things. What works for your audience and what works for LinkedIn. LinkedIn wants to promote its services, that wants to promote the pages, the groups and the algos will work based on LinkedIn wanting to promote more engagement within teams features and then this will work for your audience and you need to play them both because if you don't play one, you don't reach the other.

Thank you very much.