LINKEDIN ADS AND SALES NAVIGATOR – WITH PHIL GERBYSHAK | THE LINKEDIN ADS SHOW

SHOW RESOURCES

Here were the resources we covered in the episode:

Phil Gerbyshak on LinkedIn

Free 60-day trial of Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator Course with Phil

Grab time with Phil to chat LinkedIn Ads

Effect of iOS14 on LinkedIn Ads

Amazing podcast episode from Phil Graham – Next Level FB Ads Podcast

Metadata benchmarks report

LinkedIn Learning course about LinkedIn Ads by AJ Wilcox: LinkedIn Advertising Course

Contact us at [email protected] with ideas for what you’d like AJ to cover.

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

You’ve heard about LinkedIn Sales Navigator, but you’re not sure if you should be using it instead of ads or in combination with them. Well buckle up, it’s time for the full scoop.

Welcome to the LinkedIn Ads Show – here’s your host, AJ Wilcox.

Hey there LinkedIn Ads fanatics.

So Sales Navigator is one of those topics that comes up a lot in LinkedIn circles. So I got one of the top organic LinkedIn pros to come on and share his wisdom with you. Phil Gerbyshak is one of the most well connected people I’ve ever met. He’s provided sales training for everyone from the Fortune 500, all the way down to small business owners, and everything in between. We’re going to talk about everything from what Sales Navigator is to who in your organization should be using it, as well as how it will complement your ad strategy.

First in the news, my apologies for the last several months with no episodes at all. I’ve got a ton of great episodes and a bunch of great content planned, but they may come sporadically for the next little bit while I’m dealing with some personal and family issues. But so much has happened with LinkedIn Ads since the last episode. So let’s run through some of them. The first is the Twitter user @DannyGavin, who’s a VP of Marketing for an agency. He brought to my attention when his rep sent him an actual document of the types of things that LinkedIn expects to be affected when iOS 14 rolls out. And of course, by this point, we already have iOS 14.5. But it’s a cool graphic that I’ll share with you. Then a few weeks later, one of my own account reps send it to me as well, but Danny gets props for getting it to me before my reps. So thanks for that. We’re, of course going to have a whole episode all about the cookie-geddon and the effect on LinkedIn Ads. But for right now I’ll just say LinkedIn has this available, ask your rep. And I’ll go deeper into it in a future episode. Next, I want to point you to towards one of the best podcast episodes I’ve ever heard. So there’s a podcast about Facebook ads specifically and it’s called Next Level Facebook Ads Podcast hosted by Phil Graham. And specifically, the episode that I want all of you to go and listen to is Episode 196. How I’d spend $20 per day on Facebook Ads. The whole goal of of his podcast episode is just to talk about like running low budgets and testing. But what he ended up doing was showing a masterclass on how to approach testing and optimization, AB testing, how to strategically test through your your content. So I’ll link to that in the show notes. I highly recommend going to listen to that episode, I absolutely could not have said it better myself. Then I was really excited by something I saw in my inbox. This been a couple months ago, but LinkedIn started sending out new emails with a subject line that says you have a new comment for review. This was back at the beginning of March of 2021. When I got my first one. And I was so excited by this because if you’ve talked to me about comment moderation inside of sponsored content, you’ve probably gotten an earful about how, how difficult it is, as a company to moderate and plan and understand the comments that are coming in. So with this one, some of our clients started getting emails that says, “hey, you got a new comment, click here to see it”. Now there’s a whole lot I wish we got with these emails. I wish it would give us like the text of the comment with, you know, quick actions like like or respond or something. But at least for right now, we’re getting something. I’m sure this is not rolled out to all accounts yet, because I’m assuming I would get inundated with these on like an every few minutes basis. But at least some of our accounts did I think probably three or four accounts have access to this so far. So watch for that in the future. And I’m excited to keep watching LinkedIn roll this stuff out. Next, the company Metadata.io released their own benchmarks report from LinkedIn Ads. And I’ll link to it in the show notes down below. But it’s entitled What We Learned From $15 million in Spend on Facebook and LinkedIn. And you can see the data directly, they put it into like a nice Google Data Studio report. And they also say get the report. So definitely worth checking out in quite a few cases, the benchmarks that we see versus what Metadata sees are quite different. And I know plenty of the Metadata folks, and I have a good understanding of their strategy as to why we might see differences there. But it’s definitely worth checking out to see what other people are seeing in the world of LinkedIn Ads.

Okay, I wanted to highlight a couple of reviews for the podcast. Rudeboyj on Apple Podcasts says, “AJ, the hero of LinkedIn marketing, I love love, love AJ, his LinkedIn Ads podcast, so much valuable information and as an agency owner, this is the best place for me to get insider information, tips and tricks that LinkedIn won’t tell you about directly. Amazing content. Well worth a listen. Kind regards, Rudy.” Rudy, thanks so much for leaving such an awesome review for me. I really appreciate it. Then we have nandogevers from Apple Podcasts. Sorry if I mispronounced the the handle there. But they say learn from the best. “I listened to a ton of business podcasts, it is hit or miss. The LinkedIn Ad podcast might however be the best I’ve ever heard. No generic nonsense, but actionable points. Keep it up.” Absolutely. Thank you so much. That’s exactly why we create this. I love to share, okay, and I want all of you to go and leave a review to so that I can shout you out. I want to feature you here. So please let me know what you think of the show. Alright, with that being said, let’s hit it.

Okay, everyone, I’m super excited to have Phil Gerbyshak here. He is not only the VP of Partnerships for us here at B2Linked.com. He’s also the chief Revenue Officer of Process and Results, his company, Phil, so excited to have you on the podcast, this is Phil Gerbyshak and tell us what’s new in your world.

Phil Gerbyshak 6:21

Oh, boy. So lots of stuff, AJ, with all the changes that’s happening with the different ad formats and stuff. You know, LinkedIn is hotter than ever, especially for those self employed folks. And we’re seeing a lot of action there. In my world, you know, a lot more engagement in some spots, less engagement and others, and automation still not working on LinkedIn. Funny, right? How that works, sending 1000 connections a day doesn’t work. In fact, many of the groups that I’m in say that LinkedIn has shrunk that down to be 100 connections a week. So it’s even more important to find the right people to start the right conversations so that you can possibly work with them.

AJ Wilcox

And we used to get something like 75 per day. So this is a big restriction.

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Huge.

AJ Wilcox

Lots of people getting their profiles. temp band, I guess will say

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, or shadow banned are not able to send connection requests, or oh my gosh, right, you’ve reached a commercial limit, because all you do is search, search, search and you never add any value to the network. I mean, lots of things contribute to that, which I’m grateful for. I really think that’s an awesome opportunity for all the relationship sales and relationship marketing folks that are listening to this podcast.

AJ Wilcox 7:31

Oh, yeah. And we’ve talked before about the spam problem on LinkedIn, just from so many people doing it wrong. I’m usually not a fan of LinkedIn cracking down on things. But this is one I’m really glad they’re cracking down on.

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah,

AJ Wilcox

I obviously have you on here to talk about the sales side about Sales Navigator, about organic. Tell us about your background. Why are you the one that I brought on here?

Phil Gerbyshak

Well, you know, years ago, when LinkedIn was really infantile, and it was six degrees of Kevin Bacon, I get started with it. And I worked in financial services and my advisors would be like, hey, is this actually something that people actually care about the internet? And this is a long time ago, obviously. And I was like, yeah, I think so. I think so. Right? And I showed them how they could use it. And then, you know, over time, I quit my my day job as a VP of IT, working with financial advisors to learn technology, and moved into my own consultancy. And I started seeing, hey, LinkedIn is thinking about this additional offering that offers more search capability, more opportunity to kind of segregate between an organic user and a paid user, and offer just more and more power. So I started using it, you know, people started asking questions, I started coaching sales teams, I ended up being a VP of sales training at a software company in Tampa, Florida for about a year and a half. I mean, it just naturally happened. And it just totally makes sense. Because really, just about every day that I’m on LinkedIn, I’m looking at Sales Navigator, because I’ve got 14,000 connections, but I’m like, well, who I just want to focus on Who are those 100, 200, 500 people that I want to pay attention to this week, and Sales Navigator just makes that so much simpler. So I’ve trained a lot of self employed folks on how to leverage it. And I’ve been leveraging myself pretty much since Sales Navigator rolled out.

AJ Wilcox 9:20

Oh, that’s awesome. Well, so glad we got the Sales Navigator pro on here. So the big question I get from people, and I don’t quite know how to answer it, which is, hey, AJ, you’re the ads guy, but we’ve also heard about organic LinkedIn, and we know people are doing outreach and we’ve heard about Sales Navigator. And they asked, you know, what should we prioritize? What should we be doing with LinkedIn? What’s your response there? How would you answer that?

Phil Gerbyshak

Well, the answer is all of the above. Organic Sales Navigator and sponsored for sure. When you think about organic everybody in the organization should be organically using LinkedIn. Should be building their network, should have a good profile, right, should be an ambassador for the organization, sharing content, you know, doing things just like they would in the office as an on matter of course, right? I mean, people want to work with you if you’re a company that’s welcoming, so be a company that’s welcoming, right? I mean, be that way. Get all your employees using organic for sure. And frankly, there’s a lot of things that are only available in the organic version of LinkedIn that show that you’re not dead, right? Posting to LinkedIn, building your actual network, not just sending in mails, things like that. So organic, for sure. When we think about sponsored, that’s the marketer side, that’s the brand side, that’s the opportunity to build brand awareness, and in many ways to make better offers that if your sales team made may or may not resonate all that well, because they’re just kind of blasting it out there. They’re not gonna, they’re not going to really hone in on the exact target. Not that they mean to, I’ll tell you, right, as a sales guy, of course I mean to. But I’m not just connected to the right people, and frankly, putting it in front of them at the right time. Well, I can’t always do that. I send out when I have time, not necessarily when is the best time or when LinkedIn knows that they’re on. So sponsored, helps with that, and then Sales Navigator for the sales team, for those heavy duty recruiters. Absolutely. Sales Navigator is great, because all just about all of the search features that we use to target on advertisement on the sponsored side are available on Sales Navigator. So if you think about Sales Navigator, it’s almost like advertising for one on one results. And sometimes if you already connected or your second degree connected, this is why you gotta use organic side and get connected, right? You can send a message hyperfocus that says, hey, AJ, are you interested in learning how to increase your revenue with LinkedIn advertising? And if he says yes, well, then we have a conversation here. And I can send a link to maybe sign up for that same webinar that the sponsored posts are, save the ad dollar, and sometimes get an even better target, but not always, because we’re not always connected to everybody that could benefit from our products or services.

AJ Wilcox 12:03

Absolutely. All right. So I may have jumped the gun a little bit. Can you define Sales Navigator for us? Like, what is the product, you’ve kind of told us a little bit about what it does?

Phil Gerbyshak

Sure. So LinkedIn Sales Navigator is their most premium sales solution. LinkedIn premium is an option as well, I would tell you that it’s it’s about 10% as effective as Sales Navigator, so I’d focus on Sales Navigator Sales Navigator is a separate sign up, it costs anywhere between $80 a month, if you go month to month, or $65 or so if you go out for a year at a time. And it is an awesome laser focus search tool that allows you to save leads and save people that you want to work with in different lists so that you can review them. And it allows us to see, oh, are there lead updates? Meaning did Phil’s profile post anything new. Or account updates, did Process and Results, did B2Linked post anything new on LinkedIn. Have both of those things. And then it’s also an opportunity to interface with the CRM, that’s a more premium tool, but you can interface with Salesforce, or with Microsoft Dynamics and some of the other tools to interface so that you capture every interaction so that if I go on vacation, an agent needs to pick up my accounts, he can see that interaction, but only if the company pays for the team solution of Sales Navigator.

AJ Wilcox

Ah, okay, so this is like the power tool for sales folks.

Phil Gerbyshak

Absolutely.

AJ Wilcox

Yeah, cool. And I love this because between 65 and 80 bucks a month, that puts it at about twice the cost or maybe a little bit more than like LinkedIn premium, but it has so many more features that has basically like a little mini CRM. And anyway, that feels like a really, really good value to me.

Phil Gerbyshak 14:00

I think so right? I mean, if your leads to close, right, if it takes you let’s say 10 or 15 people to get there at $65 a month. And let’s say that’s all one of your sales people gets. Well that’s $6.50 a lead. If you turn that into one meeting, which turns into one, SQL or MQL right, depending on how you target that. Well, heck, I think that’s a pretty fair price. And your salespeople have to do outreach, right. I’d love to tell you that just marketing is enough, but it’s not. We see all the time that folks that advertise with us, they may not have a great sales process at the end of that. And then they’re like, Well, hey, people are magically spitting money at me. It’s like, well, no kidding. If you don’t have a sales process, it just, it frankly, doesn’t work. So you need a sales team that’s using that and you combine the two, right? It’s like if you remember the old superfriends right wonder twin powers activate form of revenue. It’s pretty cool.

AJ Wilcox

Perfect. Well, so we here at B2Linked, we do, obviously, a lot of advertising. And the strategy in our advertising is generally trying to get a cold audience from our ideal market to identify themselves and make it so we can start nurturing up and following up and starting a relationship. But I would gather that the approach with both organic and Sales Navigator as an extension could be quite different than how we’re approaching it. So tell us about the difference in strategy and audiences there.

Phil Gerbyshak 15:33

Sure, well, first of all, organic and Sales Navigator are really meant to be one to one tools, more than one to many tools, those certainly when you post something, your status, I mean, you’re hoping your whole network sees it, you’re hoping it goes viral, let’s let’s be honest here that that’s the hope. But it’s hard to know if it did anything valuable when you don’t get any engagement. So what I would say is, if you think about using the organic side, and you post something, whoever then comments, whoever likes, whoever shares, whoever, you know, does something interacts, get some engagement, then the sales team should follow up with them and try to see there’s an opportunity for a conversation. Well, on the sponsored side, we run an advertisement. And, you know, they might have never heard of the company before. But hopefully, you’re posting something in the sponsored content that solves a problem or illuminates a problem. Or sometimes, you know, that offers a vitamin to make things even better for you. You know, those are the three reasons we run sponsored. And you’re hyper focused on who you’re talking to, right, you have that audience really dialed in, you’ve got those facets dialed in, but you don’t know their name. So to personalize, you have to go Sales Navigator organic, because I have to see your name. But on the sponsored side, you’re really more demographically targeting them plus some company size and things like that. So again, right, you have to think about, okay, organic is mass network. 5000 10,000 50,000 people, right, depending on how big you’ve grown your network, sometimes less. But then we’ve got the Sales Navigator, which is super targeted at an individual one at a time. And then the sponsored content, which is super targeted at the persona that we’re having, but yet we don’t know their name, who I love three prongs, all important.

AJ Wilcox 17:27

So one thing we’ve noticed is that when we are running ads for a client, and the client is also like their sales team is engaged in in outreach, we find that they really supercharge each other. Like when someone has been seeing our ads for a month or two. They’re a lot more likely to respond when someone reaches out. Because they’re like, oh, I’ve heard of your company before you guys must be legit. Like, let’s talk.

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, it seems so obvious when you say that, AJ but let’s break that down. Right? Let’s, let’s talk a little smaller. Right? So I’ve never heard of your company before and you cold call me. And then I email you. And then I send you a LinkedIn inmail. And maybe I follow you on LinkedIn. And maybe you happen to find me on Twitter and maybe engage with you on Instagram and okay, so I email you. So I did 6, 12, 15, 20 touches, Still nothing. Now imagine instead, if they knew your business name, and they knew that you solve problems they do. Even if they don’t know it. They know it right. It’s here. It’s here. It’s in the back of their head. And they think Oh, interesting. So B2Linked does LinkedIn advertising. Oh, that’s cool. And then me the sales guy calls up and says ring ring. Hey, AJ, Hey, buddy. I was wondering, do you, you know, do you need some LinkedIn advertising? And he might say no, I’m good. Or he might say, oh, yeah, I’ve heard of you guys. That’s pretty cool. Well, again, supercharge those by combining streams, get them together because building awareness, though, that you don’t really want to pay for awareness. It’s important, right? I mean, you want to pay for results. Let’s be clear. But that awareness is a nice byproduct of what happens for people who don’t necessarily click the ad that you can’t retarget that don’t sign up for you because they’re like, oh, I’ve heard of you. Especially if you do a good job of the company’s marketing. It helps your sales team just so much. Oh my gosh.

AJ Wilcox 19:16

Oh, yeah. And one thing I really wish LinkedIn would have taken across the finish line. A couple years ago, they had a beta, where a sales team could add leads in Sales Navigator. This was called Project Stereo, by the way, and as soon as they added it, they were tagging those leads, then the marketing team could pick this up for direct targeting. And so you could really target the exact individuals that the sales team cared about. And we had several clients who were part of the beta. It worked great. And then we heard that they sunset it, it was probably just too much work to upkeep

Phil Gerbyshak

Or it’s super creepy, right? I mean, that’s the challenge, right? I mean, sometimes we get super creepy I mean that that is sometimes a challenge. So I think that’s why you have to do all of them even more because that Stereo project. It’s interesting, right? If I just talk to you, and then I pop up, I mean, what do we Facebook here? Come on AJ?

AJ Wilcox

Sometimes I wish.

Phil Gerbyshak

Right.

AJ Wilcox

Alright. So obviously, the LinkedIn advertising is oftentimes handled by the marketing department. But we see that outreach, even handling of Sales Navigator is oftentimes over on the sales side. And there’s a definite divide there. So when you work together with these strategies with these different effectively channels, how do you do that? And who owns what leads? How do you kind of heal the divide?

Phil Gerbyshak 20:41

Sure. So if you think about sales development, and business development, that’s a marketing function, and a backup sales function, meaning when I make a phone call, if I’m, you know, not shy about sharing my company name, I’m aiding in awareness of the company that I work with. Well, we might say, well, oh, that’s Phil, that’s marketing. Okay. But it’s a phone call. So you might say, well, Phil, that sales? And the answer is it’s both. So here’s what you want to do, right? It to heal that divide is you need to meet together, you need to spend some time together and say, Hey, here’s the 3, 5, 7, 10 campaigns, we’re going to run. And sales team wants to run behind this. And as you’re talking to people, you could just ask, Hey, have you heard about XYZ campaign? Now they might say no. And that’s perfectly fine. Not a problem, right? But if they say yes, well, now we’ve got a conversation path. Now we’ve got something to do. And this is really important, because what gets measured gets repeated. Okay, understand this, right? So if you measure the fact that the sales team put in there, oh, yeah, they’re aware of one of these 10 campaigns. Now, marketing says, oh, cool, right? We’re, it’s a marketing attributed lead. That’s fantastic. The work we’re doing is actually helping the sales team. But a lot of times, we worry so much that if marketing helped us, we’re not going to get full credit for that deal, for that lead, for that conversion. That I’m not going to put it in there. I’m just going to say, Yeah, they were totally cold. And marketing might say, well, if I tell them, well, they’re never going to tell me back. So why should I do that. So I want to encourage you, if you’re, you’re listening to this, even if you have a marketing team and a sales team of one each, to spend some time together, talk about those campaigns, really heal that. And then make sure that it gets measured, make sure that gets put into your CRM, make sure you know even if you have a simple CRM, like a spreadsheet, just put it in there. Oh, yeah, this customer heard about, and then gently let the marketing team know hey, by the way, gang, thanks so much. This week, six of our leads came through, and we’re aware of that campaign that you had. Now they might not have clicked it, they might not have filled it out, they might not be in your CRM from the marketing side. But they absolutely should be from your sales side. And they can partner up because then you know what works. Now you got feedback. Now you keep that feedback loop going. Do more of what works, less than what doesn’t, invest in the winners, ditch the losers.

AJ Wilcox 23:18

I can’t impress on everyone enough how important this is for marketers to play the sales enablement role. And for sales to play the marketing enablement role. That communication is absolutely crucial. Phil, something else you mentioned, that is really interesting to me. You mentioned how Sales Navigator has a lot of the same targeting criteria that ads do. So what that makes me think is me as the advertiser, I could go to the sales team, and I could say, hey, here is the exact way we’re targeting here are the audiences we’re going after. And then someone from sales could say, perfect, I’m going to go and run searches with exactly the same parameters. And that’s how I’m going to start my outrage. Is there value there?

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, well, there’s huge value there because you can set that up as a default search criteria. So you can search inside that universe. So let’s say the marketing team is going to target you know, this much of the universe, they might target 100,000 people. Well, each salesperson might only really responsible. Say you got 10 salespeople, everybody’s response for 10,000. How do you slice that up? Well, it could be by industry, so they add one parameter, industry. Okay, add another, location. Now, let’s also not forget, and many sales people do, they broaden it out to everybody on LinkedIn, instead of shrinking it down first, and going first and secondary connection that people you already know. And the friends of people that you already know. I mean, folks, if I drop AJ Wilcox’s name with a prospect that has heard of loves AJ Wilcox, they are going to open right up and we’re going to get to have a real conversation about what’s going on. On the other hand, I cold call and I pretend like I don’t know AJ. That AJ is an oh, who’s that? I don’t know. Well, that’s not going to open it up and it’s gonna be harder. Now replace the word AJ Wilcox with your company name. Replace that with B2Linked, replace that with Process and Results. Replace that with your company name. And if they’re aware of it, now they’re going to open up. Oh, yeah, I’ve seen that. So you have to row together? Absolutely. And let’s not forget, sales team can feedback. You know what, I appreciate that you gave me those seven criteria. But you know, what I found really helpful is when we include X, Y, or Z, you know, maybe it’s people who’ve only been on LinkedIn, you know, less than 30 days or 90 days. Or maybe it’s people who’ve changed jobs in the last, you know, in the last 90 days, something like that, that sometimes the marketers forget is available, so they can dial it in even more. Okay, here’s a quick sponsor break. And then we’ll dive into more on Sales Navigator, and specifically how we can make your job with this easier.

Unknown Speaker

The LinkedIn Ads Show is proudly brought to you by B2Linkedcom, the LinkedIn Ads experts.

AJ Wilcox

If the performance of your LinkedIn Ads is important to you be to B2Linked is the agency you’ll want to work with. We’ve spent over $135 million on LinkedIn Ads, and no one outperforms us on getting the lowest cost per lead. We’re official LinkedIn partners, and you’ll only deal with LinkedIn experts from day one. Fill out the contact form on any page of B2Linked.com And we’d love to chat about your campaigns.

Alright, let’s jump into it here, Phil, tell me because there are a lot of people doing things really wrong on LinkedIn organically? What are the common mistakes that you see with organic? And then what are some of the common mistakes you see with Sales Navigator?

Phil Gerbyshak 26:51

Well, with organic, a lot of your people look dead. They haven’t posted in a while they haven’t gotten any updates in a while they haven’t done anything to their profile. And it still maybe lists their old job, it lists things that they’re no longer doing. Or they don’t take the time to even copy and paste the job description that you provided them. So work with HR to actually build out your team’s profile, make sure that profiles are strong. And then make sure that you tell your sales team, hey, here’s content that you can share as often as you want. And don’t forget, please add some of your personality. Because here’s here’s the truth, right? Everybody interacts more with you, if you’re just talking about stuff, if you’re talking just about work. If you’re in a networking event, you’re like, come on, man, that’s horrible. So share some of that personality share some of the stuff outside of work. Yes, I understand marketers, you want them to push your webinar, your white paper, all that sponsored content. But don’t forget to encourage them to be them selves. That’s a big miss that I see with a lot of these folks on incomplete profiles or out of date profiles or dead profiles, and then not sharing enough. And then frankly, I’m going to give you one other big mistake on organic and then I’ll shift to navigator and that is they don’t connect with everybody inside the organization. I can tell you right now, most of your higher level associates on the team, whether they’re whether you’re a big company, and you have CEOs and C-stars, or whether you’re a smaller company of an owner, it doesn’t matter. You as the owner, as the C-star likely have more reach and more connections, then anybody in the organization. You should be sharing those with your sales team. your sales team should be able to see oh, look, AJ is connected to this person. I should mention AJ now they might not know AJ, because AJ might be willing to connect to anybody. Or AJ might be super tight with his networking and not connected anybody that he doesn’t know. If it’s the latter, and I drop AJ’s name. The person’s like, Oh, yeah, I saw AJ at this event or that event, or we work together at this thing, or we went to church, or we are part of this group, or that group. That is an opportunity for your sales team to immediately build rapport. But your executives, your leadership team has to connect to the sales team. Because otherwise, that’s an opportunity lost.

Okay, so what are some of the big mistakes with Sales Navigator? First, they set it up terribly. Or they don’t set it up at all right? Then the marketing team doesn’t give them any of the criteria. They need to be successful in that they just say, Oh, yeah, we’ll just use a persona. Really, what’s the marketing campaign that you’re working on that you want me to focus on for this 30 days because I can change it. Sales Navigator is not static. So that’s another big mistake folks make. They change their target, but they forget to change in Sales Navigator. Now that doesn’t mean they change their profile, it could, in fact that encourage them to right to really focus on who are they trying to be a resource for, but they might forget to change our targeting which saves them or will cost them some keystrokes, every keystroke saved is one or two extra calls that can be made today, so that it’s way easier to reach your quota. So they don’t do that. The other thing that they don’t do, they don’t set it up, they don’t change. The last thing they don’t do is they don’t actually save anything inside of Sales Navigator. Tthey don’t save leads, they don’t save accounts, they don’t do anything with that stuff. And when you don’t do that what happens is LinkedIn is automated, artificial intelligence doesn’t help you. I think you should combine all these forces. You should throw them all in a blender and use them all. Because when you do them all, organic, sponsored, and Sales Navigator, marketing and sales can sing together and make beautiful music. And when you don’t, well, you’re almost fighting against each other.

AJ Wilcox 31:05

Oh, yeah, I’d much rather be singing Kumbaya and fighting a sales department. What about measuring success, because on the advertising side, it’s so easy to measure the success. If you’re tracking your leads into your CRM, you can literally know at the individual ad level, what your cost per marketing qualified lead is or your cost per sales accepted lead or sales qualified lead, cost per proposal given, cost per close. And so we thrive off of the metrics. But when it comes to the organic, sometimes it’s a lot harder to determine is what you’re doing being successful. So how are you going to measure that success?

Phil Gerbyshak

Well, first, how many of the leads that are in the pipeline? Have LinkedIn profiles associated with them? If you’re using Salesforce, if you’re sing dynamics, many of them do just automatically. They pop up. But here’s the thing, is your sales team actually doing anything with those? One of the things that you could use to measure success is LinkedIn’s own social selling index. They’re talking, they’ve talked for, actually, for at least the last three years,”We’re doing away with the SSI score.” I don’t think they are, they might call it something else. Right? Because social selling is a total misnomer. That’s a whole other episode. But social selling? Nobody sells on social, they sell with social, let’s be super clear. Totally different episode, but just be aware of that. Okay, so how do you measure that right? Is your team is their SSI score? Are they looking at profiles, you can see that, again, if you have an organizational account, you can see are they viewing profiles? Are they doing searches? Are they investing their inmail? Right? Are they actually taking those inmails? 20, 30, 50 emails a month. And are they sending them? That is almost like a direct line to the right person that they’re wasting? Imagine if you provided them with 1000 direct dial phone numbers of every person that they want to talk to him of their ideal target customer, and they didn’t call them and instead, they’re like, oh, well, I didn’t know that was valuable. Come on. So sales team, use your inmails. Use your inmails. So you measure those and then you measure some of that engagement. Did they did they put anything back into the CRM? Because otherwise, what happens is, the salesperson keeps the connection, it never makes it to the CRM, and there’s never any connectivity, and you just wasted $80 a month because you can’t measure anything. So that’s how I would do that. And then again, you know, periodically look at their profiles. Don’t just use LinkedIn’s SSI score, but actually look at them. Right? Spend some time every quarter train, retrain your sales team, get them hey, what are some best practices? What are you doing? How has this helped you get them to share that I would say at least a quarter, probably once a month, though. Just don’t do it at the end of the quarter and the end of the month, because you want to tick off a salesperson forced them to get quota. And then don’t let them work at the end of the quarter because they’re busy on training. Don’t do that.

AJ Wilcox 34:06

Great. Great point. Yeah, let the sales guys fly free for the last week of every month. All right. So if someone wants to get started with advertising, obviously, like listening to this podcast is a great place to start. But if you want to get started on the organic side, Phil, can you tell us like what are some simple things, some simple steps that you can use to get started?

Phil Gerbyshak 34:27

Sure. So first, I can’t get dressed before you get busy. Get your profile up to speed. First, most important thing, second, get connected, right? Connect to the people that you know that you need to know that you want to know. Third, get sharing, share some content, get some stuff out there. And fourth, do it every single day. Real simple process there. Just four little steps, get dressed before you get busy, get connected, get sharing, and then get out there more often.

AJ Wilcox

Great. And then what about Sales Navigator? If someone’s listening to you? And they’re like, yes, this would be the ideal step for my organization. How do they get started with Sales Navigator?

Phil Gerbyshak

Sure. So we’re going to put a link here in the show notes for you so that you can get a free 60 day trial. If you’ve never used Sales Navigator before. Sign up, that seems obvious, but sign up, right actually input your credit card information and sign up. Secondly, set it up, like actually go through and be mindful about that stuff. You might have to partner with the marketing team, you might have to ask yourself, whatever that is, and then show up, get there all the time be frequent. Again, just like on the organic side, you can’t expect Sales Navigator is just going to work magic for you if you don’t work the tool.

AJ Wilcox

Beautiful. Okay, so it sounds like a lot like running a company that runs LinkedIn Ads is already hard enough. And it’s a little bit scary, a little bit daunting to think about okay, great strategies, I need to add these onto my plate. How can people get started without losing all their hair? And you know going crazy?

Phil Gerbyshak 35:57

Oh, my gosh, yeah. You know, I mean, some some people believe bald is beautiful. And that’s perfectly cool, right? I’m great with that. But you know what, we created just a little course, for you the Sales Navigator jumpstart for busy business owners and teams, it is really simple. If you sign up by the fourth of June, we’re gonna make it just $97. If you sign up for that, it’s $147. But it’s gonna be some zoom calls, just like any other meeting that you’re used to where you can ask them questions, but it’ll be facilitated by yours truly, we’re going to go through that. And we’re going to share lots of stuff. So that’s the Sales Navigator Jumpstart for those busy business owners, for those self employed folks, and for salespeople.

AJ Wilcox

Can give us a little sneak peek on what’s going to be in the course what people are going to actually learn.

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, absolutely. So first, you know, you’re going to learn a little bit more about what is Sales Navigator some of the ways that I’ve used it, I’m going to share with you, we’re gonna talk about some best practices for setting it up. So you can be successful, right from the jump, super important, what you use it for, how should you use it, some of those tools who should be responsible for this? Sometimes you might send one of your sales people and they might say, Well, you know what, this isn’t really for me. So let’s talk about that, we’re going to talk about some of those things that you’re going to discover. We’re also going to talk about augmenting navigator with advertising and advertising with navigator. So if you’ve got some ads that you’re running, you can send your sales team with that. We’re going to show you some of the things that people do wrong when I actually do use it. And then some of those daily habits so that you can actually maximize your efforts and get the jumpstart you need so you can actually use Sales Navigator as a lever instead of just one more expense.

AJ Wilcox

And a little sneak peek I’ll be making a guest entrance on the topic about the ad side about how to use Sales Nav and sponsored ads together so anyway, I hopefully that doesn’t push anyone away. Who’s this best for? Is this for sales teams? Is this for business owners? Is this for individuals? Who is gonna get the best use out of it?

Phil Gerbyshak 37:59

Yeah, well first you know self employed folks right they’re responsible for making them rain a lot of times, driving the business for their for your business. So if you’re a busy self employed business owner you should certainly attend. If you’re a sales team and each person on that team has a individual Sales Navigator license well that’s another great opportunity to take part of this and if you’re responsible at all for lead generation or revenue generation, you’re someone that definitely could benefit from this Sales Navigator jumpstart.

AJ Wilcox

Okay, awesome. And even if you don’t make the early bird $147 for all this information is a total no brainer. So I would highly encourage everyone to check it out. Where do we find the course?

Phil Gerbyshak

Yeah, so the course is found at B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. That’s B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. It’s going to be held the week of June 22. And we would love to see you there. You can sign up when you’re listening to this atB2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. Sign up it’s $97 by June 4, or until the week of the 21st that will be $147.

AJ Wilcox 39:14

Beautiful. Alright, so we’ll obviously have a link to that down in the show notes. You can navigate directly all that. Alright Phil, you are a rock star. Thank you so much for coming on here. Where can people find you and connect with you?

Phil Gerbyshak

Well, if you want to talk about LinkedIn Ads with me you can go to B2Linked.com/meet. And you can certainly sign up to talk about LinkedIn Ads. I’m on the ads team. We talked about that stuff. I can get you signed up, send your proposal. Whatever it is that you need there, answer questions. Always going to add value to you there and of course finally on LinkedIn, Phil Geryshak. Tell me you heard me on the LinkedIn Ads podcast. Tell me that you know AJ or that you don’t let me know and let’s connect

AJ Wilcox

And tell him that you like short walks on the beach because sand gets everywhere on long walks, just saying.

Phil Gerbyshak

That’s it.

AJ Wilcox 40:07

Alright Phil, thanks so much for joining us. And I’m sure we’ll be hearing from you here again soon.

Phil Gerbyshak

Thanks, AJ.

AJ Wilcox

All right, I’ve got the episode resources for you coming right up. So stick around.

Thank you for listening to the LinkedIn Ads Show. Hungry for more? AJ Wilcox, take it away.

AJ Wilcox 40:33

If you want to connect with Phil on LinkedIn, you can go to linkedin.com/in/philgerb or just search for Phil Gerbyshak, he’s gonna be the only one that shows up. He is definitely one in a million. You’ll also see that link down below in the show notes. You’ll also find the link for the free Sales Navigator 60 day trial. They offer a 30 day trial by default. But we were lucky enough to get a free 60 day link. So wanted to share that with everyone. You’ll also find the link to the Sales Navigator jumpstart course. As Phil mentioned, it’s B2Linked.com/sales-navigator-jumpstart. But of course, it’s always easier to just hit that link. And if you want to meet with Phil, because he’s actually the one who’s going to talk to you if you want to do business with B2Linked, you can go to B2Linked.com/meet and book a time directly with him. He’s awesome. Like we talked about in the new section, we have that graphic showing the effects on LinkedIn Ads of cookie-geddon, iOS 14 update. So you can check that out. Open that up, you can also see a link to the Phil Graham digital podcast episode that I thought was so amazing, as well as a link to the metadata benchmarks report that we talked about. And of course, if you are trying to uplevel your LinkedIn Ads or have someone in your organization who needs to check out the course, it’s linked down below in the show notes. And it’s the LinkedIn Learning course on LinkedIn Ads. Definitely valuable, and Hint, Hint. Watch here in the next, I would say month or two to see the update to that course coming out. So check that out. Also, be sure to subscribe. If you’ve liked this content, you want to hear more of it, make sure you subscribe in your player. And then please do go and review the podcast. I would love to shout you out. And thank you for whatever kind words you have to share. It definitely helps other people find the show. So we will take any rating and review that you’ve got. If you have any topics that you’d like us to cover or questions related to anything we’ve talked about. You can email us at [email protected]. And with that being said, we’ll see you back here next week. Cheering you on in your LinkedIn Ads initiatives.