What You Need To Know About Social Selling On Linkedin

We have all seen some absolutely cringe worthy outreach on LinkedIn. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Yet there are a lot of companies that are driving significant amounts of leads and revenue from LinkedIn. Question is, how are they doing it, and what can you do to accomplish similar results? My special guest today is a social selling expert that is going to help us answer these questions and a whole lot more.

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick ?and?Alex Boyd ?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

Watch This Episode

Listen To The Podcast

Subscribe To The Podcast

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Podcast
• Stitcher
• iHeart Radio

Read The Transcript Here

Podcast?Transcription

What You Need To Know About Social Selling On Linkedin

Tim Fitzpatrick: We have all seen some absolutely cringe worthy outreach on LinkedIn. I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. Yet there are a lot of companies that are driving significant amounts of leads and revenue from LinkedIn. Question is, how are they doing it, and what can you do to accomplish similar results? My special guest today is a social selling expert that is going to help us answer these questions and a whole lot more. Hi, I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I'm super excited to have Alex Boyd with me today from RevenueZen. Alex, welcome and thanks for taking the time.

Alex Boyd: Thank you. Good to be here. Tim.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I'm excited to dig into this. LinkedIn outreach is something that is gosh, so many people are taking advantage of it, but I think there are so many people that have the wrong approach, and I think you agree with me on that, yes?

Alex Boyd: Yes, I absolutely do. Most people have the wrong approach.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Cool. So we're going to try and help steer people down the right path today. Before we jump into that, I want to ask you some rapid fire questions, help us get to know you a little bit. You're ready to rock and roll?

Alex Boyd: Yeah, let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Okay. When you're not working, how do you like to spend your time?

Alex Boyd: I'm often taking long walks in the neighborhood with my fiance to find people's cats that have gotten outside and want to say hi.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So you're a cat person or your fiancee is a cat person or both?

Alex Boyd: She is. We tried to adopt a cat. We thought it was a street cat. Turned out to not be a street cat. We adopted someone's cat for a night, but that lasted 24 hours and then stopped. Dogs, cats, goats, whatever you want.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What's your hidden talent?

Alex Boyd: Many. I played classical flute for ten years. There's one.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Classical flute. You don't anymore?

Alex Boyd: I have not for a long time. I do play a lot of other instruments, the guitar being one, but I did vocal percussion college. A capella. I can squeeze out a few tunes in the mandalin, the banjo, give me a ukulele, alto, sacks, handbells, whatever it is.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Nice. I love it. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

Alex Boyd: Say no more often to more things. It's the way to focus.

Tim Fitzpatrick: That's a good one. Yeah, focus. So reminds me, somebody once told me, every time you say yes, you need to be clear about what you're going to have to say no to because of that. What's one thing about you that surprises people, other than the fact that you play all kinds of instruments?

Alex Boyd: I think sometimes people assume that because the company is named RevenueZen, that I am this sort of guru who never experiences, emotions, and I'm always just stoked about everything and I have to remind them, no, even the people who do this for a living, we still go through all those things. The goal is just to be able to not be dominated by your feelings. And we'll get into this with the marketing stuff, too, but to be able to kind of sit with reality as it is and then say, okay, this being the case, I do. But we all go through that struggle regardless of the aspiration we put out in the name we chose when I was sitting there in front of Google Domain six years ago thinking, what would be a nice name for my company?

Tim Fitzpatrick: I love it. It's a very calming name.

Alex Boyd: Thanks.

Tim Fitzpatrick: What does success mean to you?

Alex Boyd: Being able to experience life on this Earth more fully and less attached to all the noise going on in our mind that keeps us from realizing how lucky we are to be on this Earth somehow constructed of trillions of atoms. Being able to think and do podcasts and all the other wonderful things we do.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I like that. That's a great definition. I've never actually had anybody explain it in that way, but it definitely is in line with this Zen mentality, right?

Alex Boyd: Yeah, right. Making seven figures a year, whatever. I don't know, whatever you want to, but like, really, it's that all the other stuff is just a key to get that thing to go about it in the wrong way. But that's my definition, at least.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Where's your happy place?

Alex Boyd: Cannon Beach, Oregon.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Cannon beach? I've never been there.

Alex Boyd: Not a warm town most of the time, but I just get really good feelings when I'm in either Cannon Beach, Oregon, on the coast, which is the closest straight shot from Portland out west.And also the Subtle Lodge, if anybody listening, is from Oregon and you've been near Bend, go to the Subtle Lodge. You will feel a magical energy about this place on Subtle Lake. A lot of places in Oregon with magical energy, but those are two of them.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. Very cool. I have been to Bend. It's been a while, but definitely a cool spot. What qualities do you value in people you spend time with?

Alex Boyd: The combination of kindness and honesty. People who will be direct with you, but in a way that indicates that they support and want you to roll. And without either of those two working together, we have weak and disingenuous people and we have assholes and people who are in the middle. I tend to prefer to spend most of my time with people who will be extremely kind, and then when you're about to make a bad decision, they'll say, you really shouldn't do that. That's the type of friend you want to keep around.

Tim Fitzpatrick: I don't think any of us like being around people that use being honest as a way to be unkind and mean. We can still be honest and be kind, empathetic and caring about it. So I love that. Before we dig into social selling, tell us a little bit more about the types of people you're working with that RevenueZen and how you're helping them.

Alex Boyd: Yeah, RevenueZen is a BB marketing agency. So we work with two kinds of people. One is the founders of smaller companies that are between usually under 50 ish people and they have somebody working in marketing, but they need more than just the one person they have in their own brain. They want a second set of eyes and a team to execute on one of two channels being search engine optimization for B to B and SAS companies. And the second one being LinkedIn, which is what we'll be talking about soon, which is how do we grow organically. So organic social and organic search are the two channels of choice that we've been working on most of the time, and we've added a couple over the years, but that's our main bread and butter. And then also I've also built two SaaS platforms that help the LinkedIn social selling process go better, faster, stronger as well, which is separate from the agency but RevenueZen and what I'm all about is helping people grow organically better to make their companies more like an asset that continues to pay them all the time rather than an expense that when they stop feeding into it, it stops paying them. I'd rather have you build rental properties than pay rent. And that's what we're trying to do with RevenueZen.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I love that. And I love the fact that you guys have really you found a couple of sweet spots where you really excel. So many people overlook this with marketing, but nowadays marketing is so broad. There are so many different disciplines. Unless you're a huge marketing agency, it is absolutely impossible to be great at everything. So focusing and finding out what you love and where you really help people, not a lot of people make that choice. I'm excited to dig into LinkedIn because so many people are doing it wrong. First thing I want to ask you, what's the biggest thing the founders get wrong when trying to grow their revenue on LinkedIn?

Alex Boyd: The first main thing is they think, well, this should be about the company page and the company account. This isn't about me, it's about the company. So they'll write or have somebody write posts for their company LinkedIn page. Usually this is one of the blogs they just posted, plus a couple of hashtags, and they'll post on the company account and the founder will repost and their feed is full of just reposting the company's blogs. And then they'll wonder why they have no pipeline. But that's the biggest thing is they think, well, this isn't about me, this is about the company. Even when a company was founded by them. So we'll get into that later. That's the biggest thing to get wrong.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. So when looking at LinkedIn, what I'm hearing you say is you really should be focused on personal profiles first and foremost.

Alex Boyd: Absolutely. There are some people who've grown company pages very well. The only exception to what I'm saying with the rule that personal profiles lead the way in LinkedIn is if you really take the time and effort to have your company have a voice and brand of its own. I mean, if you think about Wendy's Twitter, right, it's not a person, it's Wendy's Twitter. Like that's a thing all on its own. But the majority of people are going to have a much better time building their personal profiles for a number of reasons. One, the LinkedIn algorithm just favors personal profiles, kind of like Facebook downgraded pages and showed you more people that you know. It's the same idea. People don't really want to open their feed and see blogs from companies in their network. They want to see posts from people with faces, with opinions, people with reputations attached to those opinions. And a company does not have a reputation, a person does. And so people will believe things that people say more than what companies say, because they know there's nobody hiding from that. There is a face that is hard to change. There is a Social Security number tied to the impact of what you say, but a company can be spun up and down rebranded to what they can do, whatever. So that's the biggest reason why personal profiles are the way to build. And you can verify this by looking at a lot of the brands you follow on LinkedIn. I'm betting there are people that you associate the brand with positive things because of what the people at the brand have said. If that person leaves and goes to a new company, you're following the person. You're not going to say, oh, they're not working at Gong anymore, I'm not going to follow them. No, you follow the person because it's that person you've built up this relationship with. And it is a one way relationship in a lot of cases if you're just simply following them. But it is still a relationship with a person. Now, in that case, you still have that good feeling built up with the brand they worked at, because all those things they said while they were working at that brand, you associate with the brand, too. So if I were to leave RevenueZen, and I'm not planning to, but if I were to, you would still think about revenues and of all the things I said, because I've done it while founding this company. And that goes the same for if you're active on LinkedIn, try this in your own head and think about, who do I follow? Who do I know? Who do I pay attention to? And think about your own association to the person of the company. I'm betting it's the person leading you to opinion about the company but your opinion about them stays with both. But it doesn't happen. If it starts with you don't discover a company page you like and then fall in love with it, that doesn't happen. Right? Again, some exceptions. There are certain Twitter accounts. It's rare and that's a specialized strategy that can be done and is very creative, but it's hard to pull off and is just much more difficult technically. And also with the algorithm, with creativity, you have to invent a new persona of your company if you're going to pull off the company page thing. So that's tough. Make it easy on yourself. Stick to your personal profile first. It doesn't mean it's all about you. It just means that people buy from people, they listen to people, they don't really listen to companies and that's the main thing to take away.

Tim Fitzpatrick: So set up a personal profile. One of the first things that most people do who want to start generating leads from LinkedIn is they start using automated LinkedIn outreach. They're connecting with a lot of different people. I kind of think of it like the spray and prey type mentality where they're just, they're playing the numbers. What are your thoughts on that? What do you think of LinkedIn automation?

Alex Boyd: It's often the first thing people turn to, and I can understand why, if you have been selling for a while not on LinkedIn, and you have this the reaction to email cadence tools and sequencing tools, which was, oh, this form letter I've been sending to people by hand, I can just send it to 100 people at once. That sounds great. Why wouldn't I save time and save myself the clicking bandwidth? They get to LinkedIn, they think, well, this is the same thing. If I'm going to send this note to everyone anyway, I may as well send it faster. And the problem with LinkedIn automation I separated into two categories. It's not inherently evil, but it's overly abused by too many. Because it works just often enough with low enough effort that people will keep going even if it yields them one lead once in a while and one deal once in a while. That's most people. The ones who are not using it right and the ones who are not using it right are the ones who load a bunch of leads into a cadence and try to get people to book a meeting or make a sale on the spot and just let it rip. I don't think that's a good that's just sort of saving you time at the expense of all of your prospects experience. Are there any right ways to using automaton? For example, if you're going to send an update to 80 people that really would just get the same note, then it's sort of similar to a newsletter where they would expect to hear from you anyway. Like if I follow someone's newsletter on email, getting a note from them on LinkedIn is really no different. But it's about the expectation that that's how I'm going to hear from them about certain things. It's also what you say if you're letting people know of an interesting update to a targeted group, there. If you're blasting 2000 people asking for a meeting in the hopes of getting two to three, not so great. So generally I don't advise using LinkedIn automation. There are some cases where you simply are working at a large company and you have a large network over a long career and you really do, and you just need an easier way to keep up with more than one person at once. There are some ways to make that okay, but generally I don't advise it. And it's not going to be nearly as effective as what I would call social selling. So I think LinkedIn automation is fraught with issues. It can be done okay, but I don't recommend it unless you really fit certain categories of I built up a large network over a long career, it's simply too difficult to, you know, if you were going to send these people a Christmas card and you did it on LinkedIn instead for business purposes, fair. If you're trying to barge into inboxes to create pipeline because you don't want to send personal notes, not so good. Most of the use cases, not great. Once in a while I get the appeal.

Tim Fitzpatrick: You know, I think what I see most people doing, at least those that are outreaching to me personally on LinkedIn, is kind of like, hey, we'd love to connect. You accept the connection request and then they're immediately wanting to get married. Right? They're jumping too far forward in the relationship and they're making a lot of assumptions based on what they can see on my profile rather than starting a relationship. In the dating realm, right, it's like, hey, you meet, hey, let's have coffee. Let's have lunch. Let's get to know each other a little bit. People just skip those steps on LinkedIn. A lot of people skip those steps on LinkedIn. And I can't remember exactly where I heard this, but it always resonated with me. Somebody said, you know, with social setting, when you're starting to build that relationship, you don't want to ask for time too early. You want to find out if there's interest. Right. And once you find out there's interest, well, then you can start taking things a step further. But until you actually know there's interest, asking for time is a pretty big ask. What are your thoughts on that?

Alex Boyd: Definitely the way that I approach this when messaging people and building relationships is that I really try my best not to pitch until they ask. And I just have conversations and see where they go. And sometimes those conversations are about what we do. But even if it is, if somebody I think we all know when you're in a conversation and somebody wants it to go in a certain direction versus resists that direction. If somebody is clearly resisting that and you push anyway, they'll just conclude that you aren't paying attention and don't really have any respect for their time. Right? They can see your profile, they can see what you do. And over the course of the conversation, if that interest develops, you will be invited. Or if you see a very clear tie in and can respectfully make a connection to suggest something about their business that can go better, great. But if there really is no connection and you go into love to connect boom. Just to put an ad out there, you're just sort of advertising rather than social selling. And that's a big difference. We don't want to use this platform for advertising. LinkedIn automation with a basic pitch is advertising. It's not a great form of it, but it is that it's not social selling, it's just something different entirely. Whereas social selling is helping people publicly. You're on a social media platform, you're hopefully putting out content that adds value, is original, and people can recognize you and get to know how you think. And then when you talk with them privately and engage with them publicly too, you're building a relationship based on here is who I am, how I think about the world, how I think about this area of expertise or practice. And here is you, your situation, how you think about things. Maybe there's something interesting there, maybe there's a way that we can work together, but without knowing that you don't have grounds to pitch anything, nothing worthwhile at least. And that's where most people go wrong. They think, well, I don't know anybody, so instead of getting to know anybody, I'm just going to advertise with my connection requests. And that doesn't get you anywhere because the chances of somebody trusting you enough to take that call based nearly on what's in your message are low. And if they do take that call, let's say you have this ultra innovative SaaS product that you tell people what it does and they're like, I got to see this. You know, they're still going to show up to the call, not with their guard up. Right? And that will reduce your win rates. Almost every organization that I look at, they have a lower win rate on outbound of this kind than of inbound or other forms of lead gen. The exception to that is low volume, very high in intense Enterprise outbound that has a high win rate when you get a proposal, but before that stage when you're just sort of spraying and preying. If you do get leave that way, it's going to have a much lower win rate and you're going to be spending more time in the sales cycle and be more difficult kind of taxing calls than if you attract leads in pipeline through the process of putting out content, demonstrating your credibility, engaging with others publicly, taking those interactions offline at a pace that is reasonable for them and doesn't simply blow past their resistance, which you know you know is there. Hopefully you're not pitching any way through that resistance. You're going to be met with this reaction of anywhere from screw off to applied version of screw off, which is nothing. Ghosting? No thanks. Like any of those things where it's like, I brush you off because I don't feel like explaining to you what you're doing wrong. It's not my job, so go away.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Man, you shared a ton of stuff in there. There's a bunch of good stuff. I want to try and pull this out a little bit. So what I'm hearing you say is automated LinkedIn outreach has its place, but most people are using it from an advertising perspective rather than trying to keep in touch with a lot of people like you would an email list. With social selling, you're not saying with social selling, just interact with random people and try to build relationships. You're absolutely being targeted when you're social selling, you're identifying those people for one reason or another that make the most sense for you to interact with on LinkedIn. And then you have a plan of how you're going to strategically do that. Right? Some of that could be sending connection requests. Right. But you're not sending connection requests and then advertising to them. You're building the relationship with them. You're interacting with them. Maybe you're liking or commenting on posts. You might be sending them direct messages in some way, shape, or form, but it's part of a larger multipronged approach is what I'm hearing.

Alex Boyd: Yeah. I don't actually have an issue with people using an automation tool to send connection requests at scale to folks that they would have sent connection requests to anyway by hand. That's just speaking of a process. What I don't recommend is once they accept, pitch them. That's the way to use it wrong. Example of a way to use LinkedIn automation, I am one of 200 people that has been supporting your book launch, and you messaged me to tell me that the Kickstarter is done and to fill in my address at this link to receive a copy of the book. Perfectly acceptable. I would have received that over email or LinkedIn, it doesn't matter. Not acceptable. You message your entire network about a blog you just wrote and you thought, I'd find it interesting. Probably not, right? Yeah, certainly not. The question is, would you send this by hand? And what I appreciated by hand if you didn't automate it? If so, no harm in automating it. But that's the route. Most people don't understand that distinction. So what I do advocate is building a network of people with connections, with people that want to see your stuff or might want to see your stuff. Meaning if somebody accepts your connection request, here's what they're doing. They're saying, you could be interesting. Let's see what you got. And then they're going to see what you say to them or don't say. They'll read your profile. They'll see if you have any interesting posts that come out that they get value from. Maybe you comment on their posts and help them out. Maybe your comments are insightful and interesting. Maybe then one day the thing you've been talking about for a while is something that came up in their meeting that they have to solve and they ask you a question about it. When people accept a connection request, it's not an invitation to be pitched, it's a handshake, right? I would handshake lots of people at a conference. I wouldn't necessarily set up an in depth meeting with all of them. And so we have to distinguish between that. If you're going to connect with lots of people, that's fine. Maybe you're just saying, I'm being abundant to the world. I'm putting out content I think you would like, but I'm not going to blast that in your face. Maybe you'll just see it when you see it. And when you have that issue, you'll come to me. Maybe if I see you post something, I can do the same thing. And there's just a sort of reciprocal abundance that you can create from it. Doesn't cost anyone to have another connection. It does cost somebody if you put a pitch in their face every three days for the next two weeks and annoy them. Right. So we've got to think about the person on the other end. Am I costing them? Am I annoying them? Am I adding value? And people always say, what does adding value mean? How do I add value? Different for everybody. Are they talking about something you can add to the discussion? Are they trying to hire somebody you can maybe point them in the direction of? Do you have a lead for them? Did you find something on their profile interesting? There's tons of ways to add value. It's just about what it is they seem to need and what it is you seem to have. But just think about the receiving end of that and that will be the guiding principle for this.

Tim Fitzpatrick: There's a couple of other things that I'm pulling out of what you're saying too. To have a successful LinkedIn strategy, one, you need to be interacting with people, right? You need to be posting your own content and you need to be interacting with other people's content. Which then also leads me to the next point, which is some of the stuff you do on LinkedIn can be automated, as you pointed out. But there's a lot of it that you can't like, somebody has to do this work. And I'm assuming when companies hire you, you guys are the ones that are taking the brunt of that more manual work on to help save them time.

Alex Boyd: Yeah, you can't substitute the doing the work at some point. And some people say, well, I don't want to post content. It's possible to be successful without posting content, but you will have an uphill battle, and you will not bring it as much as if you did. Some people don't want to engage, but they do want to post. Same thing. You can do fine with that, but you'll be less successful than if you put it all together and if you treated it like a conference at which you A speak at a session, B shake hands afterwards, and C walk out to people you don't know. If you do just one of those things, you'll have some success. If you put all three together, you'll have much more. So, yeah, when we help people, whether it's tools or services, it's one of those things. It's either I'm a busy but passionate executive. I have a lot of pains. I'm loving working at my job. But is my primary goal writing LinkedIn post? Well, no, but I want to make sure my team are really elevated in our presence. And I work at a VP at a 10,000 person company. This is a client we're on boarding right now. So we can interview them and just have them walk around the park as they talk on the phone. And then we are the ones who kind of pull as you're doing right now. We pull all the things out that are interesting and meaningful and say, hey, you're the four things I found from this session that are really interesting and meaningful. I'm going to write those up in posts. And then we send them these Google Docs that are, you know, just finished draft posts and they can edit as they please. We schedule and post. It's much more enjoyable experience for them. There's no writer's block. They get to edit versus draft, much less time investment, and we just know what's interesting and what they should be talking about. They know the company priorities. We know how to translate that to their engagement. If it's a tool, we might be giving them a list every day of where to comment to have the maximum effect, like, hey, here are the five prospects that interacted with your top competitor today. Send them a connection request and then leave a comment on the competitors post if that's your strategy. Or it could be, here are the ten influencers you want to track. Here's all of their posts from today. Here's all the people who interacted with their posts so you can, whatever it is you're going to do, send them something. Also comment on the post, whatever it is. So we have tools that kind of enable that, but we stopped short of saying, we're going to automate the important work, because you don't want to do that. You can automate the low value work. Don't try to automate the important work. The real work, the stuff that should be good and fun for you to do.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. With posting, do you feel like it's important, I mean, I see people posting all kinds of different stuff, and they're having success with various formats. Right. There are some people that are posting more motivational things. There are people that are publishing their opinions. There are people that are publishing more educational stuff. Do you need to pick one of those? Can you pick multiple? What are your thoughts on that?

Alex Boyd: That's a good question. I've talked to so many people who have wildly different levels of public facing engagement, and those people have a wild difference in how successful they are in terms of the revenue that they bring in. Here are some very telling examples. Somebody hires a consultant to do LinkedIn for them who mostly posts platitudes. Don't micromanage your employees. Agree or disagree. And then somehow there's like 20 likes on that post. But then you look at that and most of them are purchased likes they're bots. And then all the comments are Great post, love this. Nice. Agreed. And then you ask them how many leads are coming from this activity? And they say, well, none so far. So you can't really just look at somebody and say, that person successful on LinkedIn. Unless you just mean engagement likes attention. Which we're not really about attention. We're about pipeline. It's very different. Here's another example. Somebody gets about 100 engagements per post and ten comments per post. But their comments are long, they're substantive, they're interesting, they're real parts of the discussion. And this person is a consultant to tech companies and large organizations doing six figure complex work and also has a book for sale. This person's wildly successful, even though they have much less engagement. There are individual contributors, sales reps that I see that do fantastic things and have 50,000 followers and have a great brand and style of their own. And I chat with them on the phone and they're like, man, I would just wish I got credit for all these leads because 80% of them aren't in my territory. I can't even take these leads. And I'm like, that kills me to hear, but you're doing great. I only wish you could benefit more from it. I have 16000 followers. It's not crazy, but we've pulled in over $4 million because my value proposed is much higher because of what I talk about, who engages. Because I don't indulge in this, like, purely motivational, low value ad kind of platitude that might be more popular. I wrote it recently about this but going viral is usually a waste of time because you'll spend two days responding to everybody. You'll get interview requests, and not a single deal will show up in your pipeline as a result. But you have burnt two days on it. It looks nice, it feels nice, but it's usually not that important. It's usually just this big pile of noise that gets stumped on your desk, and it's just like, what happened? Why did I bother with that? Like, the circus came to town and threw your neighborhood for two days and then left like nothing good happened, but it was a huge distraction. Whereas, or I should say, versus posting once a week, really kind of case studies for what you're doing with your clients. Ten people like it one person a month who's lurking and doesn't engage, takes notice, messages you wants to work with you, and your average deal size is a quarter million dollars a year. That's an amazing strategy. It does not need a lot in B2B if you're in consumer marketing, it's a little different. Right? If I'm selling something that individuals buy and purchase for $40 or $200, I need a lot of engagement to make that work, and those numbers work. So because we usually work with B2B companies, I often just say, all it takes is one per week or month or whatever, but it only takes, like, one person to be like, that's stuck with me. I want to talk with you about that.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah, it's not a lot. I love the fact that you're really so many of us get caught up with the vanity metrics in marketing. How many followers do I have? How much engagement am I getting? And one of the things I always talk about is, none of that crap matters if you're not generating leads that are turning into customers. So I love the fact that you brought it right back down to that, because that's really it. Are you doing this to boost your ego, or are you doing it to actually generate leads that turn into revenue? So, keeping that in mind, what expectations should people have about getting a return on investment of time spent on their LinkedIn presence?

Alex Boyd: People usually don't see all of the different ways that ROI can be realized. One of the most common ones that people don't usually think of right off the bat is recruiting. I was in my peer group yesterday with eight other business owners, and everyone's talking about how tough it is to hire and recruit. And I'm like, I don't have an issue at all for you to recruit. I write a LinkedIn post and we get five good candidates. People don't usually think about that, but having a LinkedIn presence or a brand presence means when you need something and you've been giving to your network for a while, you can ask. It doesn't need to be sales. It could be an intro, it could be a candidate, it could be a favorite for a friend. It's a platform. And you can withdraw from that yes by having people come and say, I'd talk to your sales team about working with you guys. It could be people saying, I've followed you for a month now, and I read your job post. I'd love to apply. And it's a very easy process because they know who you are, and there's not this big process of needing to build trust, and it can solve a lot of those problems. It can solve recruiting awareness, intros, clients. The most common one is, of course, sales. People oftentimes do it for sales. And the way I would encourage them to track it like we do is to even if you don't have a tool like ours, where we can actually get all of your links in their actions, in your CRM, you can still just when a lead comes in, if it was sourced from LinkedIn. Meaning they said, well, I heard about you because I've been following your CEO for months. Or they DMd you on LinkedIn, put it into CRM with lead source equals LinkedIn or whatever it is, and then run a report that totals up the deal value or the invoices or whatever it is. Where lead source equals LinkedIn. Simple as that. And you can track the ROI. Now, the volume of expectations, how much of this should you get? That depends on your deal size. Anywhere from nothing at first to a couple of leads a month to a handful a month thereafter. We got our 1st 200K year deal that kicked off about three months after I started posting vigorously on LinkedIn once a week or so. And that really hit it for me, like, oh, this is important, this is big. Because my strategy is so dialed in. We make about 13k of revenue per post that I write. But if your deal size is bigger, you can do better than that. If it's smaller, you're probably not doing as well. You might raise money from LinkedIn, you might connect with investors on your LinkedIn presence. What's that worth? It's hard to say. What recruiting fees did you save by not needing to engage a search firm to find candidates for you because you've got them on your own. You can total all these things up, like any organic channel, if done well, this tends to be extremely high ROI, and I have sat down and done this, but I encourage people who are doing okay on LinkedIn to sit down and think about how much have I earned and saved from all sources by my LinkedIn presence. For us, it's been invaluable. We would not be the same company at all without that channel. So the ROI is almost one of the highest things we do. So I would encourage people to say, where does this fit among other sources of return on investment? But it's not going to be a huge quantity unless you really focus on it. Like you're posting daily, you're building your following to hundreds of thousands, then the quantity can be much higher. But if you're like most people, it doesn't need to be much, and it's not going to be a huge amount. It's going to be a handful or two every month. The people who are interested in want to chat one to three clients a month, something like that. Which is more than enough.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yeah. It seems like to be successful on LinkedIn, it's important to think from a long term perspective and you need to be consistent over time. Is that right?

Alex Boyd: Yeah. If I read what you are writing and hear what you're saying for months, over time I can build a much more rich, comprehensive and thorough impression of you and what you believe in, how you operate. And I can build trust with you more than if I see like one thing you wrote one time that isn't enough to bury in my psyche and change my mind. Because marketing at the end of the day is about changing lots of minds at once, whereas sales is about changing one mind one at a time. And if I'm marketing with my social, selling with posting, I'm trying to just change lots of minds all at once and then I bring it to sales and I'm changing one mind one at a time. That's what we're doing. And we can do that much better when we're consistent and give people the chance to change their mind over time because it doesn't happen instantly. Think about the first time you saw an ad for some new single product. Probably took you more than one time to think, I should go by this. You didn't see the Apple Watch the first time and just Google Map off to the store to buy it. It probably took like a couple of news articles, a friend telling you about it, a couple of ads, some of this and that, and it happened over time. Same thing with LinkedIn. People are going to build that trust with you in order to feel comfortable buying from you and knowing what to expect from you when they see overtime. That's why you should be consistent. More people, more impressions over more time equals more people who are primed to want to buy from you. It's not just like be consistent because it's not like a fitness consistency where if you lift enough times, your muscles change. It's less about the habit and more about influencing thousands of people over time versus just whoever happened to log in that day, which is just not enough.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Yes. This has been awesome conversation, Alex. Any last minute thoughts you want to leave us with today?

Alex Boyd: The one thing most people don't do that they can do today without even adopting a larger strategy is take the last person who signed up with them and then write a short LinkedIn post about what they were feeling, thinking and challenged with before they signed up with you, what you guided them to do, how the issue was solved and what they experienced after. Now write a post about that. It's going to look different than your blog case study post. Just write an informal case study post, anonymize it if you want to. Put it out there. That is the single easiest, most profitable thing you can do with the LinkedIn profile. Even if you don't go full bore on buying my course and all our tools and ghost rate for you and all this stuff, just do that. You're going to have the quickest hit of ROI if you do that one thing properly and kind of see that on the bottom with the scrolling. If you need me to look over your post, send it over before you publish it. I'll look it over.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. I appreciate that. So people want to connect with you. They can obviously do it on LinkedIn and that's LinkedIn.com/in/Alexcboyd, or they can always go check you out over at revenuesen.com. We'll make sure that that gets in the show notes as well, so people that are listening to this can easily access that information. But Alex has been awesome, man. I appreciate you taking the time to share your experience and wisdom and hopefully some people get some valuable social selling tips that they can use today. I know I've picked up some good stuff, so thank you so much for that.

Alex Boyd: You are so welcome. And thank you for having me onto it's been fun.

Tim Fitzpatrick: Awesome. For those of you watching listening, thank you. I appreciate you. We've been digging into social selling, which for me falls right into Lead Gen, which is one of the nine common revenue roadblocks we help people remove so they can accelerate growth. Which roadblocks are slowing down your growth? If you want to find out, head on over to Revenueroadblockscorecard.com. Takes less than five minutes for you to discover and assess the roadblocks that you have that you need to remove to accelerate growth. You can also connect with us over at Rialto Marketing.com. That's R-I-A L-T-O marketing.com. Thanks so much for tuning in. Till next time. Take care.

Connect With Alex Boyd

• Linkedin

Links From The Episode

• RevenueZen

About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick

Do you know you have an opportunity for revenue growth and are unsure how to make it happen? Do you lack someone with the time, skill set, and desire to take ownership of marketing to drive results?

When it comes to marketing, it's easy to fall prey to information overload. We understand how overwhelming and frustrating marketing your business can be. But, marketing shouldn't be difficult.

At Rialto Marketing, we work with B2B professional service firms that want to accelerate revenue growth and attract more ideal clients.

So, stop gambling with your marketing budget each month. Put an end to guessing what your next marketing step should be and hoping it works. It's time to remove your revenue roadblocks.

Wouldn't you like to reach your revenue goals faster? Let us run your marketing, so you don't have to.