The effective 9 minute call with your LinkedIn connection that you never spoke to before!

You do not need to spend hours networking each day for you to build deeper relationships with your network of contacts on LinkedIn. Some people think they need to have an hour conversation with someone to really get to know them. 

I really want to get to the point with you and setup a follow-up meeting. So I came up with the 9 minute networking call. 

Here is how it works. 

You ask one of your connections if they want to have a 9 minute networking call. If they agree, you ask them for their cell phone number and you send them a text message asking them if they can chat in the next 15 minutes. If they say yes, you call them when you are ready. 

If you want to make it more formal, you can invite them to a ZOOM meeting or an Uberconference line. I personally reserve those with my calendar link but I do 15 minute meetings like that. These meetings are on the fly and much shorter. Sometimes they can finish in just 5 minutes or less or they can go over depending on if you are having fun or it's getting awkward. If the energy is off, you can always end the call by thanking them and hanging up. 

Here is how the conversation would go. 

Joe: Thanks for taking the time to speak to me today. I am so glad we are both on LinkedIn. Looks like we have 9 mutual connections, it's so interesting the way our networks intersect. 

Connection: Yes, I love to meet people on LinkedIn and get to know them better. Thanks for reaching out to me. 

Joe: You are most welcome. Just so you know, we are going to follow a simple process to make this call as effective as possible and keep it under 9 minutes. You go first, tell me what you do and who your ideal client is, then I will go and if we have time we will set up next actions for us to follow up on. Does that work?

Connection: That works perfectly. 

A few minutes later… 

Joe: Well, that was fun! I will send you a follow up LinkedIn message now with what we spoke about and our next actions. Thanks again for getting on the phone with me. This was a blast, I look forward to doing it again soon. 

Connection: Yes, it was fun. Thanks to you for setting it up. All the best! Boom

“Click”

Once the conversation is over you can send your connection a message with the next actions and a Thank you! 

Here is a template message you can customize.

“Thanks for taking the time to speak to me today. I really had a great time getting to learn about your business and who your ideal client is.

Here are some action items for us. As promised, I am including a link to our upcoming webinars about sales https://learn.socialsellin.com/salescurewebinar and about LinkedIn marketing https://www.learn.socialsellin.com/webinar - Also please review my contacts on LinkedIn and let me know if you see anyone there that you would like to meet. Happy to connect you with anyone interesting. 

Looking forward to speaking again soon. ”

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You might think that 9 minutes is not enough time to really get to know someone. IT'S NOT! You want to get to know someone? Meet them in person - but the way that you QUALIFY them to see if they are the type of person that you want to meet, is by having a call with them first. Also you can spend 9 minutes reviewing their profile before the call. What would you do when you review their profile in 9 minutes?

Here is what I would do in just 9 minutes on your profile. 

1. Look at their photo and background photo. 
2. Read their name and headline out loud 
3. Read their summary in full and make sure you understand it. 
4. Check out their past history and review their list of skills. 
5. Read all their recommendations or at least the most recent ones. 
6. Check out their company website that is found on their URL.
7. Do a quick Google Search for their name and company name. 
8. Review their recent posts and activity. 
9. Read any article they have created on their profile. 
10. Check out your mutual connections that you have with them and see who you know well. 

Now after doing those 10 things, I am prepared for a 9 minute call with you. Ready to ask you questions and go deeper. 

Hope you got value out of this. If you did, please leave a comment committing to have at least 9 calls like this in the next few days. Lets see what happens. Come back and report what came out of it. 

If you think someone else should see this, give this article a SHARE and your network will be able to read it and enjoy it too. 

Joe Apfelbaum

Ajax Union

PS: I do 1000 calls per year and I LOVE every one of them. If you want to learn how you can leverage LinkedIn please join our Social Sellin System We have a 7 day trial going on right now for only 7$ - Enjoy.