The Sales Evangelist
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You have a beautiful LinkedIn profile now. People are actually reading it and they're engaging. They're now looking at your profile. How do you take those views and turn them into connections? And how do you take random people that's not looking at your profile and turn them into connection? I'm going to give you exactly what we do in this LinkedIn Response series, our third segment. Check it out.
Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, we're going to talk about our LinkedIn Response Series. If this is your first time watching one of our videos about a LinkedIn Response Series, we're doing a four-part series on LinkedIn Responses, four. We started off with three, four. And I did two the other day. Now we're doing, last week, now we're doing this one, and we have a fourth one coming up. This one is all around turning those views and then also turning the random people that you are connecting with. They're not so random, as we go back to our previous conversation.
Those focus people you're going after, turn those into connections. If this is your first time listening to the show, subscribe. If you've been listening for a while, share this with somebody else. Your whole team can benefit from it. But let's go ahead and dive in straight into the topic. I looked at your profile. What do you say to me now to turn me into a connection request? We talked a little bit about this the other day. But the easiest thing that I found to make this work, and the whole point is to get conversations start to engage with a prospect. The easiest thing that I found that works is to tell them straight, "Jamie, I saw that you looked at my profile. I looked at your profile, and I was like, why in the world we're not connected?" That's literally what I say verbatim, and you can borrow that, or you could tweak it. But the formula there is, let them know, like, "I saw you looked at my profile." Ding, ding, ding. They know they've done it already. No one's in trouble.
"I researched you, and your profile looks great." And they're going to feel that compliment, like, "Oh, you looked at my profile. I thought it looks great." Or, "Looked at my profile and was like, why we're not connected? That's cool. Well, why should we be connected?" And it may be they're thinking, well, perhaps as a collaboration, or maybe we know each other, know people in similar industries, or whatnot. He's a mover and shaker in our space. The point is, if they're looking at your profile, it makes it so easy to be able to do that. And then they'll usually say, and then, once they accept the connection request, you might say out of curiosity, "What brought you to buy my profile?" And they may say something like, "Well, you know, I did, saw you on a webinar, or I listened to the podcast, or I saw that you..." Your posts around prospecting, or in your case, it could be a saw your posts around
marketing and artificial intelligence. Now, if that's the case, you have engagement, you have conversation. That is the purpose of the series. That is the purpose of you being on LinkedIn is to get that type of conversation. And what I'm trying to tell you in the series is what's working to get that. If you do that, you're going to see anywhere between a 40 to a 60% response rate. And I know that may seem like a wide gap, but people will respond. Again, they're looking at your profile and you're engaging with them. Those are going to be responses. They're going to start conversations and those conversations lead to opportunities.
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What might happen now, if you'd like, they, once you start that dialogue, and they say, yeah, I looked at, I saw you on a podcast, or saw your post, or something to that nature, you can then just be a human, pretend you're out talking to a human being, and just ask them, what is it that you find, out of curiosity, what was it that stood out to you in that article? Or what was it on that podcast that, was there anything that was? I'm always trying to improve. Was there anything that was effective for you on that podcast? I might say, well, when you discuss blankety blank, I thought about this. And when you talked about blankety blank. Like, all of that now gives this buyer, this feeling of like, all right, I mean, this gives you the prospect, the feeling that this person is really trying to engage with me and they'll give feedback and that starts dialogue.
Or let's say it's a post around AI. You're the marketing director and you did this wonderful post about AI and marketing. Now, and this person saw it and you sent them the message about, so you looked at my profile, permission to connect. They connect and they say, hey, out of curiosity, what brought you to my page and my profile? Then I say, well, I saw your posts around marketing and AI. Like, oh, cool. What was stood out the most to you? Well, it's about blankety blank. And it's like, it sounds like you have some experience with that. Oh, my goodness, we're going through it right now. Interesting. Tell me a little bit more. And this where I probably would do a voice message where I bring the human side into it. I can say, you know, I got a story of exactly that similar situation with myself or with one of our clients in a similar thing. Here's what I would recommend that you do to fix it. And better yet, if you're open to a call, I can jump on and share with you five to seven minutes how I'm fixing that.
That works because now the human, you're human, they're hearing your voice with the LinkedIn voice message. And that converts it and brings them to want to connect with you. And your post was triggered or agitated a problem that they have. And that problem is something that you could clearly solve. The second type of approach is people that you don't know. And I'll be quick on this one. The way I like to do this, if I'm trying to get response from my connection requests. Now, there's some people who say, don't send a message and that's their beliefs. I tackled this on another episode already. I think you should send. I feel in that case, if you want to get responses, you should be sending the message. Now, don't send that silly message like, I saw we went to college together or we have mutual connections and we'd like to connect.
It's like boring garbage. What you want to do is give them something that's going to make your message stand out. So I look for people who are posting on LinkedIn. It's not that to say the other ones aren't valuable, but if they're posted on LinkedIn, they're active on the platform. And there's a high chance that they're going to engage and that's what I want. So if they're posting, I would send them, look at their. And I would send them a message relative to that post. And so I might say, I caught your message about blank and blank. Absolutely love the point we made about blank. And then you send the connection request. You don't have to say permission to connect at that point. The connection request does work. You can also do it the other way as well, where you send them a, you tell them, give them a thank you. So you can send it without the connection, permission to connect,
or you can send it with permission to connect after you share a message. But the key there is just to be able to do a post, like read their post and actually give them some kind of compliment. Caught your post on blank or thank you for your insight on blank. Or from your post, I learned blanky to blank. People are going to respond to that. And you should see anywhere from that type of connection request, you're going to see people respond and accept your connection request. Probably anywhere between that, that 50 to 60% range because it's the ego. I'm commenting about their posts. And then, and this is what we've seen internally with that team member I shared with you. Just started with their LinkedIn profile with us.
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Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them? And that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day. So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, could we do that for them? We experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation.
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The other side to that too, is that you're going to see that people will actually respond and that's going to be a little bit less in that right off the bat, but the response, you're probably maybe anywhere from about 20% response where they say, thank you so much or I appreciate it. They will accept the connection request and comment on that. And those was where you can start the conversation easier. The other people who accept the connection request, the what I do at that next step is I will engage with them, something simple like, hey, I appreciate the connection request. I love the content, keep pumping it out. If there's anyone in my network or community and the one I love is like if anyone in my network or anyone in my team's network could be of assistance to you, let us know.
More than willing to connect, give an introduction, but that just, it opens up this idea of me or my team willing to do that. Now I'm the CEO, so we can do that. But if you're, sometimes you're, if you're an individual contributor, you can say similar thing or just say my profile or our company's team member's profile, I can give you an introduction to that team member. But it's just a goodwill, goodwill gesture that most people are probably not going to capitalize on, but it's a goodwill gesture that you're not given from empty tank, but you're giving it as being. Genuine. And then what I typically do after that, they'll connect back and for, you know, whatnot with me. But I would probably then maybe a couple of days later, send them a message that's going to tie back to the pain. Cause again, based on you go back to episode number
one, these are people that have a problem. They're engaging on LinkedIn. They saw my profile and they connected with me. Either way, I would say something around the issue, you know, so and so and notice then that you're, let me give you one for us. Notice you guys are doing a lot of content on XYZ. Have you ever guys thought about doing podcasts or going on the podcast to share that message? Notice you guys are launching a new product in the fall. If you guys would consider going on a podcast tour. Notice that you're a new author and you have a book coming out. If you ever thought about doing a podcast or all of these things that may tie back to the podcast production or podcast booking that are, again, we did the filter based on those ICPs that again, a launching, maybe launching a book or whatnot. So my team,
when we do that type of, send that type of message, these are people are relevant because again, one, they fit the ICP, that two, they have the, it's relevant to them because they face the challenge that we are, we can address. Three, they saw my information on my profile and looked at it and still accepted my connection request. And four, I said a message specifically towards that. My response now would be so much more higher than just connecting with random people. And that is why I stress so much. If you're looking for higher response, you have to be relevant and you have to make sure you're looking at a niche group of people that have the problem that you have. If you can do that, those responses will come great. In my next episode, the last one in a series, we're going to go deeper into the conversation.
I kind of alluded to some of it today, but we're going to go deeper into the conversations of using videos and of using audio and use getting those, even if somebody in your network, getting them to respond to you and sending a message that can turn into an opportunity. Stick with me and I promise you, we'll land this thing well. You're gonna love it. If you enjoy this episode, please let me know. We have a program called LinkedIn prospecting course. You can find details by going to the sales evangelist.com slash LinkedIn. Again, a sales evangelist.com slash LinkedIn. As always, I want you to thrive. I want you to succeed. But most importantly, I want you to raise your level of thinking. I want you to go out and do big things. See you on the next one.
The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSE Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is Dusan Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristy Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly. Sales Podcast Network.
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