162: LinkedIn Strategies That Actually Work In 2025 | Richard Bliss

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you need to give before you ask and for a lot of sales repsthey're asking before they give they're asking for a

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connection request they're asking you to open an emailthey're asking for an appointment they're asking for your time they're askingasking asking asking i'm

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like "I don't know you give me something else you wantto share." Or maybe an aha

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moment that comes up all the time when you're on the stagespeaking and people are like "Oh wow i didn't know that." A couple ofthings one would

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be if you're treating LinkedIn like Facebook or Instagramyou're playing the wrong game today's guest says that

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strategies that work everywhere else on social media canactually wreck your LinkedIn results and he's here to flip

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the script and show you exactly why welcome to the Learn ItAll Podcast the show for today's leaders who want to get

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ahead and stay ahead because we believe great leaders aren'tborn or made they are always in the making i'm your host

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Damon Ley twotime best-selling author and CEO of Learn It alive learning platform that has helped upskill over

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two million people over the past three decades our guesttoday is Richard Bliss author and the go-to LinkedIn strategist

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for building real influence today Rich and I are going todiscuss why likes are almost worthless the 60-minute window

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that will decide if your post succeeds or vanishes howsenior executives can grow real influence in just 10 minutes a

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day on LinkedIn why adding a link can secretly destroy yourpost reach and smarter ways to use Sales Navigator to

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find new leads faster what's the number one mistake you seepeople making on LinkedIn these days that's a great

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question because one of the things that people are seeingoftentimes and I'm sure you've heard it as well people are like "Well I'mnot going to be on

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LinkedIn because I tried it and it died there was nothingthere crickets." The biggest mistake is that people think

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that LinkedIn is just another social media platform and it'snot it is radically different so different that

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the efforts that we bring over from the other social mediaplatforms actively sabotage our approach and our attempts

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to be successful on LinkedIn actively sabotage it and that'sthe biggest mistake they think well I know social media i've been doing it i'mjust going

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to come over to LinkedIn and it's going to be the same andit's not that's the biggest mistake first of all it has to

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do with money and that is I always ask my audiences i speakI train I I do a lot of that i ask them how does Facebook

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Instagram Tik Tok Twitter X all of those how do they makemoney advertising i

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know advertising only 20% of LinkedIn's revenue comes fromadvertising so then I

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ask the audience where does the other 80% come from becausewhat that means is Facebook Instagram Tik Tok and Twitter

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are all focused on driving revenue for their customers theiralgorithms are

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designed for that we are not the customer we're the productright and so their algorithms are designed to

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maximize benefits for somebody other than us but on LinkedInif only 20%'s coming from advertising the other 80%'s

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coming from you want to take a guess sales navigator uhrecruiter sales navigator LinkedIn recruiter LinkedIn

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premium yeah 80% of that 11 billion dollars is that theymake is coming from

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those tools which means we're paying for it we're thecustomer or the work

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companies we work for are the customer you know some of myclients spend one to two million dollars a year on Sales

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Navigator or LinkedIn Recruiter that means the algorithm isdesigned to

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benefit us and that means it's going to do things radicallydifferent than other

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social media platforms for example LinkedIn is not justtheir vice

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president of uh operations I think has come out and said"We don't necessarily want your content to go viral." Well

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what social media platform doesn't want it to go viral itwants it to be relevant it wants it to show up in front

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of an audience that is interested in that content not for abenefit for them not because somebody stood in the middle

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of a room with a megaphone and started shouting it out henceyour verality on some of the other social media platforms

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so their algorithm is going to prevent verality if you do itthe same way so

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for example when a post goes live on LinkedIn they don'tshow it to everybody

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in your network they show it to a small test group and thattest group has about

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an hour to prove to the algorithm that that content wasinteresting and the one

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thing that shows that it's not interesting is that peoplegive you a thumbs up a thumbs up on LinkedIn

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basically says "I didn't find this interesting."So I just gave it a like and when I when I present and talk to

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people I said "Can you imagine standing around in anetworking event and you're all sharing a conversation and every time you saysomething everybody in the

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room just sticks their thumb in the air." It's like"That's not a conversation." And the algorithm on LinkedIn's like"Yep that's not a

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conversation you're just simply giving a random weak

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indicator." And so when people chase the likes or theshares for another example

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so back to I'm going this is a long answer Damian but gowith it yeah go go go with it so when you post that content

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on LinkedIn it only goes to 10% of your audience thereaboutsa tiny fraction and

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then it watches to see what happens with that audience forabout you got about an hour 90 minutes to prove it likes

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they're not really worth anything if somebody hits there-share button LinkedIn's not going to share it to your

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audience one out of a hundred people of your connections seethat re-share and

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people like "That's crazy." And except often timesI'm talking to 300 people i'm like "Okay do we all have mutual

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connections?" Yes if we all hit the re-share button ona post what would happen to our mutual connections it

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would be flooded with multiple copies of the same contentyeah which is not a good experience for a paying customer

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we're the paying customer i don't want to see multiplecopies of the same content for a variety of people so that's another thing thatpeople like

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and share your social media teams say "Hey everybody golike and share like and share on LinkedIn." Like they're

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like I always do this put that big L on your forehead likeas in

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loser no LinkedIn's looking for really one thing did youcause your audience to

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stop pay attention and then engage in a conversation withyou through commenting

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and that's the biggest difference is that you're not lookingfor likes and shares on LinkedIn you're looking for

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comments that actually engage in a conversation and that'swhere the influencers and people who come to the

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LinkedIn platform from the other social medias that's wherethey run into trouble because oh here's a couple other

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things a link in your post is going to cut your audience inhalf because the

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engineers have determined that you and I asked my question ihad a room full of 300 people in Orlando a couple weeks ago

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and I asked them "How many of you are on LinkedIn thisweek?" Everybody's hand goes up what were you doing nobody was

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doom scrolling you know watching cat videos instead whatthey were doing is

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they had a specific reason to be there and a specific amountof time to do it linkedin has said "Look if I put up a

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link I'm going to rob you from the reason you were there youweren't there to go read a Forbes article and you had

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a limited amount of time if you do click that link you'reprobably not coming back thereby disrupting the very purpose

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you were on our LinkedIn platform." So things like thatthere's several more but that gives you an idea of the

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radical difference between Facebook Instagram Tik Tok X andLinkedIn where

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you're seeing that uh that challenge it's so funny because Iwish you could just see what my email or my Teams chat

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looks like it's like "Hey everybody can you please likeand share this post for me?"

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Yep and and I'm always looking at like how many likes did Iget on this how many likes and then when I was preparing

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to interview you I was thinking to myself "Oh man maybeI don't even want these likes anymore." The like I mean

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they're not 100% useless they're close but they're not 100%useless because if

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you get a thousand of them let me give you a perspectiveDamon a like to the algorithm is the equivalent of a single

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point of value one point so if somebody likes your post theygive you one point

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because that's the least they could give your post becausethe algorithm is trying to determine through alg you know

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it's mathematical formula how valuable is this post well howvaluable is a like

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one point okay if somebody hits the reshare button itdoesn't go to their audience but it's still an indication of

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interest how many points is that oh about 10 points unlessthey add their

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own thoughts if they add their own thoughts you only give itthree points of value and it

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only goes to about a half a percent of the audience and itonly gets to be their one post for the day let me just

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repeat that linkedin only lets you have one post a day youcan do more than one post a day but LinkedIn's going to hide

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the subsequent post from your audience because it's lettingyou test that one conversation and if somebody hits the

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repost button and adds their own thoughts it's theequivalent of them walking into an empty room repeating

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everything you just said and then shouting what they wantedto say nobody's listening because LinkedIn's

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like "Look if you want to participate in theconversation don't go stand in an empty room make the conversation happen

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right where the post is your audience is right there lookingat it leave your comment." And a comment is worth about

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15 points of value compared to that like but here's what'sinteresting

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not all comments are equal so if I leave a comment on yourpost we have started a small

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conversation you comment back to me I you've now increasedmy comment by

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50% according to the algorithm because now a conversation'shappening between you and I but if a member of your

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audience comments on my comment on your post now theconversation's happening

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amongst the audience you literally got people talking andLinkedIn's like "This is hot let's This is now worth double

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the points that we would normally associate with a commentbecause they've started a conversation amongst each

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other." That's where the true value comes in and thenyou've only got about 60 minutes to be able to prove that this

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is uh worth something so takes about 10 comments if you canget about 10 comments back and forth boom the

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algorithm is going to show it to about a thousand people inthe next 24 hours or so this is great stuff so the first

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thing you're saying which is important is if you're going topost multiple times in a day on LinkedIn knock yourself out but it's only goingto show

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your first post so you better make your first post your bestpost of the day that is super that is super important to

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know now the next thing you said is that if you add a linkinto your post it's

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going to you know since you're taken off the platform it'sgoing to hurt you but Richard what if you don't add the link

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to the actual caption but if you put it in comments doesthat still penalize you no that's why you see people saying

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"Look for the link in the comments below." They'rebypassing that penalty but what happens if you've got 100

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comments where's the link somewhere in there myrecommendation is make the post

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go live without the link edit the post immediately thelittle three dots click the edit button add the

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link resave the post bob's junk i've just I was just in theUK last yesterday and Bob's your uncle is a phrase over

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there so there is Bob's your uncle you simply edit the postadd the link resave

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the post now the link is buried in the post but you haven'tbeen penalized because the algorithm doesn't come back and look okay so you'resaying this is a

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this is a great hack you're saying put the post up withoutthe link um but then

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go back and edit it add it back and then the algorithm's not

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going to go back and look at it a second time so now youhave the link in the post um without getting penalized for

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having it that's correct now there's a couple of things thathappen with this this means it's almost impossible to use

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a scheduling tool to put your posts on LinkedIn because youcan't do that with a

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scheduling tool you can't edit the and that's good becauseLinkedIn sees if

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you're active when you post it are you posting and ghostingare you just putting it out there and then walking away and then expecting usto take care

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of your conversation so by showing that you're activelythere edit the post you're on the platform in addition it

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doesn't load the preview image now that sounds like a badthing i was just talking to somebody in the UK uh this

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week and he says "Yeah I tried your technique and itdoesn't load my preview image." I said "That's a good thing."

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Research has shown that when you use a preview image

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uh interactions on your post drop by 75% engagement drops by

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75% why i'm going to use a preview well I want to get theirattention so I put up this image yeah you got their

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attention but now this is called co uh cognitive dissonanceyour audience sees the

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image and they try to process it within fractions of asecond okay what does that image mean it got my attention now

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what does it mean and as they start reading your postthey're now trying to figure out the connection between what

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they saw and what they're reading and if there's not animmediate con and when we say immediate two three four seconds

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then they're like uh they'll click the like button and moveon we are so conditioned to see those stock images

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cliche images that it doesn't cause us to want to stop andengage with the

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picture now if I was just in Iceland last

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week it's a 42-year goal of mine that I wrote down 42 yearsago on a little 3x5

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card and stuck it in a box that I want to go i was living inEcuador and I wanted to go to Iceland it took 42 years

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and so I'm standing next to a sign that says exit to Icelandand I posted that on LinkedIn with a with a narrative

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about this story the number of people who commented on thepicture drove the

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conversation if I had just used a stock image of Iceland itwouldn't help

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engagement would have no it wouldn't have helped and so wehave to think about the fact that these stock images that we use the clicheInstagram images

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the people on the beach with the sun and the wind onLinkedIn people like I don't have time for that i'm here to learn

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engage do business and I don't care about your Instagrammotivational speech so I'm throwing a lot out here Damon for

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the audience to listen to but this is this is what I'mtalking about radical changes from the way that we traditionally approachsocial media and

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LinkedIn is just going to drive it into the ground if we usethose traditional tools or approaches to social media and

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what's better for your one post in a day is it text or videookay I'm going to clarify before I answer this because

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we're talking about personal pages not company pagesabsolutely yes yep this is

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personal pages text only text only or text with a personalpicture and when I

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say personal it doesn't have to be a selfie but somethingthat is real that's not four individuals of a diverse

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ethnicity and gender sitting around a laptop all smiling andlooking at it and they're going to you know who who is

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that member of your team Damon who's on no it's an ice stockphoto it has to be a real picture that will cause your

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audience to stop and then read and engage a video on theother

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hand causes people to see it click the like button and moveon very seldom do

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the video the videos will get impressions people will see itbut very seldom do we believe that if I leave a

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comment on your video that your video is going to commentback and yet when I read something from you and I comment I

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do in my mind believe that I'm having a conversation in myhead with you and that you'll comment back that's where

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the human algorithm kicks in as humans we seldom comment ona video thinking

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that somehow it's going to talk back to us and so we'llclick the like button we saw it maybe we watched it and then we

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moved on and so video isn't bad it's just that the algorithmsees the lack of

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intera significant interaction and conversation and so itjust doesn't show it to anybody now hang on i got people

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are going to be like I'm going to back up there over thelast six months LinkedIn has heavily promoted video and

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they've changed it they change they changed it to look likeInstagram i mean I'm not a big Instagram guy but it's

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it's much different in the last couple weeks isn't it it isbut what we've seen over this year alone is a 300% drop in

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them people paying attention to those videos so they're anovelty they came out and we're seeing it drop

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significantly now video is great for branding for for I cansee you but I got

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to tell you I go through my little video feed on LinkedInall I see is a bunch of talking heads and the and the subtitles

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are like boom boom boom boom boom now I'm old i can't readthose subtitles that fast

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and also Damian I can't do anything with that video i can'tsave it i mean I could but it's a it's a 30 second video

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but at second 20 you said something really important that Ireally liked i'm going to capture that i can't I can't

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record it i can't I can't track it i can't save it i can'tcopy it i can't I have to listen to the whole freaking

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thing again and then write it down video is great forentertainment and

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introduction but it's not necessarily a good median totransfer important

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information unless I'm trying to fix my washing machine thenI'm watching a YouTube video and I can pause it and go

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back like "Okay where did that net go?" All rightall right so so we've kind of gone through the algorithms where posts

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show up and everything and I also want to point out to ourlisteners we'll put a a link uh hopefully in the show notes

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you've got a great report that you're part of right the 2024algorithm report on your website yeah let's be clear so

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yes I'm part of that i have been sponsoring that uh I wasthe original sponsor of this report the gentleman who

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creates that report his name is Richard Vanderblam and Ihighly recommend that anybody has the chance follow Richard uh

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you have to be named Richard to be heavily involved inLinkedIn that's is what I figured out sure sounds that way it sounds like thatrichard is Dutch

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he's based out of Valencia Spain and he comes out with theresearch report every year it's due out in April of 2025 and

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that'll be the uh the next version of the 2024 report the2024 report is on my

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website you can get an access to that so I'm the originalsponsor of that he has several sponsors now but it shares the

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research from this these stats that I'm showing that I'msharing with you uh

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Damon this is where this research is coming from peoplealways ask me "Hey how did you learn all this how do you

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know all this?" I said "I just make it up becauseyou can't prove me wrong." My team's like "Stop saying that they

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believe you." So Richard Vanderbl follow him onLinkedIn he's got great content

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so Richard I I was at a uh a conference uh the CEO project acouple months ago in South Carolina there's about a

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hundred CEOs there and there was a lot of curiosity aroundLinkedIn and I got

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to give a shout out to Jim Schleser from the CEO project forletting me go there but there's a lot of curiosity around

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these CEOs for you know multiple hundreds of millions ofdollar companies but they all said the same thing i don't

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really have time for this what would you say to them whatare some of the myths that you see with uh CEOs and senior

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executives well let's start with the three myths that Imentioned in my book Digital First Leadership myth number one that executiveshave is I don't have the

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time that's myth number one myth number two is it's allself-promotional as our mutual friend

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Tom Mendoza always says about his social media I don't carewhat the Kardashians had for breakfast i love it it's not all

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self-promotional and number three here's the shocking oneDamon a lot of these executives don't think they have

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anything relevant to share i work with a I'm in SiliconValley i work with a lot of executives and I'm always shocked

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when they're like,"Well nobody really wants to knowwhat I have to say." Yeah they do your employees your partners

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your vendors yeah they do and so when it comes to LinkedInone of the challenges is when I

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get done my content I just got off the phone i'm going to bedoing a conference in Orlando um I say "How much time can

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you give me?" They're like "Okay 45 minutes."I'm like "Great i can do 45 minutes." some of my uh sessions they

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come in and say "Okay we've given you six hours."Like "Okay great i can do six hours." There's so much to learn

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here from an executive standpoint here's a couple of thingsthat people who are trying to reach executives don't understand executives areon LinkedIn

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every day every day they're on LinkedIn what they're notdoing on LinkedIn is posting

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they're not creating content they're there to listen andlearn what are my competitors doing what are my peers

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doing what's happening with the news out there they're usingLinkedIn as a tool to be more informed about their

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role but now you've identified now they kind of want toparticipate and they look at their kids

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or they look at their young people and all they see them isliving on their mobile devices they don't have time for that they look at theself-promoters the

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politicians the sports figures the social media gurus whoseem to just be

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all about look at me look at me look at me they're like Idon't want to be that person and then they s sincerely wonder

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what what am I even going to say and so what I share withthem is a couple of things one you don't have to spend that

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much time i recommend they spend 10 minutes 10 minutes a

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day not creating content but taking the opportunity toparticipate in

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conversations with other people's content because that'swhen they show their interest in who let's use our

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example of our friend Tom Mendoza right who's been on yourshow and you promised me a good And you promised me a good Tom

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story too by the way i I did promise you a good Tom storyand And we can share that but we'll get there later what did

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you say but what did you say to me about Tom when you made apost in that how

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long did it take before Tom responded uh 15 minutes 15minutes and by the way if

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you don't know who if you don't know who Tom Madoza is he'swas like the vice chairman of NetApp a legend yeah six

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billion dollar company right sits on the boards of a varietyof companies he's done very well for himself and yet and

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then he was asked one time "Is this really you?"And he's like "Yeah who else would it be?" And so he's an

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example of executives are paying attention but he's alsolearned that he doesn't necessarily have to create the

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content okay got okay since you called it out my Tom andDosa story i got lots of them tom and I have worked together

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for 13 years and uh occasionally he calls me up for a littlebit of help so

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I am uh he was in Italy and I was in Hawaii there's a bigtime zone

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difference there and I get a message from him saying"Hey Richard can you post this video for me on LinkedIn?"

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because he was out and about on he was on holiday with hisfamily and his wife was expecting at the time and uh I'm

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like sure I get this video from him it's him and his wifemeeting Pope

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Francis and the video it no serious so and he but it gets itgets better so the

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cameras are clicking and the photographers are clicking andso you can't hear what's going on but you see Tom's wife walk up to the Popeand you

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see them having a little conversation and she's verypregnant uh and so the

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you can see Pope Francis kind of indicate to the baby andyou ask a question she nods and the next thing

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that happens gives me chills and I'm not Catholic but itstill gives me chills

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pope Francis places his hands on her belly and prays overtheir unborn child

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wow and I it's still it's it still gives me chills and I'vegot chills right now just talking about it and so Tom's like

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"Hey can you put this on?" Yes what a touchingincredible experience and Tom's just thrilled about

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it and here's the funny part she walks and then then it'sTom's turn hey I'm Tom you know that was my wife and the

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pope's like "Yeah yeah yeah go on next next it was like"Yeah next." He It was

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like "Oh yeah great story." So but if I'm a if I'ma uh CEO and who doesn't

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have a lot of time for this stuff um and you're telling meto comment um how

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would I where would be the first place I'd go to figure outwho I want to comment on i'm like I know who I want to

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comment on but I don't have time to research througheverything to figure that out yeah so you start the easy the

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easy one is you start with your company take the time tocomment on the things that are being produced by your

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company oftentimes for years executives I was one of themwere insulated from the real

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world by the PR team by the marketing team by the messagingteam and so you would only see an executive say

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something through some kind of sound bite or press releaseor maybe if you got to see them in person well that has

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all changed that was one of the motivations of my bookthat's all changed you now as an executive leader

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have unfiltered access and that scares a lot of executivesbecause there's nobody there to be a safety net and so the

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easiest thing to start with is if your company putssomething out go comment on it but even better if one of your

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employees shares something on LinkedIn take a few minutesand go comment on

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that thing that they said the impact that a single comment hI have

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seen going back to Tom and other executives I've worked withi have immediately heard what has happened when

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the CEO takes the time to comment on an employes post theemployee becomes almost giddy 10,000 employees and the

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executive took a few moments to simply say some words and itwasn't just an attab boy it wasn't just hey congrats

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but it was insightful you know Susan great to see thisrecognition and I know you've made a contribution here at the

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company and it's great to have you part of the teamwell-earned recognition well done holy cow that so Susan's going to

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see it but so is nearly 30% of that executives audience isgoing to see them

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taking the time to engage what a great point now go talk onto one of your partners one of your customers who's had

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a success story congratulate them this tiny little actcreates a a ripple

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effect because LinkedIn takes every comment we make 100% andmoves it to a

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major portion of our audience 30% of our audience sees ourcomments and 100% of our comments are pushed out to that

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audience so as an executive taking the time to do that nowon the flip side if

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you were at a conference and you or you were interviewed oryou were on a really cool podcast with Damon and he uh had

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you on his show now what you do is don't rely Let me giveyou an example Damon

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there's this great movie you should go see it it's aboutthis widowerower somebody stole his car and shot his dog

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great movie go see it if that's all I do for the movietrailer there's not really

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a good chance you're going to go see that movie john Wickjohn Wick right and then I say Keano Reeves and all the

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women in the room just go so John Wick we know that so oftenwe see that exact

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same type of setup oh here's a quick video y'all should gowatch it it's great no nobody's going to watch that

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nobody's going to watch that what they want to know iswhat's in your head that caused you to want to share that tell us

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hey here's this video i had an opportunity of speaking atthis event let me tell you some of the key things

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that I shared that were so what I felt was important for theaudience to hear and then write those out now your

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audience is seeing what's in your head and you don't have tothink about it because you just gave the speech or you're just on the interviewthis gives

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the uh an executive they don't have to come up with it netnew it doesn't have to create something but instead just use

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the opportunities that are out there for them let's switchgears to business development uh and I mentioned this to

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you off air just the other night i was having dinner with afractional CRO who works with a lot of companies and

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they're trying to figure out if they should invest in emailuh for uh business development or LinkedIn where

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do you sit on that i mean obviously I know where youprobably sit on it but why is why would LinkedIn be better a

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couple of things um the approach on LinkedIn is literally asif you were at

28:27

a networking event standing and talking to the personliterally bec just in this case it's a digital networking event

28:34

instead of a physical one and so I'm not going to email isstill the king of

28:40

sales and email still does its thing we we all get spammedon a regular basis so

28:46

this must be working but when it comes to networking as asaleserson as a

28:52

business development the people you're trying to reach areright there there's

28:57

no guardian there's no there's no somebody filtering themail there's nobody filtering the phone calls there's

29:03

no gatekeepers to get through to the executive but so

29:09

often sales reps business development use LinkedIn like anemail spam list

29:16

it's almost like they just got the freaking big mistake theyjust bought the list of email addresses and they're

29:21

just blasting it out and it's I use the Groundhog Dayanalogy in the movie Groundhog Day when Phil is walking and

29:29

all of a sudden uh Ned Ryerson comes up ned did the Bill uhbelly button thing

29:35

in high school and dated his sister until Phil told him tostop if we've all seen Right am I right am I right i'm

29:41

right i'm right i'm right right he's trying to sell himinsurance and so often that's how sales reps use LinkedIn

29:48

like that here here here i call it you need to give beforeyou ask and for a

29:54

lot of sales reps they're asking before they give they'reasking for a connection request they're asking you to open an email they'reasking for an

30:00

appointment they're asking for your time they're askingasking asking asking i'm like I don't know you and yet if I'm an

30:07

executive and the first time I encounter you is you askingme for something but

30:12

if we flip it LinkedIn gives you an opportunity to give tothat executive to

30:18

give to that prospect long before you ask for anything ifthey have posted

30:23

anything on LinkedIn go like it now I've already said thatlike only gives it one point of value no no no now what you're

30:29

doing is you're just showing the executive hey I saw it evenbetter go comment on it no executives puts content

30:36

on LinkedIn hoping nobody sees it take a moment if that'syour prospect to

30:42

read what they had to say and now leave a comment that doessomething like this ted you make a really good point and

30:50

then restate the point that they said knowing that they'regoing to pay attention now that you're talking to

30:55

them say what they said and then provide your own insightsthat adds to the conversation as if you as if you and I

31:01

were standing around holding cocktails on our hands andtalking and then you said something or Ted said something and

31:07

I'm like Ted you make a really good point here's what I'vebeen able to see and how does that how do you see that working that littleconversation is a

31:14

give to the individual do you have a hack using chat GBT onhow to expedite

31:19

that perhaps for these comments you can you can now you gotto be careful

31:24

because I can spot a chatbt comment in a heartbeat so can IYep so much so the

31:29

other day we were doing a sample i was doing training and Ihad a bunch of people make comments and one of them was

31:34

like "Wow." And I turned to her and said "Didyou use chatbt to make that comment?" And she sheepishly said in

31:40

front of her boss "Yeah." Like "Yeah ifyou're going to use chatbt you can take

31:46

the post throw it into chatbt throw it into Claude throw itinto one of the AI tools ask it to generate a comment but

31:52

you need to be a little bit more specific please comment onthis with this tone playful informative useful

31:59

with an intended audience of this person as if I wanted tohelp my audience

32:05

understand this topic right and now it's going to give youthe gist of what you want to say and now put it into your own

32:11

words and there's a variety of ways you can do that um Ihave something called

32:16

uh since we're still talking about Tom Mendoza we have adrinking game at work wherever Tom Tom's name comes up everybody has to take adrink so just

32:23

I'm just telling you that but there are tools out there thatallow you to create personas that you want to represent so

32:28

most of the time for my executive clients that I work with Iwill take all of their content and put it into a

32:34

persona so I have a what that's called a tombbot so I wantTom to say something on something i'll take it throw it in

32:40

there spit it out give it back to Tom and he'll say"Hey that sounds kind of like me." And then he'll tweak it a littlebit well yeah because I it it

32:46

came from his content so you can create these personas to dothat takes a lot of work up front an executive shouldn't be

32:53

using chatbt they should be talking themselves but as asales rep yeah I

32:58

have clients that are involved with microwave transmissionsfor NASA i don't know anything about that and yet if they

33:04

make a post I could ask Chad to explain that to a12-year-old for an audience of

33:10

let's say lawyers it's going to give me some insights thatmaybe I didn't have so there's some ways to do that but this

33:16

concept Damon of giving before asking is critical and that'swhere sales reps get

33:22

it so wrong and kind of email is kind of like that hey I'mgoing to send you an unsolicited email also called spam and

33:28

I'm hoping that you will open it respond to me i don't evenknow i don't want to

33:33

go on a rabbit hole but I don't even know if email works atall i I just feel like it's so oversaturated and maybe LinkedIn is getting inthat direction

33:40

but I'm a huge advocate for for LinkedIn and I'm always allmy friends who are

33:45

sales leaders and on my sales team it's like focus more onthe LinkedIn approach than on email now I heard you tell a

33:52

great story that I'd like you to tell now because I thinkthis is important these days with live events about how

33:58

you know a conference you went to and and how you usedLinkedIn going into the conference yeah you're talking about a

34:04

story I share about my team uh two individuals on my teamLeah and Kira uh we signed up for an event and we

34:11

determined that the attendees about a hundred of thembecause when you sign up for so many events today you can see an

34:16

attendee list and we saw that about a hundred of them wereprospects for our company our company trains salespeople

34:21

and executives on how to use LinkedIn to reach your audienceso we saw hey also

34:27

10 of the prospects at this 10 of the comp sponsors of thiscompany of this event were our clients already so it was

34:34

a good event for us to attend but what Leah and Kira didbeforehand two weeks

34:39

before the event is that they just started commenting onthese individuals and not about our conference and not

34:45

about us as a no one of them had something to do mentioned amovie so

34:51

Kira went out and commented about the movie they had seen ithere's some insights another one had some topics

34:56

about uh some books leah went out and commented on that bythe time the event rolled around they had had these

35:03

conversations with these 100 prospects back and forth andwhen they walked into the real live event Leah always shares

35:11

the story that she felt like a rock star those 100 prospectsthat we wanted to

35:17

sell to looked at Leah and Kier and said "Leah Kirait's so great to meet you in

35:24

person." and we had a 100% connection request

35:30

acceptance i mean that's fantastic but it got even betterbecause 22 of the

35:35

hundred accepted a sales follow-up call because they feltlike they knew Leah

35:40

and Kira who were both in sales uh that it became such aneasy way for them to

35:46

engage and the trust had been built up because Leah and Kirahad given to that relationship long before they asked for

35:52

that connection request long sometimes the prospect wasasking the connection request Leah here I can't believe we're

35:57

not connecting on LinkedIn let's connect right now and sothat turned into a massive benefit simply because they

36:03

participated in the conversations that the prospects werehaving rather than trying to drive the conversation back to

36:09

themselves say I've been in sales a while or maybe I'm evena new sales rep but I'm not very active on LinkedIn

36:16

where should I start so the first thing you should do is golook at how many people have looked at your LinkedIn

36:21

profile in the past 90 days all right that's where you startgo look at that

36:27

how many people have looked at your profile in the last 90days that's going to tell you how interesting you have been to other people andoftentimes when

36:35

I ask them to do that it's like 30 30 people in the last 90days so one

36:41

person every 3 days has looked at your profile that's not agood number so then I say here's all I want

36:48

you to do i will spend six hours with people or 30 minutesit doesn't matter at the end I always say "Here's your

36:54

homework do this one thing for the next five days all I wantyou to do is go

37:02

comment on three different people that's all I want you todo and it can't be a

37:07

throwaway comment thanks for sharing awesome good job."It has to add to the

37:13

conversation three times a day for five days and then I givea guarantee and I'm

37:19

going to give it to your audience Damon and that is ifeverybody go look at their LinkedIn how many people have looked at theirprofile in the last 90

37:25

days it's easy to go find you on your profile and then Ipromise them after

37:32

one week they will see a 300 to

37:37

500% jump in the number of people looking at their profilesimply that

37:44

week and listeners hear that 300 to 500% jump in peoplelooking at your profile

37:49

because here's why this is important when a when aconnection looks at your profile the very next thing you post

37:58

gets automatically placed in their feed they get LinkedInalgorithm guarantees they'll see it so the more people you

38:03

can look at your profile particularly first-degreeconnections the more content is going to show up in their

38:09

feed yes a 300 to 500% which means that let's suppose let'sdo ED math 90 people

38:15

have looked at my profile in the last 90 days that's one aday if you le leave three comments a day for the next 5 days

38:23

you should now have 300 to 400 people look at your profilein 5

38:31

days that massive jump simply because you were interested inthem which

38:37

automatically makes you interesting when you show interestin another person that

38:43

automatically makes you interesting that's a key thing toremember when it comes to being active on LinkedIn and

38:49

you're saying that once they connect with you your very nextpost will show up on their I said two things here so

38:56

couple of things if they're a connection and they look I'mjust looking you and I are connected if I look at your pro

39:03

actually I am looking at your profile right now the verynext thing you put out on LinkedIn is going to show up in my feed automaticallyyou don't have to

39:09

mention me you don't have to tag me but hang on youmentioned something else though let me just clarify when you get

39:15

a new connection on the other hand for the next two weekseverything you do

39:20

will be in their feed and everything they do will be in yourfeed it's like you you swiped right on a dating app and

39:26

now LinkedIn likes "Hey is this serious do these peoplewant to actually know each other?" And so it'll shove your

39:32

content into each other's feed to see if there's realinterest and if there's engagement and interest comments likes

39:38

shares whatever you're doing LinkedIn's like "Ah let'skeep this going." This is why for salespeople they should

39:45

be posting a minimum once a month excuse me once a week oncea week knowing that

39:50

those new contacts they just made are seeing their contentand if you spot somebody and go look at who looked at

39:57

your profile and it's a prospect then you should think aboutwhat's the next thing I want to put out so it's going to

40:03

be automatically put in their feed and that changes yourapproach a little bit rather than just pray spray and pray

40:09

that is a great mind shift to think about is that you lookat who's on your

40:14

um who's looked at your profile and you know right therethat it's going to show up in their feed so you want to be

40:21

mindful with what it is you put out maybe it's somethingthat addresses a challenge that they have at work right

40:26

or or something something like that right so like absolutelythat's going to show up for them absolutely and that and

40:33

that's what's important is to thinking about oh I'm going tobe a little bit more purposeful about what I post also I

40:39

hear a lot of people complaining that LinkedIn is kind ofturning into a mess and my feed's full of random stuff like

40:45

your feed's full of random stuff because you trained theLinkedIn algorithm to show you random stuff you like your

40:52

buddies from college's kid that just graduated from middleschool oh well let's show you more of that stuff oh you

40:58

randomly your commenting and liking activity on LinkedIn ifyou're in sales should be very purposeful yeah you can

41:05

occasionally be involved with your friends and colleaguesbut think about every comment you make 100% is going to

41:12

be lifted and put in front of a significant portion of youraudience that might change the what you start

41:17

thinking about what you comment on and how you commentbecause that's your main

41:23

selling opportunity is those comments are going to be put infront of an audience that you normally would have never reached becomes verypowerful this

41:30

is the This is now we've tapped into what I primarily teachto sales teams

41:35

when I work with them here in Silicon Valley is how totransform the way they use LinkedIn from just that spam spam

41:40

spam to an engagement relationship building and then you askfor that connection request and almost always get

41:46

it another um technique that I've seen you you that I'veread about you using

41:52

is the uh what's it called the the hero post strategy isthat still a good one

41:57

yeah that works i think we're talking about where you have aprospect that you want to get their attention is that what we're talking aboutbut also if somebody

42:04

on your team posts something and everybody else comments onit here's the concept of this often times the

42:09

marketing team will say "Hey we just created this pieceof content everybody go like and share like and share." Well I've alreadypointed out that that does

42:15

nothing on LinkedIn nothing instead take your sales team andpick

42:21

one of your salespeople and make them the hero of the weekand let's say let's say Tuesday morning nine o'clock local

42:29

time for your customers if you're if you're doing the USthen probably nine o'clock California time noon uh Eastern time but that time

42:36

frame create a post as a team that's important to yourcustomers uh today

42:43

ransomware is a big one uh right let's let's we're insecurity space ransomware

42:48

so write up that post target at a specific audience now at9:00 on Tuesday

42:55

that post is going to go live and let's say Jennifer isgoing to be the one who posts it jennifer's our sales rep she's our hero of theweek she's going to post

43:01

it now we're all not going to like and share this postbecause that doesn't do anything what we're going to do is ahead

43:08

of time prepare our comments now Jennifer sells incommercial i as a

43:14

sales rep sell in the enterprise mike over there is sledsomebody else is right you got the point

43:21

here got the point now I'm going to leave a comment not toJennifer she doesn't care she's my coworker instead

43:29

I'm going to leave a comment knowing that 30% of my audienceis going to see this comment and since I'm working in

43:35

the um commercial space or whatever one space I was workingin I'm going to

43:40

leave a comment that talks to my audience jennifer you makea great point particularly this particular concept of

43:47

rans ransomware in the commercial space one of thechallenges we're seeing is that small businesses oftentimes don't

43:53

have the infrastructure in place here's how they've beenable to tackle that and address it my comment is going to go

43:58

into details for my audience not the author that's Jenniferfor my audience

44:04

now Mike over there he's going to make his comment to Sledright carrie she's

44:09

going to make her comment to uh Enterprise whatever it mightbe each person's going to make their comment to

44:15

Jennifer but really with the intent that their audience islistening in now here's what's going to

44:20

happen jennifer is going to make sure that she makes herselfavailable at 9:00

44:25

so that she can respond to the comments because thealgorithm is going to see are you actively participating in the

44:31

conversation i have done this exercise Damon live with sales

44:36

reps where all of a sudden prospects start commenting duringour exercise and

44:43

they're like "Oh my gosh I just got a comment fromsomebody." Because what happens is each one of those comments is beingpushed out further and further and

44:49

further and suddenly people are being brought into theconversation who aren't in the room and this shocks the sales

44:55

rep that all it took now next week it's Mike's turn to bethe hero of the week he's going to make the post targeted at

45:02

his audience and we're all going to prepare our commentsaround a new topic maybe this time it's going to be you

45:07

know virtual data centers all right let's talk about virtualdata centers but from my perspective of my audience

45:13

that rotating of the hero of the week is a huge opportunityfor each of your salespeople to be rewarded now why would

45:19

you do this two reasons one I'm going to reach my audiencewith my comment but that hero of the week Jennifer she's

45:26

going to get thousands of people to look at that postthousands and it doesn't

45:31

matter how many connections she has because the reach ofyour content on LinkedIn is not determined by the size

45:36

of your network i mean you've got 6,700 almost 6,800 peopleyou're connected and following that are following you uh

45:42

Damon your content can have the same reach as somebody who'sgot a 100

45:47

followers if they drive a conversation within that first 60minutes and when

45:52

all of those comments come in the algorithm is like geez wegot to show this to a lot of people and suddenly thousands of people will seethat six

46:00

seven 8,000 people in a 24 to 48 hour period versus the likeand share

46:06

approach that your marketing team usually says that's goingto go to 1% of your audience nope i mean 67 people are

46:12

going to see it if you like and share something David 67people are going to see it so that is a radical change of how we think aboutworking together

46:19

collectively to drive conversations because that's allLinkedIn's looking for did you start a conversation even if

46:25

it's amongst your own employees did you start a conversationand a real one not thanks for sharing awesome great job i I

46:32

have to say that as we were talking I was just kind of goingthrough my head how this would work with our team with

46:37

comments around like what I'm seeing with customers I'veworked with and you know the nice thing about that Richard

46:43

is you're you're adding value to the prospects and thecustomers as well so you're you're not just tricking the

46:49

algorithm you're actually adding value um I mean I I've gotso many other

46:54

questions for you and so many other different topics um somany things we didn't even get into but we got time for

46:59

one last thing either give me something else you want toshare uh a best tip for

47:04

a sales rep or maybe an aha moment that comes up all thetime when you're on the stage speaking and people are like "Oh

47:11

wow i didn't know that." This is a tough one you kindof because I've shared so much here uh Sales Navigator fantastic

47:17

tool to use if you're in sales use Sales Navigator can wetalk about that uh because I uh sorry for interrupting you

47:24

but Sales Navigator especially around finding people wholeft the company and went elsewhere yes and I've talked about

47:29

that here's a So if you're using Sales Navigator as a salesrep here's a quick little technique to find prospects in a

47:38

hurry here's what you do you go in so Sales Navigator forthose who are listening who aren't using it is a tool that LinkedIn has thatallows you access

47:44

to the database of the 1 billion users on LinkedIn and youcan search and you can filters and all kinds of stuff so

47:51

here's what you can do you're a sales rep looking for netnew customers and you'd really like to find somebody who's

47:57

already interested in possibly what you have to say so whatyou do is you go into sales navigator and said "I'm look

48:03

here are the five top clients I've had in the past." SoI'm looking for

48:08

somebody who used to work there in their current companythey don't work there so

48:15

I don't know where they work i just looking for anybody whoused to work at one one of my companies past company but

48:21

doesn't work there now current company okay next the ICP inmy case they're

48:27

going to be in sales so I'm going to check that box theirtitle is probably going to be vice president of sales i'm

48:33

going to check that box and then I want them to be in theirrole for less than two years check that box give me a list

48:41

now when I do that it gives me about 51 candidates 51 namespop

48:47

up these are not necessarily people I know these are justpeople who used to work at one of my clients and now has

48:54

moved on and taken on the role of vice president of sales ata new company in less than one to two years they're a

49:00

perfect person for me to reach out to why because there's areally good chance they know who I am because these clients

49:07

these five clients I've been working with them for years andif they were in sales and left and went somewhere else and now either gotpromoted or moved

49:14

over they probably know who I am and I can just reach backhey congratulations on your new role don't know if you know

49:20

who I am but I worked with your sales team at X and love tohave the

49:25

opportunity to come in and chat with you about what I couldpossibly do for your company that's a huge huge benefit super

49:31

easy to do that's a quick way or here's another one damonI'm trying to get into

49:37

company XYZ uh I got a big it's an enterprise sale i don'treally know a whole lot of

49:43

people in there so what I'm going to do is I'm going to putin company XYZ and then I want you to tell me if any

49:48

anybody we've been using NetApp as an example tom Mendoza isover at NetApp so you know I've worked with NetApp tell me

49:54

if anybody's worked at NetApp before but they're not therenow but they work at this new company now why would I care

50:00

about that oh they could be an ally they could be somebodywho I could reach out

50:05

to and say "Hey you don't know me but maybe worktogether at NetApp or something i give me some hints." The

50:12

other one Damon is to say "So NetApp's big competitorsgot several but Dell EMC

50:18

tell me at this prospect I'm trying to go into has anybodyworked at DELMC those would be roadblocks that I might

50:25

not be aware of and Sales Navigator is going to uncoverhidden landmines if I

50:30

have to encounter one of those individuals so SalesNavigator can be a fantastic tool to quickly find new leads

50:37

but also to help you dig deeper into the accounts that maybeyou're already working so it's a fantastic tool to take

50:43

advantage of no thank you for that Richard so I mean what anamazing conversation i don't even know if I can

50:48

even recap everything we talked about we talked about howLinkedIn is like the upside down of social media it's so much

50:56

different and how what you do on channels like Facebook andInstagram can have a negative impact on LinkedIn how

51:03

LinkedIn is all about conversation really over content theimportance of commenting you did your five-day

51:10

challenge that we talked about uh and that would increaseyour views for uh

51:15

over 300% and we we just talked about Sales Navigator whichby the way if you're a

51:21

sales leader out there and your team has Sales Navigator andyou're spending tens of thousands of dollars more you have to

51:28

bring in Richard or somebody like Richard because why payfor the tool if you're not going to actually use it so

51:36

Richard this has been uh brilliant uh it's kind of sillyeven asking where should our audience connect with you at

51:42

but I'm going to ask it anyways probably on LinkedIn and ifthey are going to connect with me uh I do tend to

51:48

filter that so if they reference the show hey Richard Ilisten to you on the show I will that that tells me I get a

51:55

lot of connection requests and so that makes it really easyfor me to identify oh absolutely let's let's talk so that's

52:01

on LinkedIn type in Richard Bliss and uh I'm going to pop upawesome and so

52:07

listeners if you're a sales leader or you know somebody whois a sales leader who needs to get more impact and value

52:13

out of LinkedIn do me a favor share this episode with themon your favorite channel um and until next time everybody

52:21

stay curious keep learning have a great day see you latermost attorneys will

52:26

will focus in a specific area family and criminal family andbusiness family and

52:32

corporate um but we're not a one-stop

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