How to build your LinkedIn database of connections and create sales opportunities

I am now a big fan of LinkedIn automation -for me, it’s now on a par with Keap/ Infusionsoft! It’s exciting, like having the automation power that Infusionsoft brings, but what Infusionsoft lacks is a huge, searchable, built-in, up-to-date database of business people.

I was on the Growth Mindset Movement Podcast with Paul Greig-Smith the other day with a new strategy – if you were starting with a new LinkedIn account – how would you quickly add contacts to get say 2500 1st degree connections, and as a result get a universe of millions of 2nd and 3rd connections you can then reach?

In the podcast, I show you how to achieve this manually, the time-consuming way or automatically – which of course frees up your time. Check out the recording below.

TRANSCRIPT

Paul Greig Smith 0:00
Welcome to the Growth Mindset movement interview series. Now, if you are listening in today and maybe you’re a business owner, or you’re a coach, and you want more leads, this is what we all want. It’s increasingly tougher and tougher to get leads these days and cut through all the online clutter. You’re going to want to listen to this interview. Because I’m speaking with a good friend and a marketing automation specialist. His name is Julian Mills, and he helps business owners take a lot of the heavy lifting out of marketing. And over the years I’ve always loved my conversations with Julian because I’m non techie. So if you’re non techie, as well, you definitely want to listen to this because he really he’s got a great way of simplifying marketing, removing a lot of the heavy lifting, and helping automate and helping kind of free up you as a business owner as a coach as an entrepreneur to do what you do best. But anyway, I will let Julian introduce a lot of it as well but yeah, so if you want to get more leads, get more sales. And you need help doing this through LinkedIn. You are in the right place. So without further ado, welcome, Julian.

Julian Mills 1:20
Hi, Paul. Thanks for having me on the podcast today. Delighted to be here and hopefully add value for your listeners. Fantastic. So I’ll jump straight in. Today I’m going to talk about LinkedIn first degree connection building. So who is the strategy for so basically, if you are selling B2B to other businesses. You obviously need a LinkedIn account to make this work and you want to increase your sales. So I think that’s pretty much most businesses unless you’re b2c. Yeah. So who am I, I’ve been helping entrepreneurs now for over 25 years in the trenches working with offline and online marketing. For the last 12 years, I’ve specialised really in marketing automation with a software called Keep, or Infusionsoft as it was called. And then more recently, coaching clients with marketing via the entrepreneur circle marketing marketing system, and if you want more information on me to find my details at www.Julianmills.co.uk. So I learned this years ago, but it takes about 300 LinkedIn profile views to generate an opportunity on LinkedIn.

Paul Greig Smith 2:35
So an opportunity is someone you know, sending you a contact request or something like that.

Julian Mills 2:40
Yeah, someone putting their hand up and enquiring about what you do, Paul. Yep, got it. Got it. It takes 300 profile views. So then that’s interesting because then we can go and look at our LinkedIn and see how many profile views we’re getting. So I went and had a look at mine before and in the last month I have 277 views.

Paul Greig Smith 3:00
Okay, and I think I had something like 11 in the past 90 days.

Julian Mills 3:04
If work out the maths for that Paul . I did it on 10 recently if you’ve been getting 10 profile views every 90 days. That equates to about seven half years before you’re generating any meaningful opportunity.

Paul Greig Smith 3:19
I’m not a LinkedIn specialist. So I’m not getting leads from LinkedIn right now. So I’m really looking forward to this conversation.

Julian Mills 3:28
So that would explain why. So if you want to find out how many views you’ve had simply, you see here, go to your dashboard in your LinkedIn and see your 277 views in the last 90 days. So check out how many profile views you’ve had and see where you stand. So to get LinkedIn profile views theres two ways to do it.

Unknown Speaker 4:16
So there’s the easy way and the hard way, the hard way, I’m guessing is what most people do and that’s the manual kind of way of typing it out. Hi, how you doing? I’m Paul whatever want to connect. very slow, very laborious, but not efficient.

Julian Mills 4:32
And there’s also you know, spending half your day on LinkedIn, looking at other people’s posts, posting yourself, commenting, liking and some people like that but its time consuming. I haven’t got time for that, but I will occasionally when I’m writing a newsletter post or a blog post, copy, paste and stick it in a LinkedIn post, but it’s not my day to day thing.

Paul Greig Smith 4:54
And what I would say for anyone listening, Julian gave me a sneak peek of this and it always blows my mind with it because essentially, to be able to kind of set up this marketing kind of automated reaching out to people but in an organic non spammy way, as a great way of building your profile connecting with people, but setting it up in the background. So so you’re not doing it manually the hard way, which is what I would do as a not kind of techie person. So so yeah. Anyway, sorry to dive

Julian Mills 5:26
You stole my thunder there Paul. Okay, the manual way, the traditional way that everyone knows is that you shoudl be manually should be connecting with people. The other way is to connect with other users and become visible visible to them when they search for what you do. Connecting and building your database on LinkedIn, it becomes a very valuable database we looked at a campaign recently, the LinkedIn Dream 100 where once you’ve got this database, it opens up so much other opportuniities. The key to it all though is getting that list to those 1st degree connections. So 500+ first connections is a minimum but I would say because even your profile when your profile says 500+. That’s quite powerful. If it says 101 connections, it looks like a bit of a weak profile, you’re not very well connected, you know, but we found that the first thing is this strategy will solve that problem. You’ll have 500 plus connections, you can do it very quickly, actually. Two and a half thousand or more woudl be ideal. Im up to just over 10,000, most of that in the last year so you know, when you plug into this, it’s very powerful. Those 1st degree connections, I might connect with somebody today and they don’t they don’t do anything I’m interested in, you know, I’ve never gonna sell anything to them or they’ll never be interested in what I do. That’s fine by me because what I’m really interested in is these second or third connections, who they’re connected to, and who those people are connected too.

Paul Greig Smith 7:09
So its tapping into all these networks, isn’t it? That’s incredible.

Julian Mills 7:13
Yeah. Now when I got my first 1000 connections on LinkedIn, in those days, LinkedIn used to say your connected to 1000 people. This opens up an extended universe of about 26 million, if I remember correctly. And that was some years ago. So unfortunately, LinkedIn doesn’t show you anymore but just shows you how the multiplier effect of the network is.

Paul Greig Smith 7:35
So that really kind of tapping into like the compound effect in terms of increasing your profile, your reach, connectivity, all that kind of stuff.

Julian Mills 7:42
Exactly, if one of these 3rd degree connections does a search on what you’re do the chances are your going to appear. If you’re not connected you probabaly won’t appear. So what LinkedIn connecting strategies are out there. The first one, alot of are very closed minded and will only going to connect with people who I know my customers, my clients, my staff, my colleagues, whatever, which is quite a narrow view to give you maybe a couple of hundred connections that way, it’s just gonna limit your opportunities doing it that way. The other way is to connect to what we call LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns. I asked you before if you knew what a LinkedIn L.I.O.N is and you had no idea. Yeah, but L.I.O.N stands for LinkedIn Open Networker. So, these are people that understand the value of network and will connect to anybody. You ask them to connect, they will. If you go out to somebody trying to reach out to somebody who is your ideal client and ask them to connect. Chances are they won’t. But open networkers do want to connect. That as I said, they are probably not interested in what you do and that is fine. As I said, its the second and third connections were after her. So they will have other other active people want tonetwork like you and they’re the . LinkedIn open. That was two ways to do the manual way. I’ll show you that in a minute. We could do the manual way. As Paul said before, we can set the automation to do the heavy lifting for us and make our job so so much easier. Okay, so LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns, yep. So let me show you how to find LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns. The key to it is to do a search. And obviously, I’ve dealing with a database of over 10,000 connections, so you will probably see different things to me but if I put in the search here L.I.O.N, go to People. Okay, so I do a search online, so in my database I have access to 315,000 L.I.O.Ns. These people will all connect with me. So the manual way. You go and ask them to connect, often a L.I.O.N will have a premium membership of LinkedIn that lets people request to join with them. So you see here – Connect – Connect. So you can manually do this. You can manually do it that way. Yep. Okay, or as I say, if you want to let the automation take the strain this is just one strategy in the automation there is a suite of campaigns you can build with the LinkedIn automation tools available, lots’s available here is some of them Social Pilot, Linkedhelper is one I’ve used, Expandi the Meet Alfred, IFTT

Julian Mills 11:22
So there is a whole series of tools available. If you want to do it manually then you can or you can use automation then you can, this is just one strategy of a whole series you can deploy on your LinkedIn account. But the key to making all the strategies work is to have a huge database of second and third connections. Got it? And this is what we just talked about how to get those so the ideal way is LinkedIn L.I.O.Ns that is the secret. That’s the end for today. If you want more information on any of this then please visit my website www.JulianMills.co.uk, if you want any help I’m available. Love to hear your feedback, any results you achieve with this strategy, and what’s really important to me I’d love to hear any of your ideas you’ve got or improvements were I’m missing something. I’d love to hear those as well.

Unknown Speaker 12:17
Fantastic. Thank you so much for that Julian and what I would say as well to anyone listening, because here’s the thing when it comes to creating marketing campaigns I’m something of an ad hoc marketer, I’ll be like, oh, I need some leads. So better create a marketing campaign. So I’ll do a marketing campaign. Then I’ll be wrapped up in sales and operations and all that kind of stuff. And then I’ll get back in that cycle of, oh, actually, I need some more leads. But obviously, what we’re talking about here is is setting up a campaign an automatic campaign, which is running in the background, almost like a rhythmic acquisition of new leads. So rather than having this feast or famine cycle that most business owners go through my myself included, to be able to set this up in the background. Imagine how powerful that would be for your business to set it up once set it and forget it. You carry on going about your business and then just having a drip, drip, drip, new supply of leads coming into your business. So well. Yes, reach out to Julian, check out a whole load of his free kind of trainings on his website and so on, but by all means, you know, contact Julian with any kind of feedback or anything like that because I mean, yeah, I for one, never tire of Julian’s tips. He’s my go to guy whenever I kind of need help with this. So thanks for listening guys. And yet, check out Julian’s website and I hope you found this valuable

Julian Mills 13:46
Thanks Paul for having me on the podcast today.