Nashville Association of Sales Professionals

recorded August 1st, 2022

TRANSCRIPT

Terry Lancaster 0:04
All right, we are now going to get to the training session. How are you? Welcome is going to talk to us about using LinkedIn, specifically about a stab at using LinkedIn to establish that social group the stuff that you need to have it there to decide what you wanted to say, Judy, welcome aboard. Are you going to share your screen you have you should be able to do that and I'm gonna leave it in your hands.

Judy Schramm 0:32
All right. Well, I am delighted. To be here talking with you all. I know, it sounds like I'm preaching to the choir about using social media. And Mark, I appreciate you setting that up so nicely, thank you. But LinkedIn is something I'm really passionate about and it's it especially for a group like this. It is the absolutely critical, the most important social plan. And let's start with this, because this is the question I get asked all the time. Is it even possible to generate leads on LinkedIn that span in full and also without spending hours every day on LinkedIn? Because, you know, the out of 800 or 30 million members, you know, your prospects are out there that people can make referrals to you are out there. And, you know, you hear from a lot of people that LinkedIn is the best social network for lead generation. But, you know, for every person who has figured it out, and I suspect a fair number of people here on this call have there are 1000s who are doing it badly or who are not doing it. At all. And those you know, there is an opportunity here to do a really great job for your business to create a system where instead of having feast and famine that happens so often, you have a systematic way to get regular referrals and to get new customers coming in the door new opportunities continuously. And, you know, as I mentioned, we've been doing this for a long time. This is the formula that we have found to be successful. We've worked with about 1000 executives at this point. And there are three parts. The first part is telling your story effectively. That means that when people come to your profile, they understand who you are, they understand how you can help they feel that what you do is relevant for them. They feel like they can like you they know who you are and they trust you and they remember you because so many opportunities come not just immediately when they first hear about you, but but weeks perhaps months, even years now. The second part of it is locating ideal prospects and part of that is being findable by people who are looking for someone like you. The other part is finding the people who would be a good fit for you. And this is true both for prospects and for people who who do a lot of referrals. This is locating ideal people who can make referrals. And then finally getting those conversations started introducing yourself in a way that makes people say yes, I'll have that conversation. Yes, I'll have coffee with you, and then nurturing the relationship over time to get to the point where you have a deal.

5 Parts of an effective Linkedin profile for salespeople

And so let's start by sharing some best practices and talking part of that, how do you tell your story effectively on LinkedIn? And what I've done here is five key parts of the LinkedIn profile that will have the biggest impact on your overall results. So the first part is a headline. And the headline is this part right here, directly under the person's name. You have an opportunity to put some text in here we have about 220 characters and and there are so many parts on places on LinkedIn where all people can see about you is your name, your photo and your headline. Your headline is like the subject line bringing, if it's not compelling, people are not going to click and then they're not going to come through and learn how wonderful you are to really want to invest in creating a great headline. And Chris is a very good example is a virtual Chief Revenue Officer. At Terry, I hope I hope you don't mind Carrie, I think you do a great job with LinkedIn. And so I've got you as an example in here as well, and it carries. Obviously, it's a great headline also to take a look at his header graph. This is a visual way to tell your story. Terry's got his three books here. He's also about keywords that pop right out at you so that you understand exactly how we can help. Now, if you wanted to do something related to your business, the mortgage folks you could have you could mark Connell, you could take the just the top part of of yours, your background, your unsanded that would make a great header graphic. You can also do a photo of you speaking and an event. You could do if you want to make the point that you're a nationally could use photo of a local landmark, something that people would recognize. Know the second the third part about of the profile that is really compelling. It is so underused is the about section and so many people don't even use an about because they don't know what to put there. And they're not comfortable, you know just sort of freeform writing that you can do in the event section. But this is like the cover letter to your profile. This is the opportunity to tell a story to tell people who you are to tell them why you do what you do. Why your your work. has meaning for you and a group Have you shared this on you know in the introductions today. Why? Why you get personal motivation and helping people and that is an excellent thing to go in this section. Now, I'll just mention Robin Robins, I don't know if any of you know her. But um, she has. Everybody goes here a great amount of graphics. She has a great headline here. And this is an interesting format for the about that is very easy to write. So I'm not going to sit on here long enough for you all to look but you can have the deck and you can take a look at it later. Now I also put Terry's in here. Carrie does a really good job of storytelling. His is more of a flow Robbins is you know this section this section this section, but he's got a story here. You get to the end of this you feel like know who he is. And that's really important for Ken Ito runs a nonprofit. And this is the featured section. The way she uses the featured section is very powerful. Now you all know that if you vote for people take a meeting with you. They're going to Google and Google will serve up your LinkedIn profile at the top of the search results. But who knows what's gonna come next, the algorithm changes rapidly. You know, and we've all been online for a long time now there could be all kinds of things that show up. When you use the feature section on your LinkedIn profile. It's like control when that first agent search because you're choosing the things you want to highlight. You want to make sure people find specific things, the things that are most impressive, that are best at building trust. They give people the greatest opportunity to tell to know who you are. And if you look at Canadians, she's been covered on CBS News or nonprofits has been written about in the Atlanta Journal Constitution and she just won a grant from Goldman Sachs when a 50 black women leaders across the country who received this grant, these are all very impressive things and when people come to her profile, they see all of this and boom credibility.

How salespeople can connect with customers on LinkedIn

Now, Paul is a Lending Officer at Sydney National Bank, and the experience section this is the fifth part of the profile is really useful and people not just what you're doing now, but how you got where you are what was your journey? Every one of you has had a long career and you've had a successful career and and so how did you build the expertise that allows you to do what you do now so so effectively, and and to serve your customers and to deliver great results. When you put stories in your experience section you allow people to learn about you, which gives them more confidence in you and also helps you address the issue of like how do you know what you're doing? You don't have to spend that time in the coffee meeting talking about what you've accomplished in the past. It can read through it on your LinkedIn profile, and they come to that meeting much better prepared to have a rich, meaningful conversation. And to move forward. So these five sections of the LinkedIn profile are the ones that are most relevant when you're selling and if you use them effectively if you create rich sections in these five areas, everything you do on LinkedIn is going to be more effective. Let's talk about the best practices around introducing yourself. So I'm not going to you know because we have limited time here. I'm not going to go into that secondary, which is how do you find people but we can do that in the q&a about I'll just skip ahead here to the introduction section because this is an area so many people struggle with and get wrong. Now, this is a collection of messages that I've received just in the past week. And I know you receive messages like this as well. These are exactly the thing that doesn't work. If you take a look at them, you can see they're generic. These can be written to any one of us on this call today. And they say the same thing. They're spamming there's there's nothing meaningful in here. What they're basically saying is hey, I do this. Are you ready by for me, which is, which is not only not helpful, it's actually obnoxious. And if you get down to like this one here on the lower left, this is a guy who had the nerve to connect currently under false pretenses and then be offended when I didn't want to be sold to you right away. This is the kind of thing people are doing that is is why LinkedIn has as much spam as it does and why so many people

Better customer relationships through LinkedIn

most common selling mistakes, generic messages to introduce yourself like those. The second thing is the similar people who accept your connection are interested in why you're usually third starting to sell immediately after especially mortgage brokers. It sounds like all of you are in relationship businesses and and customer relationships are built over time that you know, you can like walk down the street and reach out to people and say hey, I have this to sell. We aren't ready to buy and keep going and if you hit 1000 People you probably find somebody who's interested, but so much more effective to to not just blast and spin let's talk about what the first thing is hyper personalize. In other words, do some research on them and reach out with a message that is specific to them and specific to you. That tells them why you are reaching out show that you've put time in that you did do your research. You know you listened to the whole podcast and you know any of you listen to Brene Brown's podcasts those are an hour long. So that is some time put into them and then offering something of value, not just hey, I'm selling this are you interested in buying but you know we're having an event you know, would you be interested in joining us so when you are looking at LinkedIn to go from the introduction sheet, deleting this, these are the things that you want to think about and this is how you want to invest your time and effort into LinkedIn. The biggest thing you need to do especially in a relationship business is to build trust. There, you know, Stephen Covey says trust is the combination of competence and character. And there are so many areas of LinkedIn where you can demonstrate competence and show your character. So that should be the single biggest thing you put time into. The second thing is nurturing relationships, just like you would on Facebook. You give people the gift of your attention, and you show them that you're paying attention. So you like their posts, you comment on their posts, you congratulate them. You show them that they matter to you. And that reflects well on you. It also helps them because they're their audience is seeing how much they are valued and appreciated. And then educating. You know, there's a there is an education process that has to be gone through in any kind of a of a buying process, right? People need to learn, they need to learn what you do. They need to appreciate the value of the different aspects of what you do and why you do things the way you do. And educating is something that is LinkedIn is designed for this point. And then giving back people are much more ready to make referrals to do business with to trust somebody who they see is working to benefit the community. And so using LinkedIn to allow people to see the ways that you're getting in back and by sharing your knowledge with others. That really helps you grow your business on LinkedIn. And then finally, thought leadership is at the very top of the funnel, sharing what you've learned and engaging with other thought leaders and learning from them and letting them learn from you. So these are the five things that really work on LinkedIn. This is this is a different way to think about selling on LinkedIn is this business.

So we're gonna do q&a And I'm happy to dig into any of these areas because there there is a lot to talk about there. But for those, you know, I have some resources so um, we have checklists for people using LinkedIn in different ways. There is a business development checklist that is more detailed than then the five areas that I went into, and you can get that on our resources page. We also the there's some excellent examples in this step. But our website is packed with examples so you can take a look and see what other people are doing and get some ideas for your own profile. And then we have a free webinar that we call a LinkedIn profile blow up that we do typically once a month. The next one is August 30. And what our coach will do with you on that call is walk you through updating the some of the sections that we talked about today but also some of the others that will have a big impact on on your results. So let me stop here and say What questions do you all have? What? What else would you like to?

Terry Lancaster 17:18
Yeah, go ahead. Anyone who has any questions for Judy, please feel free. Let's let's carry on your conversations didn't

Unknown Speaker 17:25
Judy. Judy. I have a question. Yes, I've been considering I keep getting, you know, contact to upgrade from the free LinkedIn, LinkedIn to the professional market. Is it worth it?

Judy Schramm 17:41
So there are there are multiple paid versions of LinkedIn. And the they're probably trying to get you to go to premium, which is sold as a general business package and is currently running around $60 a month. That one is only useful if you are really spending a lot of time on LinkedIn and you keep bumping up against the limits. LinkedIn says you send enough connect requests for this month or you viewed enough profiles for one day. You know if you keep getting error messages like that, then you probably should upgrade. The version of LinkedIn that I love and the one that we recommend to all of our clients is Sales Navigator and that's the one that is designed specifically for sales. It has fabulous search. So you can go really granular on that. You for example, you can look for companies that are growing faster than 25% a year and have more than 10 sales. People and are in you know in Nashville, right? And and you can get a list of those companies. You can get a list of people who have recently changed jobs. You can get a list of people who you know are CFOs and have just changed jobs. If you can get lists of people who you know, have been in their career for, you know, 20 or more years. It you know, it gives you really powerful search capabilities and and so that's the first part that's really useful. The second word that's useful is when you put your leads are the people you want to build relationships with like Teresa, the 20 people that you were talking about. You put them in a lead list and then you go to your homepage and navigator and it will send you all of the news about those people. So you can see when they post on LinkedIn so that you get notified and you can engage with them. If their company makes an announcement if they're all of a sudden doing a lot of hiring, you know their LinkedIn looks for all these triggers, and then puts them in front of you so that you can engage with them and congratulate them and get conversations started. And then it also maps what you have in common with those people. So for example, you know, if I look at somebody's profile, Lincoln, maybe I'll look at your profile and it'll say these are the four or five or 200 people who can introduce you to Lincoln, and it'll rank them based on the how how much how connected we are which is very useful. So if you're doing heavy duty lead generation Sales Navigator is very, very powerful. But if you're building relationships around referrals, and you know, there are relatively few people that you need to stay in touch with. You know, you may or may not. It's about $100 a month right now, but you can get your first month free if you haven't already claimed that and then you can experiment with it and see what he does that I have a question for you. One of

Unknown Speaker 21:24
a niche focus that I have is brand new realtors. I have yet to find a resource that lets me know what a person has received theirs Realtors license, and then they have parked that license with a real estate agency. You sparked a question or a point of interest when you said that Sales Navigator I'm making notes on my other screen here as we talk. That Sales Navigator will ping you when a change has been made. Is there a way that you know of? To find for me to find those brand, newly minted real estate agents? Very frequently those persons go through a six eight month process to get their license when they get it they have they have no idea I literally had real estate agents say I've got a contract in my hand. What do I do more? I don't know what the next step is. So I find that to be a very interesting facet of building new relationships with realtors who don't know what they're doing. It's a great opportunity. And I'm wondering if LinkedIn will identify those. There is

Judy Schramm 22:51
a way to do that that Sales Navigator has an option to save a search. So what you would want to do is you would want to define a search that could include you know, real estate is one of the categories on LinkedIn. You know, you do have to people self select right so not everybody who says they're in real estate is a real estate agent. You know, some of them are property managers as an example. But But what you could do is you could look at the industry you could look at the title. You could choose the geography if you don't want you know, even if you want to go nationwide. I think you don't want to go worldwide. And then you could get a list of people who are new in the career and you could have that sent to you every now are you going to get everybody? Probably not right because a lot of realtors do not use LinkedIn as their primary platform. But you would get you would get a fair number of people every week. Worth a try. If you don't have navigator yet, I would. I would get the free trial and if you want to know I can hop on a 15 minute call and I'll show you how to set up the search. And then you can just try it out. I mean $100 a month to have something like that sent to you on a regular basis. Might be pretty affordable.

Unknown Speaker 24:30
Well yeah, the dividends that we pay on that are are amazing. Thank you.

Unknown Speaker 24:37
Sure. Judy, this is Teresa. Yeah, I have found that I have a hard time getting the current realtors that I have on LinkedIn. And I'm a fan of LinkedIn. I've never really had to revert my over to Instagram. Because I'm not baseball fan but Instagram. I'm getting a lot more generation.

Judy Schramm 24:55
So Paige and I need to age work. Well so realtors are kind of all over the place, right? They're on Facebook or on Instagram. You can find them on Tik Tok. You can find them on LinkedIn, LinkedIn. is not usually the first place they go. You know? There are plenty of them on there. Yeah, you can build relationships with the ones who are

Unknown Speaker 25:22
right. I just encourage the ones that do work with me to be on LinkedIn. And I've been on LinkedIn for many years and I've got over just right at 5000 connections. That's great. That was fun can because of my previous life. Actors are all over the United States and I use that platform like they got property for sale by to do a co brand within and put it out there because we don't know if someone may know from California that's looking to move to Tennessee. Right? And I'm like that's the best platform so I try to encourage and get out there. I don't know I guess that's where I need help and I need more help with how can I sell it maybe in a different way to really get sparked their interest and how we could use this platform on a professional level can get the same means and I would never do that the same means and the comments that are made, can't treat it like Facebook, or even Instagram. And I really wish they would do more because I have I have always been a fan of like Damn.

Judy Schramm 26:22
Well, I think a two pronged argument would probably work best. The first is to point out to them that people aren't going to google them. You know, you're not going to get around that and and the LinkedIn profile is going to be at the top you know it's an opportunity to tell a really rich story. Most of the agents have a very minimal profile on the on the on the you know on the company website. On their own website, they can tell so much of Richard's story and and some of the things on there are things like you can put videos on there, right and you can upload documents that would be useful to people who are thinking about buying a house right it can be their own little mini repository mini website that is super easy to set up and maintain and under their own control, as opposed to under brokers control because if you know if they move from one broker to the next they keep their LinkedIn profile, right. So that would be part one. And then part two would be to lead with the, you know, the joint venture part of things right to say, you know, hey, I partner with people on LinkedIn, I have a large network and you know, this is something that that I do with, you know, with realtor's and and so, you know, you could kind of combine them combine those two stories, I think that would think that would work. Not with everybody.

Unknown Speaker 28:05
Right? But I do see the benefit because they don't go into it. I found myself like where I can look at my history my posts where I used to post more now have gotten just zero if they wouldn't for the company when you anything out there. My company does control what I can, you know, they do monitor what I'm putting out there and down to the picture out, you know, so there so I can't I don't want to manage to so and keep on my same connections. I just want to keep it the way it is but I do need to get back there doing more of it. You don't I don't know what the odds are. We don't know what the numbers are. I don't do the net General. Posting on it. I don't know what the ads are generating leads. Does that make sense? So is it you know? Is it you know, is it a daily post that should result in that I don't know that the odds are and I do tend to fall into numbers

Judy Schramm 29:02
right? What I would say is trying one post a week and you know, make the effort minimal but be consistent. And start with that and see where that gets you. For for a lot of our clients. We recommend one or two posts a week, and that's sufficient. Now if you're doing you know if you really want to build your audience, if you want to get to 10,000 or you know even higher then I would recommend posting more often, but you can create evergreen content and recycle it because everybody's not going to say right. So you know, you can you know, I have my content repurposed. So for example, I'll write a blog post in a blog post and by all right, what I mean is one of my writers will write for me and then that gets repurposed into an infographic and into a little mini book. And, and then little quotes go into the, into graphics. It's, you can get a lot out of materials. That your company probably has already created.