Linkedln Domination : A Deep Dive with Ed, Author of “No More Cringe”

TITLE:   LinkedIn Domination: A Deep Dive with Ed, Author of "No More Cringe” | Biz Bites episode

LinkedIn strategies for professional services, unlocking client acquisition. Join us as Ed who’s the author of no more cringe reveals some effective LinkedIn strategies to build meaningful connections, improve client acquisition and avoid some of the common networking pitfalls. You’ll discover the importance of authentic engagement and some practical tips.

You won’t want to miss for maximising LinkedIn’s potential. There’s also bonus content, which you can access via the link in the show notes on how to get a 70 percent LinkedIn ads. Connection acceptance rate. And I can tell you if you’re out there, you’re getting a lot less than that. So you won’t want to miss that bit of bonus content.

Then there is so much more that you’ve got in this very jam packed episode. Get your notepads out, get ready. Let’s get into Biz Bites. Hello everyone. And welcome to another episode of Biz Bites proudly brought to you by Com2gether, the people behind podcasts done. For you, because we’re all about exposing other people’s brilliance.

Don’t forget to subscribe to Biz Bites and check out podcasts done for you as well in the show notes. Now let’s get into it.

Hello everyone. And welcome to Biz Bites. I have a wonderful guest today and I’m encouraging everybody to make sure that they stay tuned to this one because if you’re in business you cannot miss this. This is absolutely critical stuff. I’ve been talking to Ed for a little while now and I’ve, Read most of his book and we’re going to talk about that.

No more cringe in a little while, but firstly, I want to welcome Ed to the program. Anthony. It’s great to be here. Thanks so much for inviting me. Absolute pleasure. And look, there’s so many things that we’re going to talk about, and a lot of it’s going to revolve around LinkedIn. But first of all, I wanted to just ask you to Introduce yourself to everyone.

Sure. Thank you. I was born in the sixties, only child. My father was a colonel in the army and back in the sixties, we watched television, at least I did. That was my main entertainment. I watched it a lot. My mother, my father died when I was young. I was four years old when he died. And so my mother had to raise me on her own.

She saw that I really loved TV, but wanted me to, if I’m going to watch TV, I should earn it. So she bought a lot of different puzzles and these math problem books for me to solve math problems. And she said, you can watch all the TV you want, but you either have to solve a puzzle or you have to go through one chapter and fill out all the math questions before you can watch TV.

So I became a really good problem solver, which is I think the reason why I have two engineering degrees. I think I was about 12. And our new neighbor invited us over her home. We had dinner and then she brought out this board game. It was called landslide. It’s a game that it’s it simulates a presidential election and you have to get to 270.

Electoral votes to win. I didn’t know anything about politics. I was 12 years old, but there was math involved, which I liked. And it seemed like a puzzle to figure out how to win. I failed miserably the first time. But I liked the game and I asked my mother to buy it. And I just played that game by myself for hours and hours on end.

And I discovered that there were different paths. To get to enough points to win the game. So then when I started playing my friends, I have my notes next to me and I’d have my paths already determined. And as we were playing as a path got taken away, I switched to another one, but I always won the game.

I never lost after that first time. The reason why I bring that up is because many times when someone’s starting a business, there is one path that they follow with two different methods. It’s either referrals or networking. Okay. And usually at some point that dries up. So then they, maybe they get on LinkedIn and they do the same thing.

They have two methods, one path, those methods, or that method is usually one of them, text posts or cold DMS or combination of the two. There are 16 different, I’ve identified 16 different ways to get a client on LinkedIn. Text posts and cold DMs number 14 and 15 on the list as far as effectiveness. So they are doing low probability things expecting to get a client.

It’s no wonder so many people fail. There are 65, 519 different paths. To get a client on LinkedIn. So what I do with people is I say, let’s figure out which one of these 16 things that you feel comfortable doing. We’ll then figure out what it in what combination provides you the best probability of getting a client.

And we’ll do that. If one fails. We have other paths that we can choose. And when they understand that they now have confidence that they can get a client and go All we’re going to do is get one client and then we’re going to repeat that over and over again And we’re going to have one path that we know really works really well And then we’ll have some alternative paths that we’ll follow and we can adjust them a little bit But once they do that the biggest I think the biggest thing That they get from going through that exercise with me is Yes, we hope you’re enjoying listening to the biz by its podcast.

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There is. So much truth in what you’re saying there. And if I can just pick it up for the sake of people who are listening, who are nodding their head about networking meetings and things where, you know you go through these ideas of I think what’s typical about networking meetings and what happens on LinkedIn as well is people go in expecting immediate results that they’ll walk into the room And immediately people will say, ah, you’re just what I was looking for.

Where do I sign up? And when was the last time that actually happened to anybody? Like never. And yet how many messages do we all get on LinkedIn with people? We’ve never met before. The first thing they do is. Please buy my services. Here’s a list of all of the stuff that I’ve done. When can we talk?

I’m like, what’s the conversation? Where did we start? Did you even know if I needed your services in the first place? Like I, I wish I had a dollar for every time that happened to me. It is crazy how that works. It reminds me of a friend, my wife and I have she was a librarian and She thought she was going to get married to everybody that kind of looked at her, like the pizza delivery guy dropped off a pizza.

And she’s telling us about her future with this pizza delivery guy because he brought her food. I go, that’s his job. He’s the pizza delivery guy. He smiled at me. Gave him a tip. That’s why he was smiling, but that’s the way people act. As soon as someone gives someone a little bit of attention, like they accept a connection request.

Oh, I’ve got a new client. They’re talking about the future, how long they’re going to be working with them, what they’re going to be doing. Let’s meet for 15 minutes. So we can get this started. Doesn’t work that way. It’s, and it’s the same, isn’t it? That we’re trained. In this idea on, on, and we’re going to focus on LinkedIn but it happens on other social platforms as well is that we’re so focused on that number of how many people have actually bothered to click, like how many people have made a comment on it.

And. Most of those people are not your clients. Strangely, very few people. In fact, if you look at the numbers when you post, and this is coming from looking at my numbers and a lot of my clients numbers, LinkedIn only shows your post. To between two and a half to 20 percent of your first level connections.

And most of the time it’s between two and a half and 5%. So a very small percentage of your connections are ever going to see your post. And most people only have about 10%. And that’s being generous of their connections that are in their target market. So it’s, we’re talking about really small slice of people that are going to see your posts, unless you do something that’s really, To make sure that you put, you’re putting your post in front of them.

They’re most likely never going to see it. And it’s such a, an interesting thing. We don’t think about that, but yet when you go and look at your own feed, you wonder sometimes about the stuff that’s coming to you. I know there’s in my feed, there’s one person that I’ve been seeing in that feeds for years.

And once in a while I’ll click like on it, but. What that person does is actually not really relevant to me. They happen to be a former colleague. So I have, I like the person as an individual. We actually haven’t spoken for quite a number of years, but somehow it’s in my feet all the time.

Now I can’t really control that. I don’t, and That’s interesting. If that’s happening to me, and that’s just one example, because there’s several of those. Imagine what’s happening with your own stuff. Putting it out there and just hoping that it’s going to get lots of traction. That is a, it’s a real hit and miss strategy.

You cannot depend on the algorithm to help you build your business. You just can’t. LinkedIn is not in the business of helping you build their business. They’re in the business of driving revenue and their primary methods of driving revenue is sales navigator. So the monthly subscription there, which most people don’t use very well, even though they have the subscription or paid ads.

They’re not going to stay in business for very long. They wouldn’t be in business as long if they were to give away free traffic and put your best prospects in front of your content. It just wouldn’t work for them. That’s the reason why they don’t do it. Yeah. Their philosophy has to be, we want you to try harder.

We want you to keep trying and keep trying harder. We’ll give you enough to make you tease you that it’s you’re going to get somewhere, but. Not enough to, completely be life changing because otherwise if we did that, then as you say, there’s no revenue left for them. And I think that’s the interesting thing about it is that the whole way LinkedIn is structured is in their favor.

The house wins is absolutely philosophy, right? Yep. Yep. Absolutely. That’s for sure. That’s it. That’s exactly the way it works. But I think the point that you make as well is that there are ways to engage with people and it’s not just about. Posting is one part of it. And I think a lot of people get that wrong.

I, I keep playing with the way I post as well. But getting that magical post that goes to, whatever the, pick the number hundreds, thousands, whatever your tens of thousands, whatever you think is relevant to your audience. It’s so hard to get there on that. And unpredictable, as you say, with the algorithm and, in my experience.

Most people at LinkedIn don’t know what the algorithm is doing. So the chances that you’ll know a million to one at best. It definitely is a mystery. It is a mystery. The way I approach it is I take the algorithm, which is a variable that I don’t control on the equation and actually use what LinkedIn allows us to do to my advantage.

So I’m getting my content in front of the right people. And I’m able to It’s I say all the time, it’s easier to make a friend than to make a sale. And so I approach it in a way that is very relaxed, but I’m just out there making friends. And so it makes it a lot easier to do business once your mindset is, I’m just trying to make a friend.

I’m not trying to make a sale just because somebody said except for my connection request does not mean that they want to be a client. What I find really interesting about what you’ve said there is that this is coming from someone whose background is in sales, right? That’s, and is there this inner conflict?

Because, as a salesperson, Don’t you want to just go out and sell? It is. In fact, I have quite a few clients that are in sales and they’re always asking me, why, when do I start selling? When do I start selling? I said, we’re not going to sell. And they go how am I supposed to make any money?

You’re going to be fine. What we’re going to do is we’re going to make friends and then we’re going to get that new connection to discover your content. And once they do that, and they’ve done three things, they’ve become comfortable with you, they trust you. And they’re confident that you can do what you say.

Then they’ll do business with you, but you can’t skip steps. Most people want to skip to let’s do business. You skipped over comfort and trust. They’re not going to they may do business with you if they’re desperate. That’s not the greatest client to have because everything’s got to go right.

If you’re going to keep them and they’re probably going to be very difficult along the way. But once you have comfort and trust and confidence, then you can make mistakes and they’ll be very forgiving because they know that you can help them get to the end goal. And it’s more of a collaboration than them just handing everything over to you and say, okay, you do it and make things happen for me.

Yeah, so I, I think that this whole approach of being friends first is a really interesting one. And I don’t want to give away the whole book. There’s lots of things in the book. No More Cringe. I love the title by the way. So let’s just talk about that for starters, because I think that’s the basis of the whole idea.

Is that when you’re making friends with someone You don’t want to be cringy and yet how many times do you find yourself when you’re reaching out to people being exactly that I was thinking only the other day that how do I actually type an introductory message to someone that doesn’t sound like it’s either cringy or written by an AI, even though it’s genuinely me writing it, it’s so difficult to do that.

And I think you flipped that completely on its head. But tell me what encouraged the title, how did how did that come about? And then let’s get into the whole cringe factor. That actually was, we were talking about viral posts. It became A series of posts that I did that did very well. And so my best performing posts talked about, do you like, there were polls and there were posts about people reaching out to them after you connect and everybody agreed.

Not everybody, the people that want to sell. They thought it was okay, but over 80 percent of people said I hate it when people do that I don’t like it when they start pitching or they start spamming my inbox Or they ask me for a 15 minute appointment. I just met you. I don’t know anything about You don’t know anything about me.

Why would I meet you for 15 minutes? And because there was it was there was so much emotion In the comments that I got, I realized that I was on to something I should cover. I should talk about this process. And so I talk about the seven cringy methods that are out there and everybody can relate to any one of the seven because they’ve probably been approached in that way.

And they probably used one of them cause they didn’t know any better. But. There has to, I figured there has to be a better way and the way you work things and networking, if you I look at it as a client has more value or a connection has more value than just potentially being a client, they could be a referral partner, they could be a collaboration partner, which is more valuable than being a client.

Cause they could bring in several clients to you, or they could just be a friend, somebody that supports your content and you support them. And if you. Go, if you proceed and with that mindset, then you really can’t lose because most people are happy to be friends and they’re happy to support each other’s content.

Yeah, I think that’s an important idea, isn’t it? Because too often. It is a very one sided thing. It’s someone pushing, as you say, for the 15 minute meeting and it’s a very one sided idea that, that is what people want and willing to give up their time and that 15 minute meeting.

Meeting often is very forced because you’re going into that with this idea that I’m going to see if this person really needs my services or otherwise I’ll tick them off the list. And it’s a very guess very sales driven approach. And yet that’s the opposite of what most LinkedIn actually really want to do, but yet that’s the trap they fall into.

For sure. And I think what ends up happening is like you said, the 15 minute meeting usually it’s framed as let’s meet and greet, or let’s get to know one another, but it’s a sales meeting. And let’s be honest, it usually is a sales meeting and that puts pressure on you if you have to try and make a sale in 15 minutes and it puts pressure on the other person.

So it ends up being awkward all the time, as opposed to, I don’t have an agenda right now. I’m just trying to make a friend and then I’m going to see like Where this leads and I talk in terms of roles that people will have. There are one role could be, they’re just, they’re friends and that’s fine.

And when they see your content, they’ll read it and like it. And that’s as far as it’ll go. Or is we work with them. I call them work friends is. You begin working with somebody and you get to know them. So you get comfortable with them. You begin to trust them as you see their content. You don’t have to sell anything because they’re looking at your content and they see what you’re doing.

They see other people commenting on your posts and, that’s social proof that you know what you’re doing when they have the problem that you can solve especially if they’ve been commenting on your posts, they’re going to be congruent with what their public. Statements are, and they’re most likely going to do business with you.

It’s rare when they don’t COVID catching up to you a little bit. One of the things that you said in the book that I think really struck out to me was we live in a permission society. And I think that is lost on a lot of people because as we’ve been talking about, there is this people forcing themselves through their messaging onto people and it goes completely against the way people feel.

You’re right. And it’s. What I found was if you can ask somebody first, would you like to connect would you be open to supporting each other’s content? I like your content. You like mine they’re willing to go along. If you’re if you want to get them on your email list, you ask them, Hey, can I put you on my email list?

But you’ve got to frame it different than that, because just the sound of that makes it seem like, Oh, I’m going to pitch you an email now. Can I update you with it? Thanks. It’s things that I come across. I think you may be of interest, maybe of interest to you. Maybe I see a motivational quote or I saw a New app that you can use to help you with a part of your business and most people are okay with that the emails sequences that I help set up for clients we use the power of the PS to remind people what we do, but we’re talking about stuff that they would have an interest in, like a motivational quote or a product that they could use, or something that’s happening in the news that may affect their business or some government regulate regulation that they’re unaware of.

And so they’ll read those emails and it’s something that a friend might send to them as opposed to somebody who’s trying to market them something. And I think that speaks to, I’m going to read another quote from your book and I don’t want to do a lot of this because I don’t want to stop people from reading the book themselves and what they want out of it.

But this really, I think goes to the heart of what you were saying. Give people an opportunity to become familiar with you, not just as an expert in your field, but also as a person. When you do that, selling becomes superfluous. I’ve just, that’s absolute gold, isn’t it? And true. True. And true. It’s I think people get so caught up in business, but we do business with people at the end of the day.

And so once they get to know you as a person they’ll get comfortable with you. I don’t know whether you’re going to ask me this question or not, but One of the things when we talk about posting and cold DMing and what in the 16 different methods you can use to get a client, the one that’s at the top of the list, the top method is engaging with somebody else’s content.

And the reason for that is they care about that content more than they care about ours. So if we’re supporting them in their content, liking it. Commenting on it, making a comment that draws them into a conversation, asking him a question about it, sharing it with others. We have done something that very few people have and they notice whether it’s a or it’s a comment, I don’t care how big a following somebody has, they notice.

When you repost somebody’s post, I don’t care again how big their network is, they notice. And it’s just those simple acts of doing that get you to a point where they can get comfortable with you. They want to know you. And then at some point they may end up doing business with you. I think what is the precursor to all of that is also that you is also doing the research, isn’t it?

Because it’s. You have to be reaching the right people. And I think most of us, if you look through your own LinkedIn connections, you probably don’t know 70, 80 percent of the people in the first place. And if you were really being serious about going through it and looking, are they your ideal clients?

You probably eliminate at least 50 percent in one go, but nobody wants to do that because you’ll want to seem to have you, like you’ve got thousands of people that you’re friends with. And but I think this, whilst you might not want to change what’s happened in the past, moving forward, you do want to do that, don’t you?

You want to be able to do the research and to get that right. So what are your tips around getting the research right and what people need to be doing? There’s a couple of different paths that they can take. I like to find people that have problem symptom awareness. Not, they may not be aware of the problem, but they’re aware of the symptom of a problem.

I’ll give you an example. In email deliverability, which is one of the things that we do people are getting, their emails are going into spam. And they may not know why that is a problem symptom of something that’s bigger, like the cause of what the problem is. So they may be unaware of the big problem.

They see. There’s problem symptom awareness. I heard, see that some of my emails are going into spam, but they may dismiss that until you come in as an expert. After they’ve gotten to know you, they’re comfortable with you. And you tell them that is, that possibly could be a bigger problem you may want to look into because you may have a problem with one of the mailbox providers.

They’re blocking all of your emails. And I’m happy to look into it and see if that’s the case. At that point, what happens is a couple of different things. Thanks. Number one, you help frame the problem and the solution for them instead of them framing it. I’ll give you another quick example. Probably this is the case in Australia.

If you want to buy a car, you can go on the internet, you can do all your research, you can find the best price for the model and the color of the car that you want, and you can even have it delivered to you. That puts a burden on the local dealers because if now, if you go around to the local dealers, they have to match the exact price that, you can get somewhere else in the country because they can deliver the car at that price.

You’ve already determined. Your buying criteria at that point, and nobody can change it. But if you can catch that person before they’ve formed that buying criteria and maybe you recommended someone that they could go see, and he’s a really good, he took care of us. You did a great job that the dealership did a great job with us.

We love the car salesperson. You go to him and now he can form your buying criteria because you haven’t had a chance to form it yet. Yeah. And that’s why we want to meet people there. So that’s one area that we can meet somebody. If we can identify problems, symptom awareness that they may have, or just a problem symptom.

The other thing, which is a little easy, a lot easier to do is you take your best clients and you break down their profile and you determine like everything about them. How old they are, how long they’ve been in the business, how many employees they have, how big the business is, how much money they make.

And let’s say if you’re working with accountants, one accountant is going to have the same problems that another accountant has. So you know that you can go after those accountants that are a lot like your client. And they probably have the same problems. And if you’re aware of the problem, symptom awareness that your client has, the other people, those prospects have that same problem, symptom awareness.

So you can go in and then frame their buying criteria so that you are the person that they end up working with. Yeah. And that is Insightful in that whole idea of the problem symptom, and I think it’s something that is it is not always easy to understand what that is, I’ve done similar kind of thinking, my Podcast done for you option where, it’s easy to jump in and say, to talk to people who have been thinking about a podcast and really, they just don’t know how to go about it.

And therefore, okay, I can come and I can help you. But it’s actually that the symptom is actually a lot. It’s a lot harder because there’s a lot of people that have never even occurred to them to have a podcast and the symptom is really that they think more people should know how great they are, but they have no idea that they’re not getting enough business.

It’s probably better to frame it in that way that they’re not getting enough business and they wonder why the competition is getting more when they think we’re just as good. We’ve got the expertise here. Why are they getting more attention? And we’re not, there can be any number of reasons why they might be, but it’s a question of what you can do about it.

But it’s actually quite a difficult thing to nudge that into, and to see to people and take them from that idea of this, of the symptom that they’re aware of to a solution that you have. It isn’t. It isn’t easy. You do have to do a lot of research. There used to be some filters you could use on LinkedIn that would help you more closely identify it.

Like you used to be able to do. You can still do this. Where you go into LinkedIn search on regular LinkedIn and you can type in different keyword phrases of a problem symptom awareness that somebody might have. And they may be asking about it. They may be in the comments, they may be saying something about it.

They may be posting about it. And that’s one way to find people. Another way is people that are attending events free LinkedIn events about a specific problem. Then again, you can go through that list and find people. All right, they’re trying to solve this problem. Part of the problem is that their buying criteria is being formed by somebody else.

So you have to figure out how to, based on the buying criteria that they’ve already formed, how do you come into the picture and sell your solution? What angle can you. Bring to the table that maybe corrupts the thinking that they had and makes them reset their thinking. So I maybe that’s, I didn’t even think of that.

That’s a good point. And then they start asking you questions. How would that work? So when you hear those types of responses, okay, I’ve done my job. I have corrupted their buying criteria, and I’m going to help them form a new buying criteria. And it’s to my advantage, but.

Also to their advantage. You don’t want to it’s easy to manipulate people. But what you want to do is make sure you’re doing it in a way that I truly feeling like this is a better path for you to take. And here’s the reasons why. I wanted to just pause for a moment and let everyone know that we’re going to have an extra bit of content at the end of this discussion, where anyone that is interested in getting a 70 percent better connection acceptance.

Then you want to stay tuned for the extra bonus bit of content, and you’ll just have to follow the links in the show notes to be able to access that. So we’ll talk about that in a little bit. There is there’s so much to continue to explore here on what is happening on LinkedIn.

And I just want to talk about AI for a moment and understand From you as if I’m reading between the lines, I think that AI creates an opportunity to stand out, doesn’t it? Because if you’re, if the people are using AI, then you who are not using AI can make it very clear to the, particularly the person who’s posted is that you’re real and sincere.

That gives you an opportunity to stand out, doesn’t it? It does. It does. And I think people right now are being a little bit lazy in the way they use AI. It’s funny that you bring that up because I saw a it was a YouTube video that was talking about creating AI content and how they could produce a really nice looking article in seconds.

Or a post or multiple posts. But when you start reading it and you go through it, you can detect there’s AI in there. If you’re going to use AI for one thing, what the way I do it is I’ll write an entire post and then I’ll go through AI and say how could I improve this? And then it will give me some suggestions, but I’m writing it now.

I’ve got even more direction to make it. Clearer or more engaging. But the A. I. Isn’t doing the writing for me. The eye is giving me some suggestions on how I can improve it. You can do that. You can use a I to help build a strategy. For example, when I mentioned this earlier, when we’ve got these 16 different Methods to get a client.

And then we’re looking at the right combination of methods that will give us the highest probability of getting a client. I’m using a an AI model to help me build that path for a client. And then I’ll also do a simulation. Okay, what happens if this? This method is gone. So now it changes our path. What do we add something?

Do we continue down this path? So we’re able to predict ahead of time what our results are going to be. And we can tell if we run into a problem, we’ve already anticipated that. And then we can change paths or we can make an adjustment to our path. So we get, so the goal is the same in getting a client.

One of the keys that you glossed over a little bit there is you’ve got to track all of this, don’t you? This is the trick is to actually work out what is working best for you. And the great thing is that you don’t have to just do one method. You can try multiple different methods, but you just have to understand what the numbers look like.

And so you ultimately know where you should be putting more of your energy into it. Absolutely. As it, one of the funny things is I look at the 16 methods and we’ve got a probability is as, as far as effectiveness of each one the top one easily is engaging with somebody else’s content.

The bottom one is a celebration post. But if you do a celebration post in the right way, it can be one of the best posts that you can put out there because celebration posts get the most and I won’t, I don’t want to say traction, but they’re going to get the most impressions. If you write it correctly, you can get the most engagement.

And then if you tie it to one of the other 16 methods, or maybe there’s two or three that post can actually get you as many Opportunities to sell is anything else, but you have to understand what is the, what is, what are the order that I use these methods to create the path that will get me to where I want to be?

I get a client. Yeah. And I think It’s that’s the, I love how there’s this clarity in what you’re doing in terms of recognizing there are these different methodologies that you can use and that you have to understand where you’re fitting into which one and what you’re doing. As I was reading your book, one of the things that, kept bringing through my mind was, as we touched on before was, How do you send the right message to someone if you are going to direct message them?

And what I found fascinating was that That the simple idea that just a thanks for connecting if they reach out to you and connect with you that’s enough that you don’t need the rest of it because it’s not about that part of the conversation. Yeah. You don’t want to show your hand too early and I’ll go back to, we’re just making friends.

So I don’t know where this is going to lead. Thank you for connecting with me. And I leave it at that. You’ll have other opportunities to have a conversation with them and there’s going to be the right opportunity to have the conversation with them for them to be more than just a connection. But the thing that I think most people try to do is they project this person is going to be a client and all their actions show that they’re trying to get them as a client.

Whereas if you just leave it open and it’s, They can be, as I mentioned, a friend, a collaboration partner, which is more valuable in my opinion than a client. It doesn’t have the immediate results but long term you’re, it’s a much more valuable relationship or a referral partner, again, not maybe immediate results, but long term a better position to be in or a client.

And is if you approach people in that way, and I don’t know where this is going to go, But let’s talk and get to know one another, get comfortable with one another and see what happens. And one of those four things are going to occur. And if you play your cards it’s going to be one of those things, whether it’s a win position, win situation for the both of you.

One of the things I wanted to just touch on finally is I know we can talk for hours and hours here. There’s a lot of stuff to unpack in this, and I’m sure we’re going to do it again. And we’ve talked about talking and I think this is a good example, by the way, before I even get into that question is that you and I connected on LinkedIn because of someone else that I’ve that I connected with and who has also been a guest on the program, we connected With the simple idea of collaboration and and for, from friendship and collaboration, we had an initial conversation and we just hit it off and here we are doing the podcast.

And I know there are other things that are going to come out of it as a result of that. And that’s a valuable relationship. And people underestimate that hugely because they’re going in with this whole idea of, as we even started the program, when we’re talking about networking, that people go in with this attitude of, who am I selling to?

Yeah, you have to be careful with that. It really does put so much pressure on you and the other person that usually it doesn’t turn out well in sales, especially when you’re cold selling somebody more often than not, you’re, it’s not going to go anywhere. The odds are not in your favor when you approach it in a way where you’re open to possibilities and realize that there are other possibilities than maybe your initial one.

Good things do happen. The other thing that I say is success is a team sport, so your team members can be your clients. Because they can refer business to you. They can do more business with you, your employees friends that you know, can then end up being people that refer business to you or collaboration partners.

So you’ve got to look at is maybe if someone is okay, where are they going to fit on my team? I don’t know yet, but let’s figure it out. And how can I help them in building their team? And when you’re approaching things in that way, everything just seems to fall into place. I wanted to ask you about one other element that you Touched on a little bit earlier on sales navigator, and it’s an interesting tool.

And as you suggest, most people have that have it, don’t use it properly. I think there’s many people out there that don’t have it. And I think one of the things that you need to realize if you want to get places on LinkedIn is that if you’re, it’s like anything, if you’re using only the free tool, then you’re only going to get so far.

It’s not that you can’t do it without it. It’s just that you. You’re doing it with one hand tied behind your back. So talk to me about the value of. Sales navigator and the right way in an overall sense of how to use it. It says sales navigator really is essential. If you’re going to be serious about getting business on LinkedIn, you can get lucky and get a client here and there but you can’t do it on purpose.

For example, in the process that I go through, I I’m using sales navigator to qualify the people that I go after. I’ll use an example here. Let’s say that I challenge you to a game of darts. And you say, maybe you’re like a dart throwing champion. So you go, Oh, this is going to be easy mark for me.

So I go, okay, but two conditions. I get to pick the dart boards that we’re going to use and both yours and mine. So I give you a dart board and it goes from floor to ceiling. It’s massive. And you’re thinking, Oh boy, this is going to be really easy. And then I have my dart board, which is standard size.

The difference between the two is your bullseye is about the size of a pinhead. My bullseye is the entire dart board. And so the second condition is. It only counts when you hit the bullseye. So I could throw mine in the dart and I’m going to hit, as long as I hit the target, I’m going to hit the bullseye every time it’s going to be close to impossible for you to hit that a bullseye.

And that’s the difference between using sales navigator and trying to find somebody without it. I can zoom in on the bullseye where it’s very difficult, almost impossible for you to hit the bullseye if you’re not using sales navigator. It is such a powerful tool. And yet, as you say, I don’t think it’s particularly well used.

And I think it’s also about spending the time with it. I think that’s the problem with a lot of these tools is that people go in with this, okay, it’s just going to give me a whole bunch of things and spit it out really quickly because people don’t want to spend the time. And I think that’s the interesting thing that I’ve learned as well along the journey with LinkedIn.

And I’ve been. Active on LinkedIn for a number of years now is that you go through phases where, you might pump out a bit of content and it’s being posted, could be by someone else. It could be being scheduled in and you, it’s, you just going through the motions and it can be the same with reaching out to people.

Oh, we’ve got to, and there are various tools that are out there that are going to reach out to people for you. And I find all of that. So as your book title would call it cringy and yet there’s so much that’s happening with that. And I think there are two, there are tools out there that are, that will send out birthday wishes to people or anniversaries and things like that, that are taken in there.

And. It’s insincere is probably the best way of describing it. And people don’t know where to go when you even respond to those half the time. I know someone that sort of teaches that methodology and it works. It, if you’re sincere with it and using it as a conversation starter to re energize connections that you might’ve had, and you haven’t spoken to in a long time, it can start a conversation again.

And I get it in that way that works quite nicely, but the other people who have no intention and just send all these things out and just hope that by sending that it’ll start another sales conversation. To me, adjust. It’s infuriating. And I think that’s one of the problems with linked in on the one hand is that it’s a very cluttered space with people doing the wrong thing.

And that’s probably I don’t know what percentage of people are doing the wrong thing, but it’s a pretty high percentage. And but at the same time, it creates opportunities for those Who can follow the methods that you’ve talked about, which is based on the idea of being friends first. It’s an opportunity to cut through it is I will i’ll mention two things to you that You may question so one of the things and this is a fairly new thing that linkedin has changed.

It’s In the your network or I think network or my networking Linkedin there is growth and there is catch up catch up with one of your connections. So I think maybe that came out two or three months ago that they made that change. And so I tested it. I started to go to the catch up tab. And when somebody had an anniversary or a birthday, I would use the automated tab.

Just click. Congratulations on your your anniversary, work anniversary. And I’d send them a gift. The gift part is important. If you send just the message without the gift, it doesn’t work that well. But if you send in a silly gift is what I send like the sillier, the better, especially for the birthdays about 10 to 20 percent of the people will get back to you.

If you do that, it’s like the easiest way to get somebody to get back to you. What you do after that is the key to making it work. If you start Pitching somebody after that, it’s just absolutely the wrong way to do that. You can have a conversation with people from that, and then you just leave it at that.

For example if it’s somebody’s birthday, I’ll send the birthday wish and the gift. And a lot of times they’ll get back to me and say, thank you for wishing me happy birthday. I say, Oh, my pleasure. And I’ll send back a picture of me giving a thumbs up. I’ve got a whole bunch of them with my hat and thumbs up thing.

And that’s all I do. I may come back to them three, four days later, if it’s in a post or maybe in a DM. And if it’s in a post, I will like the post. I’ll comment on the post, but then I’ll go back and I’ll reference their birthday and I’ll ask them how was their birthday. And I’m doing that in the post.

Did you did you go out? To dinner. Did you have cake? Did you get presents? So I asked him one of those three questions, and they usually respond to that from there. I can go back and DM and talk to them a little bit more. But that’s a different approach than what somebody else might do. Hitting the automated happy birthday.

And then maybe sending them a gift and then transitioning to you. Oh, I have this special report that I’d like you to see. Don’t step on their day, let them have their day. And then the next time you talk to them, like what happened during your special day, they’ll remember that. They’ll also remember that you pitched them on their birthday and probably never do business with you at all.

I think there’s just lots of gold in all of the things that you’ve said along the way. We have to wrap things up. So just a couple of things. Yeah, I know. I know. We’re definitely going to do this again. Because we could talk for another couple of hours. Unfortunately it’s the time of day where you’re wrapping things up and I’m just kicking things off for the day.

That’s the nature of what happens when you’re dealing with time zones, but a reminder to everyone. We’re going to have a little bit of bonus content on how to get 70 percent more connection acceptance. So that’s something you want to stay tuned for and follow the click on the links to be able to do that.

A reminder also that we’ll provide links to be able to get access to the book. It’s on Kindle. I believe on Amazon. And that is no more cringe in case you haven’t, in case you’ve missed the title that I’ve been repeating a few times during this, it is a fantastic and very easy read. I encourage everyone that is listening to this.

If you’re listening this far, then you are a hundred percent are interested in LinkedIn and doing it better. And it is a must read book. It won’t take you very long, but you’ll get lots of things out of it. I sat down and wrote lots and lots of notes of things that I want to adjust and change as a result of it.

And you just keep nodding your head throughout the whole book because you think this is just, It’s in many respects, it’s obvious but it’s not obvious because people aren’t doing it. I just wanted to wrap things up and as well and say, aside from all of the different ways that people will be able to connect with you that we’ll share in the show notes, give me the two things.

One is. What’s the great way that people can work with you? And secondly which is probably the most important thing. The question that I like to ask everyone is what’s the aha moment that people have when they start working with you that you wish more people knew in advance of more people had come knocking on your door.

The aha moment is this is not as hard as I thought it was. I’ve been working way too hard to get clients. That’s usually the thing that people say, they’ll also say, now I get it, now I understand what I was doing wrong. So yeah, both of those things are true. I love that. And what’s the best way that people can come and work with you?

Is it start with the book? What’s the best way to do it? I would start with the book. There’s going to be on my profile probably by the time that they are watching this episode there’ll be a quiz that’ll be there and it’ll be like a LinkedIn IQ quiz. It’ll be story based like a choose your own adventure and you’ll get customized advice on how to adjust your approach so that you can get business on LinkedIn.

I love it. It’s been amazing talking to you and so many great bits of advice for people and the whole philosophy of being friends first, it just resonates. And I think it should do with the majority of people out there because it’s a human instinct. And I appreciate the friendship that we’ve been able to grow not just through this podcast, but through previous discussions that we’ve had, and I look forward to that continuing well into the future for now.

Thank you for being an amazing guest on the Biz Bites program. Thank you so much for having me, Anthony. It’s been it’s been a great pleasure. Hey, thanks for listening to Biz Bytes. We hope you enjoyed the program. Don’t forget to hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Biz Bytes is proudly brought to you by Podcasts Done For You, the service where we will deliver a podcast for you and expose your brilliance.

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