Summary:

‍

Sometimes LinkedIn can feel like a black hole. Where did the day go?

But if you’re still wondering when your efforts will pay off, you might not be using the platform to its full potential. In this webinar, our industry experts Derek Marin and Shannon Murphy guide you on how to connect with buyers and maximize sales using LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Here’re a few key takeaways on how to get started with LinkedIn Sales Navigator so you can start getting more appointments!

‍

Key Takeaways:

‍

9 Effective steps for connecting with clients on LinkedIn with Sales Navigator

There are a lot of clients who love what your MSP does every day. Those are the people who are most likely to refer you. They're also the ones who are connected to other people similar to them. Here are the 9 steps to connect with those clients,

1. Have an Excel sheet with all of your client’s information such as company name, company website, first name, or last name.

2. Go into the LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and head to the Accounts section. Create an account list and just call it the client list (Accounts are the companies).            

3. Also, create a client leads list, where you’d have all the prospective people that you know from your clients (leads are people in contact).

4. Find your clients on Navigator. Make sure that you're finding the right LinkedIn account page or company page because there may be multiple companies out there that have the same name.

5. When you go to the LinkedIn company page, click on More, and then go into View in Sales Navigator. This is where you’ll get more information and do your tracking. The Navigator company page has a description of the company, which has recent accounts, alerts, and things that have happened recently. This is where you'll click Save to save the accounts.

6. Also, look at all their employees. One by one, save those individuals on the client leads list.

7. After you’ve done the legwork, go into Sales Navigator and go to Alerts. There you can sort alerts by leads and by latest. So what this does is isolate all of the different activities that your existing clients are doing on LinkedIn.

8. Use lead alerts to make networking “deposits.” When you view or comment a post made by a lead or client, you make a good karma deposit as Nate Freedman likes to say (not to be confused with Reddit Karma - different platform). You can do that by engaging with that post with a thumbs up or anything. This way you’ll try and help the lead/client get their post to have a wider amount of impressions on LinkedIn so that they achieve their networking goals with a little bit of your help. Effectively, you're helping your clients achieve their networking objectives by looking at what they're posting and interacting and engaging with it in some way. 

9. After you’ve made networking deposits, you'll want to come back and just send a connection request. That will enable you to see who the mutual connections are for you to further expand. 

‍

How to create a prospects list and connect with them on LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

1. Go back to leads, and create a brand new list. Call it the prospects list. 

2. Use all of the advanced filterings that you have the option for and explore around in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator. 

3. Click on one of the prospects in that list, Navigator will pop up the profile information about them. The Navigator also shows the shared connections, which can be an opportunity. 

4. After you find that there's a mutual connection, there are a lot of different ways that you can reach out to them.

‍

What are the best tactics to create interaction points based on LinkedIn data?

There are interaction points that LinkedIn gives you notifications for, whether you're using Sales Navigator or not. You get your connection’s birthday notifications and Job update notifications. You also get notifications when your connection’s post is popular/trending, so you can go and contribute or interact. If you are following a thought leader who's doing newsletters, you'll get notifications about that, which could be very beneficial from a prospecting perspective. If you see a client or a potential client putting out articles on a regular basis, commenting on those could be a great interaction point.

‍

When you're creating the account and client lists, can you target different stakeholders? 

When you’re looking at multiple stakeholders that you want to interact with, you can use the account list naming sort of conventions to keep yourself organized. That would be the way to ensure that you're tapping into the right people, the right companies and that you're being able to separate one goal from another, from one company or for another. 

‍

What are the benefits of reaching out by email?

Your clients probably check their email more than LinkedIn and if you reach out to them via email, you're more likely to get a response. The second benefit of email is that the introduction would probably be done through email as well.

‍

What do you do if your client or prospect hasn't posted anything on LinkedIn? 

Not everyone is active on LinkedIn, and that's OK. Skip the whole attempt on depositing and send the connection request. Your client still has a profile even if they don't log in frequently, they might still be connected to some folks there. Again, this is a vital time to tap mutual connections and ask for an introduction. 

‍

How to ask a client for an introduction to someone in their network?

Looking for guidance? Try an email like this, 

Hi [NAME],

I have a favor to ask.

I’m hosting a free cybersecurity workshop on 3 ways to reduce ransomware risk. Do you know any Directors of Business Development or VPs of Sales that might be interested? Or perhaps another business leader who wants this level of protection?

If so, would you be open to making an introduction? To make things easy, I’ll provde you with an email you can copy/paste. 

If you don’t feel comfortable, no worries. I understand. 

Thanks for your consideration,

[YOUR NAME]

‍

Transcript:

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Hello, and welcome to our webinar, How to Get Appointments with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Maximize Sales. 

I am Shannon Murphy, the Chief Marketer at Zomentum, the revenue platform reinventing channel sales. Today, I am joined by Derek Marin, and let me tell you a little bit about Derek. 

Derek Marin is the president of Simple Selling, the agency that offers an all-in-one managed sales and marketing solution for MSPs that want a predictable MRR pipeline. If you would rather tap dance in a minefield than add prospecting, marketing, and sales management to your to-do list, then you may want to reach out. On the personal side, he's the father of three little boys and currently resides with his family in Boston. Thank you so much for being here today, Derek. Welcome. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Absolutely, a pleasure to be here. Thank you guys for having me. I'm looking forward to this.

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, I think we have a lot of people on the line who are looking forward to this. So guys, we've been running these marketing and sales workshops, if you will, talking with experts like Derek since November. And a lot of what I see in the chat is related to LinkedIn, questions around LinkedIn. 

So two weeks ago, we ran a webinar with two experts going through organic posting and how to build yourself to be a magnet, interact with your communities, and take that local offline networking and bring it online and be social in the same way. And Derek is going to show you how to do that from a more prospecting side of things with a tool like Salesforce-- not Salesforce-- LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And that's, I think, a big black box for a lot of you. 

So I'm super excited to have him here. He's going to set context and give us a simple exercise to do but also give us screenshots to guide us through. And you will be receiving a recording. All attendees and registrants do. So with that, I will let Derek get us started and set some context for you all to begin. Why are we here today, Derek? Why is this important? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

[LAUGHS] Absolutely, absolutely. So folks, I appreciate you taking some time out of your day. Look, I don't know if any of you guys have ever felt frustrated when it comes to LinkedIn and when it comes to the whole marketing thing. I'm not sure if you ever felt sort of like that you don't have the content to put out there, the thought leadership to put out there, or that you don't have as much time to do this marketing thing because you're so busy running your MSP. You have all these other things to work on with clients. 

And so A, I appreciate that you guys are taking some time to see if this can help you get some appointments. But also, there's some good news. With Navigator, what we're going to talk about today is that it's a really effective tool to get appointments for your MSP. And that's what we're going to try to run you through today is a really, really simple process for how you can start to get to dip your toes in the water with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and how you can get going, and not necessarily need a whole lot of time or a whole lot of content and marketing material to get what you want. So first things first-- and, Shannon, of course, please interrupt me, and let's make this more of a conversation. 

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Absolutely.

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah. So just setting some context here, so there's a lot of copy. There's a lot of words here, but that middle column, LinkedIn Basic, that's what most of us have been using for a long time, the regular LinkedIn, if you will. And if you scan down, well, the first row, when compared to LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can see that there's unlimited searches for Navigator. So there's a huge network, a lot of people out there that you want to potentially meet. So that's one of the differences there. 

And on Navigator, you also have, if we go down a couple of rows to alerts, search functionality, alerts and notifications-- oh, yeah, we got the poll here. Do you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator? Yes, please do answer that. I'm just going to-- should I just text this, Shannon? Are you guys seeing this on my screen as well? I'm seeing the poll right in my face. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, you can move that to the side and keep going. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

OK, I was like, oh, shoot, am I going to screw this up? So yeah, so today, we're going to talk about how you can use some of these advanced search functionality, alerts and notifications, and categorization so that you can start getting some traction on appointments. 

OK, so let's bust through. Let's keep going. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Just so you know, too, context, I have almost a 50-50 split on those that are using. 54% are using LinkedIn Sales Navigator right now, and about 46% aren't. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

OK. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Just wanted to let you guys know that, and feel free to chat with us, guys, as time goes. If you are a user and there's some particular grievance, maybe we can address that in Q&A. But otherwise, we'll be going through this exercise to make more of your current network and then build a prospect list as Derek's about to run us through. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, exactly. It's great to see that many of you are already using it. So today, the first part of this webinar, the first section, we're going to focus on connecting with clients. And these are some of the steps that we're going to run through to do that. And next, after we go through that, we'll work on building out a prospect list, and I'll walk you through some of the steps in Navigator and how to do that. 

And on the left, we have some of the visual representation of what's happening. If you are this woman here or this gentleman here, there's all these clients that love what your MSP does every day. And those are the people that are most likely to want to refer you. They're the ones that are most likely to be connected to other people similar to them. And so that's why we're going to go through this first connecting with clients campaign. And again, right after we do that, we'll show you how to build the next list or section, prospect list so that you can find some potential prospects to meet with. 

So I'll just run through these next couple of slides pretty quickly because this might be a webinar that you may come back to to follow step by step. I don't expect you guys to be necessarily logging into Navigator right now and whipping up an Excel sheet. But I'll just walk you guys through it and just feel free to interrupt and ask questions as we go. 

So step one, for what we're doing, we're going to just-- you guys want to have an Excel sheet with all of your clients. The reason is we're going to be connecting with them soon, the process built around that. We want to be able to keep that organized. So something as straightforward as this with just the company name, the company website, their name, first, last name. And then the other columns that you see, E, F, G, and H, just those will be blank. We'll fill them out as we go. So this should be an easy first step for you guys to just export a list from your own CRM. 

Next, you will go into Navigator, and you'll want to head over to the Accounts section. You want to create an account list and just call it a client list. So in Navigator, accounts are basically companies. I guess half of you probably know that because you're already using Navigator. But that's what it is. That's what we'll do here for this step. Very simple. So there's an empty list, of course. We're just starting out. 

‍

And ditto for a lead client list. So just like you just did for the accounts client list, you'll also want to create a client leads list, which if you haven't guessed by now, are for people. So you'd have all your client companies on one client list and all the prospective people that you know from your clients. So the main points of contact, the C level, and everyone else who your company directly works with, we're going to be populating that list as well. Any questions so far? This should be pretty straightforward at this point. 

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, so just to reiterate, leads are people in contacts. Accounts are the companies. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Exactly, exactly. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

And the reason why we have our spreadsheet, you can see that Derek left some columns empty on that, too. We'll come back to that. That's kind of servicing-- I shouldn't say servicing. That is serving as your master record and keeping track of your progress as you go about some of these tasks he's going to bring you through. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Absolutely. All right, so next, we want to find our clients on Navigator. And one of the benefits of that master record-- I love that term for that Excel sheet-- is when you have your client's website there, you can just right click and open their website. And then from your client's website-- this is a sample. Obviously, some random company that I found. 

‍

But typically, websites, they'll have their LinkedIn somewhere in the header of their website, or sometimes it's in the footer. Sometimes it's on the side. But it's a very efficient way to make sure that you're finding the right LinkedIn account page or company page because there may be multiple companies out there that have the same name because LinkedIn and Navigator have companies from all over the world. So I just find that this is a more efficient way to isolate and find your client's LinkedIn company pages efficiently. So you'll do that. 

And let's say, so if I clicked and it brought me to the ABC Polymer, in this case, LinkedIn company page, which is what we're seeing here, next, we'd want to then click on More, and then go into View in Sales Navigator. So this is where we're going to leave the basic LinkedIn company page, and we'll go into more-- let's just say another page for ABC Polymer that just has way more information. And that's where we're going to do our tracking. 

So now it's brought us into their Navigator company page where it has a description of the company. It has recent accounts, alerts, and things that have happened at this company recently. This is where you'll click Save. And then if you haven't guessed by now, we'll save it to the respective client list. So in this case, we're saving the accounts. So when you hit Save, you'll see a little pop-up, and then you'll want to save it to the client account list. 

And while you're here, you will also want to look at all 43 employees. And one by one, you'll want to save those individuals on the client leads list. So you'll be populating both the client account list and the client leads list pretty much from here. Any questions on this? Straightforward? Making sense? All right, let's keep going here. 

So just double checking, how many lists do we have? We should have two, all right. We have the client account list and the client leads list. They may not have the same-- 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Can you do that voice for me? Can you do the Count? 

‍

DEREK MARIN:

I wish. [MIMICS THE COUNT] One, one list, two. I kind of remember because I got three boys at home. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

You have three young boys. I'm like this must be-- 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, this is definitely in my wheelhouse right now, although we haven't gotten them on Sesame Street yet. We totally should. So what are we doing next? So now we have-- and this will take some time, a couple of hours maybe because you're going to have to go through all your clients one at a time and a lot of clicking and saving. Trust me, it'll be worth it. So you've got two lists. 

Now, so what are we doing next? So next deal, you'll log into your Navigator after you've done some of that legwork up front. And you'll go home, the home page, and you'll go to Alerts. And then you can sort alerts by leads. And you can also sort it by the latest. So what we're doing is isolating all of the different LinkedIn activities that your existing clients are doing on LinkedIn. And I mean by the different people, the people that you've saved on the leads list. 

So in this case, I've saved Craig as a lead in my personal Navigator. And so because I've saved him as a lead, I can see that he recently shared a post about his MSP. And here's a little snippet of what he posted on LinkedIn. And what I can do here is click View, and I'll move forward in a second. But the reason we do this, need someone to take a guess, or what are the thoughts from the folks? Why are we sort of paying attention to what our clients are posting and maybe taking a look at it? And Shannon, I cannot see if anyone is. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

It's OK. I'm watching the chat. Walter Brown says, make your name known, question mark. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yep, yep. You definitely want-- so not exactly, but that is the ultimate goal with this. But this particular maybe-- 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Hartesy Burkhart says see their pain points. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

OK, that could be, yeah. So I have a little hint, which is we're using lead alerts to make networking deposits. So think of the way I see it, for example, Craig, he is on LinkedIn probably not for a whole lot of fun or posting this because he has nothing else to do. He's like you guys, right? He's running an MSP. He's probably posting this, though, because he wants to meet prospects. He has networking goals just like you guys. 

And so I want to view his post, and what I want to do is I want to make a deposit. I want to help him out. So by looking at what Craig posted and engaging with that post with a thumbs up or any one of these, Craig is going to see that I'm helping him out. 

I'm making a networking deposit trying to help him get his post to have a wider amount of impressions on LinkedIn so that he's achieving his networking goals with a little bit of my help. So when you're doing this for your clients, you're effectively doing the same thing. You're helping your clients achieve their networking objectives by looking at what they're posting and interacting with it and engaging with it in some way. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yep, and absolutely, putting them first. What are they trying to achieve here? 

‍

DEREK MARIN:

Exactly, and I think it's important to note that you don't necessarily have to read everything that your leads are posting or that your clients are posting. For the most part, everyone's posting really professional things. This is not Facebook. This is not TikTok or something like that. So these are, by and large, just business related posts. And a thumbs up doesn't necessarily mean that you agree or that you've spoken with Sarah or something like that. It's just more, hey, I love what you're doing here, Craig, in this case, and I support you. 

And what's going to happen is Craig, when he sees me give the thumbs up, he's going to know that I'm supporting him because he'll get a little notification. So it's like a little deposit. Craig is going to have a slightly better feeling about me every time I'm doing that. So moving forward-- 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Just wanted to pause-- sorry, I just want to pause a second to say I think that this is a huge benefit of Sales Navigator when I started exploring it myself a few months ago to create this lead list and have this ability for these interaction points because I don't know about some of you on the line, but following and even sometimes connecting doesn't really seem to do much. I would notice that I would still be missing updates from those that I was really interested in engaging with. 

But if I put them on a lead list in Sales Navigator, then it was very easy for me to click through as Derek just showed and see their updates. I'm not missing updates anymore, which I'm sure is to their benefit to get those that really want to prospect on LinkedIn to move to Sales Navigator. 

But-- oh, there's a Craig on the line, and he said, I think this is the most I've heard my name spoken aloud in a long time because-- you've been at home too long, Craig. But yeah, so I just wanted to make that point that that is something that I think can be really powerful about Sales Navigator. And Derek just exemplified this right now. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, and so it goes to show that this is a process. It takes time. We can't just be approaching Navigator or LinkedIn or networking in person really with the intention of just extracting and getting what we want right away. We have to provide value to everyone else who's in the room, everyone else who's in the navigator. Otherwise, they're not going to want to help. So that's just sort of an important point. 

So just moving along here, what do we do after we've made some deposits, networking deposits where we're engaging with our clients' content for those who are participating on Navigator? Then you'll want to come back and just send a connection request. So connect will just mean that you'll basically be able to see who the mutual connections are. 

‍

‍

So with Tim, in this case, if I were to send Tim a connection request, then he'd go from being a third degree to a first degree with me. And so I'd be able to send him an unlimited amount of messages and be able to see who some of the other connections that he has that I may want to meet. 

And so you could have skipped the previous step and just sent connections to all of your clients, and you'd probably have a pretty good conversion rate because they're your clients. They already like you, and they already know you. But I like that other, that step four with Craig-- sorry, Craig. I like that step because you're showing your clients that you're also in it to help them in Navigator, too, and not just in it for yourself. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Well, we're doing this to hopefully get access to their larger network as well. So we would want their network contacts to see those interactions, too, right? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, absolutely. Yep. All right, so just kind of moving along, we're at the halfway point, but this is why we had that master file or tracking sheet. So now you should be able to have saved all the accounts, saved the leads, maybe boosted some of their content and sent connection requests. And that way, none of your clients are falling through the cracks. 

OK, so we're up to here if you've done all this. By the time you've done all this, you have sort of connected with as many clients as possible. You made a lot of networking deposits at this point, hopefully. 

And the next thing is building that prospect list. So how are we going to do that? So very similar-- step one, super straightforward, you'll go back to leads, and you'll create a brand new list. Just call it prospects list, and you'll see in a minute why you can-- this is way too broad, but for the sake of the example, we're just calling it this for now. 

And now we get to one of the parts that our team loves about Navigator, which is all of the advanced filtering and stuff that you get. So just a quick run through some of the best filters that you guys may want to explore is, well, geography is a no-brainer. Most of you-- I could be wrong-- might have one or two locations, and so you probably want to be isolated by counties or the metropolitan area from your office to find prospects that are relatively close. 

Oh, the other thing to clarify-- the reason there's geography here and then company HQ here, it seems redundant, but the difference being that the geography, this is referring to the lead, the person. And whereas the company headquarters refers to the headquarters of the company. So with everyone working remote and in different places, ideally, you have both the company local, and the person is also local right. 

Industries, I don't need to explain that, but you can isolate in segments and do that if you would like, add a whole bunch, exclude certain industries, too, if you don't want to get noise from-- you don't want to get a list that has unqualified people. So you guys know the industries that you don't want to work with. Company headcount, you can isolate that. 

Connections-- so when you select connection, you'll want to probably isolate just the second degree, that way they're not too far removed from you in LinkedIn terms, sort of that one degree away. But you can play around with that. You can do third degree as well, but you really want to make sure you do include this filter. 

Otherwise, you may even have some people that you already know are populating that list, and that's kind of pointless. So you want people that you're not connected with. Seniority level should be self-explanatory. Any questions on this? This is more just playing around with Navigator. You can do a lot with this part. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah. Definitely, guys, send us your questions if you have any on this, if you like. Maybe there's nuances or intricacies you're thinking of right now that you want clarification on. Please send that to us. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, and there's some people who have used Navigator. Maybe you guys have tried some other things that we haven't. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, we can share knowledge. I did stress in the chat just now when you were talking in terms of the connections of and the second degree, that was why connecting with our clients was so important, that we're getting that second degree in a relevant fashion. Because once you get your clients in the room, they're your biggest sellers. They kind of take the work out of it for you. So we're trying to keep them as part of this conversation. OK, I'm not seeing any of that here on Zoom. So I need to maybe send us a message from LinkedIn. But we shall see. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, yeah, sounds good. So this is just taking sort of a look at when you click into your brand new MQL marketing qualified prospect list, this is sort of what Navigator will show you at the top of the list, this row here. I just want to talk a little bit about a couple of my favorites. 

So shared experiences-- so let's say there's 100 people on the whole list that come up. 25 of them have shared experiences with me. So it could be a couple of different things. It could be that we studied in the same university. It could be that we worked in the same company. It could be that we're part of the same LinkedIn groups. So those are helpful things sometimes to give you just a little bit of a way to build rapport with some of these prospects should you meet them, should you decide to try to connect and what have you. 

The other one here is to change jobs in the past 90 days. If you're isolating decision makers at good companies and good industries and a CFO or CEO, or I guess, it wouldn't apply as much to probably presidents, but more of the people right under the owners of companies, those folks are great for you to speak with. And if they've changed jobs, of course, they're more inclined to want to make an impact wherever they're landing. So that's also sort of a good moment, maybe to reach out as well. So you can play around with this. Yeah, we got here on LinkedIn. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, so my team and I were thinking about this after you and I talked about a wonderful way of targeting with job changes. We were also thinking about just generally interaction points that LinkedIn is giving you notifications for, whether you're using Sales Navigator or not. 

So we were thinking, OK, everybody sees-- it looks like nobody's using them, the birthday notifications, though I do get some messages in my inbox for that every summer. Job update notifications, I think we're all very interested to see that. We're on LinkedIn to network professionally. 

I think popular network posts notifications, that's a little bit newer. Oh, Derek's post is getting a lot of chatter, go contribute. Or your new connection just posted, go interact. LinkedIn, I think, is trying to make that easier. And then if you are following a thought leader who's doing one of those newsletters in Pulse, I think it is, you'll get notifications about that, which could be very beneficial from a prospecting perspective. 

If that's a client or a potential client and you want to see that they're putting out these articles on a regular basis, commenting on those could be a great interaction point. And if there's ones I'm not thinking of, please feel free to put that in the chat, but we were kind of mulling, and we're interested to see how you guys are taking advantage of the different notifications that LinkedIn is offering you. 

So I'm going to end the poll and share the results right now. OK, so job update notifications are leading with 67% utilizing that. Popular network post notifications, I think that's super easy-- I mean, not easy to comment thoughtfully, of course, but it takes the pressure off you if there's a whole conversation and discussion versus reaching out to somebody individually because there's an update on their life. I don't know my personal perspective on that. Let's see. 

And Alex Carolyn, which I feel like I recognize as my last name. I think you've joined us before, Alex. How do you approach this process when you have multiple projects/businesses? And therefore, it sounds like LinkedIn company profiles that you are working on. I think I'll let you handle that, Derek, but I think when you're creating the lists, you can target different stakeholders, right? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Right, yeah. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

So I think it's probably the next step down from this is once you've created the list and you're looking at multiple stakeholders that you want to interact with, I guess you have a method for how you're working multiple at the same time. Do you phase through them? What are your thoughts on that?

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah no, I think it comes down to just good account list naming sort of conventions I suppose to keep yourself organized. That would be the way to sort of ensure that you're tapping into the right people, the right companies, and that you're being able to separate one goal from another, from one company or for another. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, I guess that's traditional sales, why CRMs exist, being organized. I think, too, maybe, Alex, feel free to write to me, shannonmurphy@zomentum.com. We can talk about this more. I do wonder if it's potentially taking a different angle with the stakeholder based upon where they sit within the organization, too. You can work as the CFO, the CEO, and maybe the CMO. They all have different tech needs, but the pitch that you have will probably change as a result. 

And then to Derek's point, cadence is really just a time management thing from there. And maybe where you can automate if possible, too, for some of that. Keep it personalized, but if somebody leaves you languishing, do you have some automation in place to help you with that follow up so that those threads don't drop off? Yeah, sorry, Derek, I'll let you continue. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

No, no, no, this is great. And let's see. Where are we going from here? Yeah, so if we were to click on one of the prospects in that list, Navigator will pop this up, and there'll just be that profile information about them. But here's the cool part, the shared connection. So this is why we did that first step with connecting to clients. 

What Navigator is saying is that there's two people between me and Woodrow, two people that share connections with us. So these shared connections could be your clients, but they could just be other people that you were previously connected with. But the point is that you have a shared connection, and that's where there's a bit of an opportunity.

And so what do we do? After you find that there's a mutual connection, there's a lot of different ways, a lot of different views on how to go about this. I understand asking clients for referrals is not always easy. There are some clients that you don't want to ask, folks who maybe you're working on improving their level of satisfaction with your MSP at the moment and others that are ecstatic. So you guys know who's happy and who's good to reach out to. 

What I'm showing here is just a sample email that you could then email to your client and ask for an intro. I'll just read this. Hi, Lisa, I know this is a huge ask. I'm hosting a free cybersecurity workshop on three ways to reduce ransomware risk. Do you know any directors of business development or VP of sales that might benefit from this?

So this is just-- or you could change the job title. This is totally made up. Do you know any CFOs, COOs, who may benefit from cybersecurity, or presidents of small businesses? If so, would you be able to make an introduction? To make things easy, I'll provide you with an email you can copy paste. If you don't feel comfortable name dropping, no worries. You don't even need to reply to this email. 

So this is just something that you could play around with. But I do recommend that you take it outside of LinkedIn because you can still try to ask for the connection within LinkedIn, but I think your clients are probably checking their email more than LinkedIn. And so you're more likely, I think, to get a response. 

And the second benefit of email is that the introduction would probably be done through email as well. Like here, it's saying, you'll provide an email that your client can copy and paste. So you can create a second email. If they're like, yeah, sure, who would you like to meet, and then you can name drop the person that we saw and give your client sort of a couple of sentences to introduce yourself or to promote a workshop that you might be doing, et cetera, et cetera. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, absolutely. I think 100% personalize this, right? We want to make sure that we're not just giving you business inspiration. We don't want you to just take this and copy and paste this into your email. Please personalize it. It's going to carry much more weight if you do. I would say, too, the copy and paste hack is wonderful. Fellow business owner myself, I have done that with my clients when asking for referrals. They're busy business owners as well. Take as much effort out of it for them as possible. 

And sometimes, too, it's great to get referrals, but I think some of us have gotten referrals that are not necessarily a good fit because whether it's a current client or a friend or a family member, they don't know how to best represent your business and the type of clients that you're looking to work with. So if you write that copy yourself, it's going to make sure that you're not just leaving it to somebody else to represent you and your business and maybe misrepresent you. 

You're going to get asked for projects that aren't necessarily a good fit for your company or not where you're looking to go in the future. So I think that that's a wonderful, wonderful hack, and I don't know if it'd be too much of a huge ask, though, Derek, because they are fellow business owners. So they should get it, right? We're all trying to grow, and word of mouth is hugely important.

If you could just flip to the next slide, though, too, I just want to reiterate for everybody why he's showing you then this email to a client, why we're trying to bring it back to the inbox. So we talked about connecting with our clients so that we can then when we do go prospect, we can hopefully get these quick wins of utilizing our current network and our current clients. 

And so when he's showing you this email template, that's just bringing it full circle to make sure, how can we get movement on these? We've made a very targeted list of a specific niche. Now, hopefully, if you're already focused on accountants, hopefully, they're already working with a lot of others or going to those events where there's a lot of other accountants making these same business decisions. And so we want to utilize that network and send that email as Derek just showed. I just wanted to outline what this process is. Does anybody have any questions? Or Derek, is there anything that you wanted to add? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

No, no, I think that was a great summary. And I just hopefully, you guys noticed that there wasn't a need to be a thought leader in this whole process. And if that's what's stressed you out about LinkedIn, well, hopefully, this helps out a little bit. You're already doing great work with your existing clients. Now, it's just a matter of taking the right steps to connect with them and meet some other people with the help of Navigator. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Absolutely, absolutely. So with that, I think we can go over to Q&A, but I will let you-- Derek, you have an offer so I will let you introduce that real quick, and I will get some other stuff ready to send resources in the chat to our friends here. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Sure, it sounds good. Well, thanks, everyone. And yes, so if any of you would like, we have a quiz on our website for a predictable MRR pipeline. So if you want to check it out, our website, simpleselling.co, .co, . You go there to simpleselling.co, the quiz, you can find it right on the top banner. It says take the quiz. And also, the chat bot on the lower right-hand corner will also bring you to the quiz. And our idea is to see if you guys are set up for predictability in your lead generation efforts. Would love to see what you guys think of it. So anyway, thank you for your time and for coming by today. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, and don't go anywhere. We're still going to do Q&A. So if you're interested in that, please stick around. And you may or may not know, Zomentum, we are a revenue platform. We have a set of tools for sales acceleration to really help you manage this process end to end. We have license reconciliation and billing. 

And we also have a discovery marketplace where you can learn about new vendors and even manage them with getting consolidated invoices from multiple vendors. So our platform just keeps expanding, and our whole goal is to add more monthly recurring revenue for you guys. That's it, and that's what drives our product roadmap. So if you'd like to check us out, feel free to do so. 

I am going to now move over to Q&A. So Walter asked a really great question, Derek. He was saying, we're talking about some of these interaction points, and I think if they're active on LinkedIn, this whole strategy obviously is much easier. He's asking, what do you do if you haven't posted anything on LinkedIn? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, what do you think? 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, so it's sort of like-- here's how I see it. I mean, the idea of leaving a deposit, and that's not possible for some individuals because as you pointed out, not everyone is active on LinkedIn, and that's OK. Skip the whole attempt on that on depositing because there's nothing there, and send the connection request. And because they probably still have a profile even if they don't log in frequently, they might still be connected to some folks there. So there is still value for you to send the connection request and to try to just be exposed to mutual connections. 

That's what I would say. Yeah, not everyone's a member of the Chamber of Commerce, right? Not everyone is going to be networking, but you still have great clients who might still refer to you, and you may not need to go to an event, or you may not need to go to Navigator to get that opportunity. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Walter actually followed up, and I'm glad you mentioned this, Walter, because I was thinking that. I was like, I wonder if they're lurkers. And he said that he sees them, and this is key. You can go into somebody's profile and you can see all of their activity. So you know if somebody is interacting even if they're not posting themselves. He said, I see them responding to other posts, but they aren't posting anything of their own. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, yeah, I mean, another way you could quickly make a small deposit, too, because they may be similar to many of us where we don't have content to post, but they have networking goals. So when you send the connection request, you could add a little bit of-- Navigator gives you the option to add a sentence or two. 

So you say, hey, John, because he knows you. Hey, John, I noticed you're on LinkedIn. If there's anyone in my network that you would like to connect with, let me know. I'd love to make the introduction. So for someone like that who's not promoting content but is present, you can make a little deposit that way by saying, hey, look at my profile. How can I help you meet people that I know that you want to know?

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, and if you're-- also, Jonathan Yarborough says, I like that. And I'm thinking that absolutely makes sense, too, because I think it's great because it's from one small business owner to another most likely within a particular geo, right? So I think that that's a natural angle to say I want to help you. Yeah, always offer to give first. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, basically just give, and you get. I mean, that'll go a long way.

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, and I think some of you have experienced that in your in-person networking. You have a great conversation with somebody, and you leave it to let me know if I can do anything for you. We have to just try to take some of these same skills and figure out how we can parallel them online. 

Walter, I was going to add another tip, too, is that if you-- I've done this before. If I see somebody interacting with another person's post, I will as long as I can contribute to that post individually, respond to the original poster. And then if I see them comment, the prospect commenting, I will then go add to theirs, comment directly back on theirs as well. Great point. Have you considered XYZ? Or I really like the angle you took with this. Whatever it may be, you can just say you agree simply, or you can add beyond it. 

OK, he said, gotcha. Yeah, I think it's nice, though, to comment on the original post first, too, so that way they don't think you're just prospecting them and only want to interact with them. I do it first for the larger, second for the prospect. But OK, Walter. Walter said, gotcha, be my friend, damn it. Yeah, right, exactly. We would try to subtly network with that but not look like we're following them peeking around corners. OK, awesome. 

Let's see. I'm trying to see if we have any other questions that I might have missed during our time. But I'm glad you guys are so active asking questions while we are going through this, too. I was looking through our notes as well, Derek, from our practice sessions. I think we actually covered everything. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, I think so. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, I think so. I don't really have any-- 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah, we don't have to extend it. I mean-- 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Yeah, I can give you guys back this time. I'll give it one more minute, and we'll see if we get any more questions. We're happy to receive feedback, but I hope that this was helpful. Again, I did post the link for the session two weeks ago, too. So I'm hoping-- I was getting a lot of comments on LinkedIn over these past few months. I'm hoping we paired it up nicely, and gave you a lot of instruction on how to do things organically and how to do things here on the paid side. And I think Derek has-- 

My goal for you from a content side is always to make sure that you have a lightweight way to get started. And I hope that this demystified Navigator for you so that you have a concrete way to get started that feels lightweight, and honestly, I think can give you some quick wins. Oh, Jonathan, thank you. Have a great day. Let me know if I can help you in any way. Putting that to use. OK, awesome. Thank you, Jonathan. 

All right, everyone. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And a really excellent session, Derek. Thank you so much for bringing us through this. Grabbing all those screenshots and giving us-- 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Absolutely. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

--a live demo here. I appreciate that. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Yeah. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

All right. Thank you all. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week. 

‍

DEREK MARIN: 

Finishing strong, and having a good weekend, relaxing weekend, magic weekend. 

‍

SHANNON MURPHY: 

Thank you all. Bye.

‍

If you would like to learn about how Zomentum can benefit your business, we invite you to schedule a demo with us.

Schedule a demo now.

‍