
In this episode, Joe Apfelbaum, CEO of Ajax Union shares how to use LinkedIn for business development. Insights he shares include:
Some topics we discussed include:
- Why businesses are often frustrated
- How to get your competitors to send you clients
- How to approach marketing on any platform
- How to build your know like and trust on LinkedIn
- Why a strategy is critical to your LinkedIn business marketing
- How to set goals for your LinkedIn business marketing
- How to create a unique value proposition for your LinkedIn business marketing even if you are just starting out.
- How stories can help you connect with your target audience
- 3 essential steps to fix your LinkedIn profile
- How to find and connect with future customers on LinkedIn
- How to easily monitor and track your progress while using LinkedIn for business development
- The major types of posts that you should be sharing with your audience
- How to leverage LinkedIn features to build your connections and business development opportunities
- How to message people on LinkedIn for business development
- How to be consistent in touching base with your LinkedIn network
- The key question to creating predictable B2B success on LinkedIn
- Some topics we discussed include:
- How to get your competitors to send you clients
- Why are businesses often frustrated?
- How to approach marketing on any platform
- How to build your know like and trust on LinkedIn
- Why a strategy is critical to your LinkedIn business marketing
- How to set goals for your LinkedIn business marketing
- How to create a unique value proposition for your LinkedIn business marketing even if you are just starting out.
- How stories can help you connect with your target audience
- 3 essential steps to fix your LinkedIn profile
- How do you find and connect with future customers?
- How to easily monitor and track your progress while using LinkedIn for business development
- 6 major types of posts that you should be sharing
- How to leverage LinkedIn features to build your connections and business development opportunities
- How to message people on LinkedIn for business development?
- How to be consistent in touching base with your LinkedIn network
- The key question to creating predictability when using LinkedIn for business development
- Links and resources mentioned
- Connect with Joe
LinkedIn is the place to be if you want to connect with others in the B2B space. It is a virtual Rolodex of key decision-makers and other professionals in business. So, it only makes sense to use LinkedIn for business development.
Here are a few statistics that support the focus on LinkedIn for business development
- 45% of LinkedIn users are in upper management
- 94 percent of B2B marketers on social media use LinkedIn to publish content
- 50% of B2B web traffic originating from social media comes from LinkedIn
- 80% of B2B leads generated on social media come from LinkedIn
- 59% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn generates leads for their business
How to get your competitors to send you clients
Joe says the easiest way to become friends with a competitor is to send them a client
Why should you send them a client –
Because:
- the client you have in mind isn’t an ideal client for you and doesn’t share the values you abide by
- By referring them to a competitor you are doing them a favor and building a relationship with them.
- Chances are they’ll refer a client who isn’t a good fit for them to you.
Why are businesses often frustrated?
Joe’s mission is to help hungry entrepreneurs go from frustration to #motivation. So one of the big issues he sees for a business that feel frustrated is a lack of clarity.
The biggest frustration that somebody can have is not being sure where they’re going, how they’re going to get there and how long it’s going to take.
This problem can be especially frustrating for people trying to get from one place to another via the New York transit system. One of the simplest things that they put together to address this issue is to put a sign outside the train that tells you how long it will take to get to a destination.
If you want your customers not to be frustrated, give them a sense of control.
If you want to not be frustrated you need to have a sense of power, a sense of control in your own life and decide what you want.
Joe says – Now you might say to yourself, there’s a lot of things that I want and I’m not really sure what I want. It doesn’t matter whether you’re 100% sure that you want something if you decide that this is your goal, and you go after the goal, even if it’s not the most perfect goal, even if you maybe there’s other goals where you can get more, but at least you decided and you made that decision that’s going to give you something called self-efficacy.
How to approach marketing on any platform
In order for you to be successful on any platform do the following:
Ask yourself – Am I a transactional type of person? Or am I more of a relationship type of person?
Understanding the context of a platform is important. Your answer to the question above will determine the platform you need to use. For example, if you are a transactional type of person then a platform like Craigslist will work well for you. However, if you are a relationship type person interested in building relationships and transforming businesses then a platform like LinkedIn would work well.
LinkedIn is a place where it’s more relationship-based.
Joe says on LinkedIn instead of just being transactional you should ask –
- What can you do to add value to your customer’s life?
- Who do you want to meet?
- Where do you want to go?
- What do you want to accomplish?
- What are your goals and I learned about you?
When you do that you start learning about the person and you really get to know them. You can then add value by either sending them clients, giving them ideas, making introductions, connecting you, whatever it is that you can do for them. By doing so you, then suddenly become more important in their eyes. And when you’re more important in their eyes they start trusting you and trust equals influence on social media. Trust is what influences if you want to be an influencer and then ultimately, you’ll be able to monetize the social media platform.
How to build your know like and trust on LinkedIn
To build your know like and trust you could think of your approach like that of building out your marketing funnel. So on the top of the funnel, it’s more about the “know”. People have to know that you exist, be visible and you need to be top of mind to your future customers.
Most people say you need to build your know, like, and trust.
Joe says he doesn’t think anybody’s going to like you if they don’t trust you. So, trust goes before know and like. A lot of people post something on LinkedIn, but they don’t get any likes.
Why?
Because nobody trusts them. You can see that hundreds of people see your post, but not one of them liked your post. Because they don’t like you, they don’t trust you yet.
So you first have to build that trust with people. And the way to build trust is by engaging with people. When you engage with other people’s posts. They’ll engage in your posts when you like other people’s posts.
You also need to have credibility. You do that by engaging and by being a real human being. Perhaps you can identify with this experience – you post something on somebody’s post and they won’t even reply to you. You’ll send somebody an email and they won’t reply to you.
Would you trust somebody you spoke to and they didn’t answer back instead they just looked at you with a dirty look?
That’s not engaging and takes away from trust.
The third part is getting people to like you. And the best way to get people to like you is by being proactive and reach out to them. How do you reach out to somebody?
You reach out to people through direct messages that slide into people’s LinkedIn notifications.
Joe says that’s how he loves building relationships with people by:
- showing them appreciation
- inviting them to things
- sending them information that’s valuable and relevant to them
- making introductions to them
- And of course, by personalizing and getting to know who the person is.
Why a strategy is critical to your LinkedIn business marketing
Most people don’t have a strategy. They’re just showing up and they’re going in their feed.
Joe has created a three-step process to address this called Branding, Building and Boom’in.
He says – Most people just want to be Boom’in and a Rainmaker but in reality, they’re an order taker.
How are you supposed to go to be a Rainmaker when in all probability your actions to date resemble that of a lurker? How’s it going to work?
The reason why you’re lurking is that you don’t have Branding, you don’t have the right strategy, which means you don’t have specific goals, business goals, marketing goals, LinkedIn goals.
You also don’t have a specific target market, you’re trying to go after business owners or decision-makers but that is still too broad a market. You need to niche down. You need to really understand who the most ideal client is.
Joe says the biggest problem he sees is that of most businesses targeting everyone. And if you are targeting everyone, it’s not going to work. But people don’t want to limit themselves.
The other issue is that of the messaging you’re giving your audience. You can’t have the right messaging unless you know who you’re targeting and if you don’t know who you’re targeting, you can’t figure out your ideal audience’s pains, their gains, and other relevant information about them. You can’t have the right competitive advantage
Steps you need to take are:
- Branding – build out your branding which is your strategy.
- Building. Understand what stories are relevant to your audience. You have to build out your stories, build out your profile and understand what dashboards you need in order for you to track return investment and build those too.
- Boom’in. In 15 minutes, a day, you need to be posting for visibility, engaging for credibility and direct messaging, for outreach. And that likeability that you create, by really having that one on one touch, where people really get to know you on an individual basis.
How to set goals for your LinkedIn business marketing
Step number one is what is your business goal?
- What do you want to generate?
- How much revenue do you want to make?
- How many more clients do you want?
- What’s a client worth you?
- What’s your lifetime value?
- What’s your cost per acquisition?
Really break down and understand your business goals then understand your marketing goals.
- Like what do you need to do in order for you to get to that business goal, how many calls you need to get on, like, really break down what you need from a marketing perspective?
- How many email addresses do you need?
- How many touch bases do you need?
- And then from a LinkedIn perspective, how much time do you need to be spending on LinkedIn and what you need to specifically be doing on LinkedIn.
To be successful you need both an outcome and a process goal for using LinkedIn to hit your marketing goals which turn enables you to hit your business goals.
And finally, there’s the messaging. You have your goals, you have your target, then you need your messaging. How do you come up with your messaging?
By asking questions like –
- What are the questions that you need to ask people?
- What are the questions you get asked quite often?
- What are the questions you need to research with your competitors to figure out what your own competitive advantages?
How to create a unique value proposition for your LinkedIn business marketing even if you are just starting out.
The answer to that lies in positioning. Joe says if you’re brand new, and you have never serviced anyone – go service people for free.
In servicing people for free you get to understand what value you can provide and build the social proof you need via testimonials.
Get those testimonials and then you’re in business.
How stories can help you connect with your target audience
People are very shy to actually share personal stories.
Joe on the other hand shares stories a lot on social media. In fact, you could say he is constantly sharing stories.
3 essential steps to fix your LinkedIn profile
There are three steps to making your profile successful. There’s identity, summary, and history. Those are the three areas that you need to focus on.
- Identity is Who are you? Who are you? What is your name? What is your title? What image do you have? What message do you want to send people based on who your identity is?
At times we have weird or conflicting identities like a person who works full time at one place and is a coach on the side. You really need to figure out who your identity is and amalgamate or streamline what you have available on your profile.
- Understand your summary. Most people don’t have a call to action, most people don’t have an organized summary with the right bullet points and the right areas that they need to have inside their summary.
- History covers what have you done in the past. Stories that get you to where you are today.
If you focus on those three areas and spend the hour or two hours that you need actually optimizing your profile in 15-minute increments, you can completely revamp your profile.
In fact, your profile is more important, then your website because when people search on Google, your profile will show up on top of your website, typically, and that’s where people are going to go.
Did you know your profile has caller ID on it? On LinkedIn you can see who came to your profile if you have a LinkedIn premium account, which is very powerful.
So, optimize your profile, you’ll get more visibility. You’ll have more people searching for you. You’ll have the right keywords. Because again, you come up on Google, you want to make sure you have the right keywords on your profile. And that’s really the idea. Most people don’t really understand what they need to do on their profile. That’s we have a whole section in our course, that really walks people through step by step what to do on their profile and exactly how to do it.
Your profile has an area up the top that is particularly important. It’s called a headline. Some people use it as a title, but that’s not what your title is. Your title goes under your experience, not under your identity.
Under your identity, you have the ability for it to really be able to tell a story covering details like:
- Who do you work with?
- How do you help them?
- What do you do?
- Who are you?
Every single time you leave a comment on LinkedIn, your headline shows up after your name and your image. So, you really want to be able to focus in on that headline and split tests and do different headlines, change it around to see what works best and keep optimizing it. Because that is literally what gets the most visibility after your name. If somebody sees your name and they don’t know who you are, they’re going to forget your name in a second. But they often won’t forget your headline.
Joe’s headline has his primary keyword in it. B2B marketing. many people reach out to him because they see the words B2B marketing and they’re a B2B business. He says he gets leads all the time, just because he has those two words inside my headline. That and the fact he helps entrepreneurs go from frustration to motivation. People that are entrepreneurs relate to that as they do to the fact that he is also a CEO and runs his own business.
If you look at people that have a successful headline, you’ll see that they’re actually telling a story inside their headline.
Kylie Chown, another LinkedIn trainer and expert also recommends that you establish your brand’s tone and voice
How do you find and connect with future customers?
To find and connect with future customers you need to understand two things.
- You have to understand who your target customer is. But more important than your target customer is your target partner. Would you rather have someone refer 3 future customers or have a client?
- You should want the referrals because that’s three times the amount of revenue. You want people who are going to refer business to you, and you want to be able to refer business to them as well. So look for networkers look for connectors.
If you are thinking why should you connect with a bunch of random people that are not my ideal clients? Because they know your ideal clients.
Why should you even use LinkedIn when my target customer is not on LinkedIn?
Because chances are that your target partners are. The LinkedIn network is not to sell, not to prospect, but to really connect. That’s what most people are missing.
So when you’re connecting with someone, you really have to ask yourself three things.
- Do I know this person?
- Is this person ideal for my business either as a client or referral partner?
- Do I want to get to know this person? Are they geographically close to me? Or do they have the type of business that I’m interested in? Or do they seem like they have the personality that would vibe with me?
If the answer is yes to all of those three questions, or to one of those three questions, then you’re more likely to accept if not realize you have a limited amount of slots for connections. There are close to 700 million people on LinkedIn, but you’re only allowed to have up to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn.
Where focus goes energy flows. So, what we want to do is you want to make sure that you’re focused on connecting to the right people.
How to easily monitor and track your progress while using LinkedIn for business development
Joe says he uses 3 different kinds of dashboards for his endeavors on LinkedIn.
The first dashboard is called the connection dashboard. This dashboard helps you recognize strategize and prioritize your contacts on LinkedIn.
The second dashboard is the activity dashboard. If you’re not measuring it, you’re not going to improve it. So you got to measure your activity.
What are you doing in terms of posts?
What are your checklists – all the different things that you need to be measuring your articles? Measure it inside the activity dashboard.
The third dashboard is to measure your strategy.
What is your strategy?
What is your content calendar, your asset library?
What is your actual plan for posting engaging and messaging on LinkedIn?
What are the scripts, the libraries that you’re going to have that you’re going to use?
That way you can be successful on LinkedIn in just 15 minutes a day
Why use dashboards instead of a CRM?
If you’re networking, you’re not going to add a bunch of random LinkedIn connections to your CRM. So instead, a customized spreadsheet works better. It’ll allow you to have the right columns in place that will show you who’s the most strategic for your business, who do you know who you not know, who’s a priority, so you can quickly go through it and really prioritize the people that you need to be proactive about prospecting, networking, connecting building relationships with because on LinkedIn, you don’t have the ability to do that.
Once you build a relationship with somebody, take them from the spreadsheet or from the dashboard, then you put them into your CRM. But before that, it’s kind of like a pre CRM dashboard that allows you to really be able to plan out who you’re going to be networking with.
6 major types of posts that you should be sharing
There are three major types of posts that Joe recommends for people to share.
Joe says he recommends people spend their time posting regular posts, posting articles, or posting media.
You also have to know the best way to do it. He says there are actually six different types of posts that you can be posting.
1. Blog posts
What better way to build you brand awareness and spark engagement while also expanding your reach than by sharing your blog posts.
Good practices to keep in mind are:
- Introduce the post with a personal comment
- Shorten the URL with bit.ly
- Ensure your images look good
For example, Rand Fishkin of SparkToro recently shared this post
2. Industry news and research
LinkedIn is a platform where users are looking to stay up to date with the latest developments in their industry. Sharing industry news and research is ideal on this platform.
Consider sharing your case-studies, whitepapers and original research as Vodafone has done in the post below.
3. How to or list posts
According to a study of LinkedIn posts, how-to posts and list style posts receive the most attention. Also, posts between 1900 and 2000 words in length get the most views, likes, shares, and comments.
Marketing pro, Jay Baer has built his business around sharing how and list style posts like the ones below:
4. Quick tips
Posts offering tips and tricks often do well on LinkedIn especially if they are aligned with leadership, productivity and success. Text quotes along similar lines also work well.
Someone who has built quite a following on LinkedIn by sharing such posts is Oleg Vishnepolsky. Check out a recent post below.
Gary Vaynerchuck frequently posts such tips like the one below
5. Visual updates
Sharing videos or photos is a great way to show off your business personality or expertise. Attractive, genuine, videos or photos taken at work or at business events can gain a lot of attention and provides a human element to your brand.
Kris Ruby for example shares posts like this one when appropriate.
6. Company updates
Company news can often be centered around – the company. That isn’t really of interest to your audience. However, if there is an aspect that is visual and interesting it can be a great fit for your LinkedIn audience.
In the example below Implement Consulting Group shares a video of what it looks like in the life of one of its consultants.
Richard Branson also shares company updates that resonate with his audience.
Company updates are a great way to let your followers get to know you better. They personalize your company and encourage people to engage at a whole new level.
What Not to Share on LinkedIn
Every social channel has its own flavor and preferences as to what types of content does well and what doesn’t. A recent study suggests that there are two types of posts that do not do well on LinkedIn:
- Anything with a headline that poses a question
- Videos
There are also three different types of media to keep in mind. There’s video, there’s images, and there’s animated gifs.
Video could include things like a video with an industry expert reverse engineering a successful outcome.
With images, you need to know how to find images on Google and how to find images and other places or create images using Canva and other tools that will easily allow you to be able to have a library of images that you can use.
There are animated gifs that they get a lot of exposure and you need to know how to create them or places where you could find suitable animated gifs.
How to leverage LinkedIn features to build your connections and business development opportunities
So what does an endorsement really mean? What is the difference between a recommendation or an endorsement?
An endorsement is where you just give a like to somebody skill, you’re not saying that they are an expert in that skill, you’re just saying that you’re giving them kudos for having that skill, their self-reporting one of the 50 skills that they have and because they have it on their profile, and you want to show that person a little love for their skill.
If a person says they’re doing marketing, give them a thumbs up for marketing, that’ll make them feel better. No one will even know that you did that. The purpose of endorsements, in general, is so that people can come up in searches for those specific keywords.
But at the end of the day, if you look at your profile and you have like warehouse operations and SaaS customer service endorsements, that doesn’t really help you that much. What you want to have are things that are related to your goals. So for example, for Joe I might have social selling as a goal, I might have LinkedIn marketing, as a skill, I might have b2b marketing or public speaking because I want to do 50 speaking engagements in the next year, I do 100 of these podcasts every single year. And often because I have those skills listed, and I’m highly endorsed for those skills.
Now, recommendations are very difficult because they are a personal note that a connection can send about specific qualities, skills or abilities during a time you worked together in some capacity or on a project. They are difficult to get but are worth getting from your connections as they are like social proof.
You can’t get recommendations or endorsements from people that are not your connections. So it’s important for you to build a relationship with your connections. So you get those endorsements and recommendations from them.
How to message people on LinkedIn for business development?
So, and messaging, how would we go about that?
So if you’re just posting and engaging, you’re doing great They say if you build it, they will come. No one is going to come. You’ve got to market it. And you got to reach out to people. So how do you reach out to people?
Joe recommends his three-step process which is greeting, feeding, and then meeting
Most people want to go straight to the meeting, going straight to the meeting is like walking over to somebody at a bar and saying – Let’s get married. Nobody wants to get married at a bar, they want to drink and have a good time.
It’s the same thing with LinkedIn, nobody wants to get married to you and meet with you right away. They want to get to know you first, you first greet them, thank them for connecting with you build rapport with them.
And then once you do that, then feed them by showing them appreciation, inviting them to things, giving them information that’s relevant to them or asking them what information they want.
And of course, making introductions to them and then getting to know them as an individual, personalizing the communication and ask them questions about themselves.
Once you feed people properly, then you have the right to ask them for a meeting. If you want more success, you got to be posting engaging and messaging. You can’t just do one without the other.
If you try to message somebody but you never posted or engaged, it’s less likely that they’re going to know who you are. But if they see you post every single day and you’ve been nurturing them for many, many months, when you message them, they’re going to know who you are.
Joe says –
When I message somebody, they know who I am. They know who I am. They’re not wondering who is this guy Joe? They’re like, oh my god, Joe messaged me. I got to get on the phone with him.
By the way, that’s how I get on 1000 phone calls of the year using the social selling system. I’m not just teaching something. I’m living it and I have an agency, a multimillion dollar agency that is supported on the back of what I’m teaching right here.
How to be consistent in touching base with your LinkedIn network
Joe says the best way to track who you’re talking to and who you’re not talking to is using our dashboards. They literally walk people through understanding the connections dashboard. It provides a snapshot of who you communicated with, who you did not communicate with, how often you communicate with, who actually replied to you, who didn’t reply to you etc.
And then once they turn into a customer to a prospect, you move it into a CRM. Before that time, the reality is that most people are not going to reply to you. So you got to know how many times you message them and who you message. Hence why using a dashboard makes things easier to manage.
The key question to creating predictability when using LinkedIn for business development
If you want to create predictable business success, and you need referrals to grow your business, you have to be nurturing your relationships.
Ask yourself –
- Who are my 100 most important relationships that are most likely and are in the position to refer business to me?
- How often am I top of mind with those 100 people?
- If you don’t have 100 people start with 10 and then make it 30 than 50. And get to that 100 number when you have 100 people that know you, that trust you, that like you and remember you because you’re Top of Mind with them.
That’s when you take your whole business and your whole life to a predictable level of success.
Links and resources mentioned
- Check out Ajax Union
- Check out LinkedIn Authority Blueprint
- Check out Evyrgreen Networking
Connect with Joe
- Connect with Joe on LinkedIn