Welcome to Linkedin Bootcamp!

The techniques and approaches we use in this course are not gimmicks. They are strategic, evergreen, practices that have been battle-tested by an agency under pressure to get leads. We'll be using tools native to LinkedIn and learning white hat practices that will keep you from getting account penalties.

We’ll talk about using the Money Client Matrix to make sure you target the right audience on LinkedIn in just a moment.

This bootcamp was designed with two primary goals in mind:

1. Empower you to learn how to use LinkedIn to get B2B leads. I want you to learn how to think – not what to think.
2. Get you excited to get out there and creatively use LinkedIn to meet your sales goals.

First, a little housekeeping

LinkedIn is different than other social platforms - even though on the surface they look relatively similar.  Let’s spend a moment going over these high level topics that will set the stage for your outreach moving forward:

• Frame of mind
• Types of accounts
• Account Settings

Frame of mind

When people are on LinkedIn their frame of mind is very different than when they’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you name it. What’s on their mind while on LinkedIn? Work. Specifically, things that will make themselves successful.

The implications? Everything you do and say should be in line with the culture of a professional platform that brings professional value to its members. That influences your posts, messaging, grammar, comments, people in your network, everything.

Types of accounts

When it comes to types of accounts LinkedIn has a lot going on. There are free, premium, sales navigator (wait for it... three kinds of sales navigator accounts alone!), and recruiter accounts.  Not to mention advertising accounts if you want to do paid.

What’s the best type of account for you? Let’s do a benefits comparison.

Note: Sales Navigator features below is the cheapest plan titled "Professional"

Account Settings

Few platforms give users the amount of account control and privacy LinkedIn does. But there is a downside - it gets overwhelming. Here are a few account settings you’ll want to visit before moving forward.

Email Communications: Update your email notifications preferences. If you don’t? Your inbox will be inundated with emails. Most of which won’t matter.

Privacy: Make your LinkedIn profile indexable by search engines. You’d be surprised who googles your name and finds you via search.

Who can see your email: If you’re getting spammed by new connections change this from 1st degree connections to only you. Or, let everyone see it to make it easier for them to contact you off LinkedIn.

Who can see your connections: Worried about competitors cherry picking your network to get leads? Change this setting to 'only you.'

Active status: The magical green dot that lets people know when you’re on LinkedIn. Turn it on to create more opportunity.

Targeting with the Money Client Matrix

It took me years of failure and success to learn what worked, what didn't, and more importantly WHY. When I figured it out I kept the answer under lock and key. I named it the "Money Client Matrix" because it was so effective at vetting potential clients during my own sales meetings. Now I'm giving it to you. Why? Because when you learn who to target on LinkedIn everybody wins.

The two axis

Targeting the right audience comes down to asking yourself two questions. Each question becomes an axis in a 2x2. Those two questions are:

1. Can I get a laser-focused list in search?
2. Is my service/product desirable to prospects?

Let's talk briefly about each question before getting into each quadrant.

Axis #1 – Segmentation (can I get a laser-focused list)

This line divides the left and right sides of the diagram. Can you use LinkedIn’s advanced search to create an outreach list made primarily of potential customers? Yes or no. Getting a laser focused list is critical because it means every person is worth talking to.

Axis #2 – Probability of Desire (do people want what you sell?)

This line divides the top and bottom sides of the diagram. Don't drink the company sales Kook-Aid. Put yourself in the shoes of the people you’ll be talking to. How desirable is your service or product? Be honest with yourself. Are your prospects excited about what you sell or not? The more desirable your product/service is the higher your conversion rates will be.

The Four Quadrants

Those two questions about your target audience produce four answers. Each answer is a quadrant in the Money Client Matrix. Let's talk about each one.

Can’t Segment – Low Desire

This is the top left quadrant – and the worst group to target. It means you cannot use LinkedIn to get a good outreach list and the people you’ll be speaking with don’t desire what you sell. Avoid this quadrant at all costs. You’ll waste a significant amount of time reading through irrelevant profiles and you’ll have to invest serious time into persuading your connections to make a purchase. Do everything you can to move out of this quadrant. Leaving this quadrant usually involves changing your target audience entirely.

Can Segment – Low Desire

This is the top right quadrant. You’ve been able to get a list made almost entirely of potential customers - which is significant. Having that list increases your efficiency because almost every person on your list is worth talking to. However, they don’t desire your service/product, and that means you’ll need to invest significantly more time and resources into convincing them to purchase. If you find yourself in this quadrant do everything you can to make your service/product more desirable. You may need to change how you present what you sell, create a new product, or introduce an appealing entry level loss leader.

Can’t Segment – High Desire

This is the bottom left quadrant. Here you cannot get a good list. Your reasons may vary but are often due to LinkedIn search limitations or unique requirements you have in order to make a sale – things  you won't know without asking the company directly. On the plus side, you know there are some people on that list who really want to buy what you sell.  If you find yourself in this quadrant try using Boolean in Sales Navigator to get a better list. If you cannot get a better list because of unique sales specifications or search limitations be aware that you’ll spend extra time reading through profiles that aren’t a good fit and having conversations with connections just to learn whether or not they meet your sales criteria. Both will dramatically decrease your time efficiency. If you can't get out of this quadrant make sure the service or product you're selling is high ticket to offset the extra time you'll spend vetting people on LinkedIn.

Can Segment – High Desire (LinkedIn Money Clients)

This is the bottom right quadrant and nicknamed "The Money Quadrant." It means you’ve been able to get a laser focused list using LinkedIn search. There's opportunity talking to each person on your list. And that group highly desires what you sell. They may not be at the end of the sales cycle when you first connect, but they value what you offer and it's a countdown until their purchase.

Quick Review: Money Client Matrix

In our last lesson we discussed using the Money Client Matrix to make sure you target the right audience. Getting into The Money Quadrant means you have a laser focused list.

HOW do you create a list made entirely of potential clients to maximize your time efficiency? 

There are two secrets to getting a laser focused list:

1. Sales Navigator
2. Boolean

1.) Search in Free/Premium versus Sales Navigator

Free/Premium

As an example, let's say we're looking for CEO's in Beverly Hills California. In Free/Premium we can’t target Beverly Hills (it's not an option). We also can't select the title as "current." Our search gives us about 112,000 people. That sounds great! But when you get into the details you realize it's not a very focused list. That list will include people both outside Beverly Hills and who are not currently CEO's.

Sales Navigator

Plain and simple Sales Navigator has more search filters. If we use Sales Navigator to do the same search we're able to target the city of Beverly Hills and include individuals who are currently CEO's. That brings our list from 112,000 to 8,000. Wow.

 Additional Sales Navigator search fields include:

• Company headcount
• Seniority level
• Years in current position
• Years at current company
• Function
• Company type
• Groups
• Posted content keywords
• Company search
• Search within saved accounts
• Search exclusions
• Search within or exclude custom lists
• Search within tagged companies and individuals

2.) Using Boolean

Boolean lets you perform a search within a search, and it's something you'll use every single time you're creating an outreach list. There are five boolean search operators (which we'll discuss in a moment). They are:

• NOT
• OR
• AND
• "quoted"
• (parenthesis)

Boolean search will work in the following search fields:

• Company Name (in Sales Navigator only)
• Title
• Keyword
• First Name
• Last Name

NOT search

How It Works: Excludes a particular term by including an uppercase NOT immediately before it.

Use Example: president NOT vice

OR search

How It Works: Includes one or more terms in a list by separating the terms with an uppercase OR.

Use Example: owner OR ceo OR president

AND search

How It Works: Requires two or more terms to be used at the same time by adding AND as a separator.

Use Example: seo AND analytics

Quoted search

How It Works: Looks for an exact phrase by enclosing that phrase in quotation marks.

Use Example: “sales manager”

Parenthesis search

How It Works: Allows you to do a more complex search by adding parentheses. Think high school algebra.

Use Example: "president" NOT (“vice” OR “assistant” OR “interim”)

Always search and refine

Even after you've mastered boolean getting the right list takes time. Do your search, scan the results, and view a few profiles. When you find profiles that you don’t want in your list update your boolean to exclude those types of profiles.

Free/Premium Limitations

When using search in a Free/Premium account Linkedin now limits you to 5 search operators. Once you use more than 5 you'll be told there are no search results. That's usually not true. There are search results (and they're probably very specific). You'll need to keep it under 5 unless you're using Sales Navigator.

Cheat Sheet: Boolean to get you started

Special Note: copy/pasting quotation marks “” from one browser to another can break the boolean if your browser/OS changes how the quotation marks as they open and close. If you get an error trying to use this boolean when copy/pasting, you may have to retype the quotation marks "" directly in your browser's search field.

In-House Marketing Decision Makers:

Current Title: (“marketing” OR “cmo”) NOT (“field” OR “analyst” OR “trade” OR “financial” OR “channel” OR “intern” OR “freelance” OR “assistant” OR “freelance” OR “interim” OR “data” OR “crm” OR “partner” OR “relationship” OR “shopper” OR “vice”)

Owner/President/CEO

Current Title: (“owner” OR “president” OR “ceo” OR “chief executive officer”) NOT (“vice” OR “interim” OR “assistant” OR “sales” OR “financial” OR “human” OR “resources” OR “marketing” OR “search” OR “hiring” OR “placement” OR “fleet” OR “operations” OR “management” OR “independent” OR “consult” OR “finance” OR “financial” OR “development” OR “legal” OR “counsel” OR “board” OR “product”)

You have your list...now what?

LinkedIn's a great tool for B2B sales but the platform doesn't give much of a game plan for B2B prospecting. A tool isn't a plan. That leaves many sales teams in the dark about what an organic campaign looks like - let alone what needs to be done on a daily basis. In the end, the lack of information results in a lot of...let's be generous and call it "uneducated bad practice."

Success = Vision + Action

Both vision and daily action plans are critical for your success. Action without a clear vision means you'll end up doing meaningless things that don't move the sales needle. Vision without action goes...literally nowhere. Here are two tools to help you get vision for your LinkedIn campaigns and create a daily action plan so you can be successful.

Getting vision with a Journey Map

There are a lot of steps that happen between finding your target audience on LinkedIn and a sale. A journey map is a great way to give you vision for your campaign as a whole. Seeing the big picture all at once makes the entire process easier to comprehend.  Additionally, having a clearly defined action plan that takes you from a starting point to a destination brings dramatic clarity in planning your day-to-day activities.

Tackling the Daily Grind with a Campaign Calendar

Big picture maps are great for vision but...let's be honest with ourselves. When the rubber hits the road most of us have a hard time being diligent following through with the daily things we need to do to fill our pipelines. That's why turning your journey map into a campaign calendar with daily action items is so helpful. If you're working with an in-house team or VA, it's also a great way to plan and delegate daily responsibilities.

You can schedule your campaign calendar any way you'd like, but we've found it helpful to plan campaigns in one month intervals. At the end of each month review your KPI's (coming up in a later lesson) and use that information to make data driven revisions to your daily activities.

The money is in the messaging

And no surprise, it's also the hardest thing to do well. Saying the right thing, to the right person, at the right time is the unicorn of B2B relational sales. Miss the mark on any of those three things and your pipeline will be empty.

Stages of messaging

As you look through the campaign journey map and begin to plan out your messaging you'll notice several broad stages:

1. Connection requests
2. First message after connecting (conversation starter)
3. Call to action
4. Top of mind

While each stage of messaging is super critical to master, today we're going to be focusing exclusively on starting a conversation with a new connection after they've accepted your connection request. This message sets the tone for the entire conversation moving forward.

Beware your hidden enemy

We'll discuss strategy in a moment. First, we need to talk about a hidden enemy. A mindset. One that's toxic to messaging and will ruin your lead generation efforts. What is this hidden enemy?

Assumptions. Specifically, assuming that...

1. Your new connection is a good lead.
2. Your new connection is at the end of the sales cycle.

Those two assumptions provide the framework for the messaging everyone hates receiving on LinkedIn. The "connect & pitch." Think you're the exception who doesn't assume? You probably aren't. The thing with assuming is...we don't realize we're doing it. That's why it's an assumption. Pay attention to how you're viewing new connections and the assumptions you're making when talking to them.

Assumption based messaging devalues your network

Here's a hard truth you need to remember. Most people you connect with on LinkedIn will not be ready to buy from you that same day. Some will be, but the majority won't. Sending messages assuming your new connections are ready to buy will burn bridges with the majority of your network that's not ready to buy now.

Assumption based messaging only generates profit from the tiny percentage of people willing to hear your sales pitch now. Maybe 5%. Which means you are wasting 95% of your network. 

Use the QuAD Method

The secret to removing assumption is asking the right questions to get the right information. Not sure if someone's actually a good lead? Ask. Not sure if they're ready to buy now? Ask. How novel, right? It works. We call it "The QuAD Method." It stands for:

• Question: Focus on your connection (not yourself), asking meaningful questions related to what you both do.
• Answer: Your connection will give you the answers and information you're looking for (no more assuming).
• Discussion: Now you can have an informed discussion giving them advice (and potentially a sales CTA) that's relevant to their immediate needs.

This isn't a cookie cutter script. It's a framework meant to guide you toward asking the right questions.

Here's an example

Let's say you want to sell Google Ads Management to roofing companies.

Things you don't know

• If they are currently using Google Ads
  • If not
    • Why?
    • Are they considering it?
    • Have they in the past?
  • If they are
    • Is it being managed in-house or by another company?
    • Are they happy with their results?

An assumption driven message after connecting might sound something like this: "Thanks for connecting [first name]! We do google ads for roofing companies just like [company name] and get amazing results no contracts 1000% ROI. When do you want to schedule a meeting so I can give you a contract?"

Using the QuAD Method we focus on asking the right questions, to learn their needs, and provide relevant value in the conversation: " Thanks for connecting John! Your company does amazing work. I see your trucks here in town all the time. You're probably slammed with the hail storm we had last month. Are you guys using google ads to capture that demand and stay busy in the off season or are you mostly taking calls from insurance referrals?"

From there, follow your messaging map and move the conversation in the right direction. 

Important: Linkedin sunset tags and replaced with Lead Lists in September 2020. Tagged leads were migrated to lead lists.

Functionally lead lists work like tags only better. However, you have a limited amount of saved leads (1,500 in Sales Navigator Pro and 5,000 in team). This may be changing in September 2020 as lead list limits were just increased from 250 to 1,000. While we wait for Linkedin to transition use lists instead of tags. If you had previously been using tags, Linkedin will turn those tags into lists along with the corresponding people and accounts.

LinkedIn is a jerk

Yes. You read that correctly. Why? Because even when you play by the rules LinkedIn doesn't give you any data for organic lead generation. No KPI's. No expectations. No anything. What about profile views? That's a vanity metric, not a money in the bank KPI.

Why no data is a BIG problem

You cannot optimize your efforts or set predicable sales goals without any information. Without LinkedIn data how are you supposed to:

• Evaluate your connection request acceptance rates?
• Know if the amount of people replying to your messaging is to low?
• Record how many connections converted to your sales funnel?
• Know how many leads became clients?
• Estimate how many connection requests you need to send to meet your sales goals?

As a service provider this lack of information presented three significant problems for us that we needed to overcome. We needed that data to:

1. Create reports for clients.
2. Evaluate campaign performance and optimize under performing areas.
3. Have correct expectations for campaign performance for pricing our services (if we send out X connection requests each month we can expect X conversions).

Using Tags to measure KPI's

For all you new marketers a tag is a label (or description) that you apply to a person. KPI is an acronym for "Key Performance Indicator" and is a measurable number used to evaluate success. By naming your tags after the KPI's you want to measure, and applying those tags to your LinkedIn connections as you engage with them, you'll get the data you need. That data will empower you to measure the success of your efforts, optimize under performing areas, and create realistic sales goals based on historical information.

Tagging options

There are two common ways people use tagging on Linkedin.

1. Browser extensions.  While an option, it's not our recommendation. Since extensions aren't native to LinkedIn they're often blacklisted, may not be updated if there's a change, and have limitations with their integration on the platform. On the plus side, you don't need a paid account to use them.
2. Tagging built into Linkedin Sales Navigator. This has remained or go-to for measuring KPI's, creating reports, optimizing campaigns, and creating realistic goals for campaigns. It's native to Linkedin, integrates with search, and isn't going anywhere.

Below: Sales Navigator Tagging

Tag names should match the KPI's you want to measure

• Invited pending (KPI - acceptance rates)
• No Reply (KPI - engagement rates)
• Replied - in funnel (KPI - engagement rates)
• Replied wants follow up (KPI - engagement rates)
• Converted to sales funnel (KPI - conversion rates)
• Client (KPI - acquisition rates)
• Not a lead (KPI - list quality and to exclude those connections from top of mind campaign)

Turning tag counts into KPI reports

Since tags are built right into Sales Navigator creating a report is easy.

Go to search, select your tag, and get the quantity for that tag. 

Add the tag quantities to your KPI spreadsheet.

Using KPI's for campaign optimization

What percentage of your connection requests are being accepted? You may be doing an amazing job – or failing miserably. If your connection request acceptance rates are low (below 30%) you may need to change your connection request messages. How many new connections never reply to your messaging? If it's more than 50% spend some time improving your message sequence - especially the first message after connecting. Without measuring these KPI's and creating a report you'd never know what needs improvement - or when something is performing well.

Creating actionable and realistic sales goals

Once you've measured your KPI's you can create predictable, and more importantly achievable, sales goals. For example (below) based on historical KPI's you might estimate if you send 1,500 connection requests, 432 will accept, 21 will convert to sales funnel, 4 will become clients, with total sales at roughly $21,000.

You may also discover you need to increase your prices for your Linkedin activity to have a positive ROI for your time investment.