NEW and Free – the LinkedIn Dream 100 Strategy

A free strategy on how to create and market to your Dream 100 list of prospective clients using LinkedIn, LinkedHelper 2 automation and Keap marketing automation.

Check out this podcast episode where I was talking about my LinkedIn Dream 100 Strategy with Paul Greig-Smith.

TRANSCRIPT

Okay, welcome to this recording of the growth mindset movement, empowering entrepreneurial evolution, and today I’m joined by Julian mills. So if you are a business owner, if you are a business owner, and you know we’ve all got the same problems of lead generation of prospecting and the cost of advertising these days, you know, more expensive than ever. So, if, if you’re a business owner, and that’s an ever present kind of problem of yours, and you need help with lead generation, and prospecting and all that kind of stuff and doing it in a non spammy organic way, then you’re going to want to listen in to this recording and I’ll tell you why. Because, one, we’re going to cover some incredible strategies used by Chet Holmes, who is Charlie Munger’s right hand man, so we got some incredible, literally strategies which are mind blowingly effective, but because I’m also joined by Julian Mills, who is an automation expert and what he’s done, he’s got this incredible strategy using the dream 100 strategy that is been made so famous by Chet Holmes, but he has coupled it with his kind of automation expertise to kind of come up with this kind of like killer approach to marketing so stay with us, I promise you it’s going to be worth it and Julian, let’s let’s crack on and dive in and show people this awesome strategy of yours.

Okay, thanks for having me on the podcast today. I’d like to start so it will be about 20 minutes or so something like that. 20 minutes well worth investing your time. You going to want to listen to it guys. And you know, there’s no sales here. This is a no sales zone. This is pure educational content. So I call this the LinkedIn Dream 100 Strategy. Okay, combining three elements really we’ll see in a minute so a three part strategy to generate sales from your LinkedIn account. As Paul mentioned, I’m not here to pitch you lead gen services for LinkedIn, which is very common at the moment so first of all who is this going to be the right strategy for. Well first of all, it’s b2b. So if you sell to other businesses, then this is the you if you sell to consumers then probably not so. You need a LinkedIn account, most people have one of those and the more connections the better.

And you know, you want to have the desire as Paul was saying to increase your sales. That’s what we’re here for.

So who am I so I’ve been helping entrepreneurs now for over 25 years, working in the trenches to generate sales, originally offline, but as the internet became more important so it’s online now.

And helping clients to systemize and automate marketing, primarily using Keap which is which was called Infusionsoft, Infusionsoft previously.

And I’m also an Entrepreneurs Circle Cerified Coach, helping customers to rhythmically acquire new customers. So again, you can look me up you will find the more information go to Julianmills.co.uk.

Fantastic. We’ve known each other for a good few years now, Paul, yeah, we certainly have. Yeah, because we’re both business owners. So we love talking business. We love talking strategy. And Julian’s kind of like the opposite to me, he’s good at all the things which I’m terrible at. So when when he was showing me this strategy, my kind of jaw dropped and I was like, wow, this is incredible. So I was really excited to bring this to people because for so many business owners, we wear so many hats, and as Julian says, you know, rhythmic kind of acquisition of leads. You know, for some people, prospecting marketing sales is not what they’re good at and so on. But this takes out so much of the heavy lifting of of the marketing and when when you see how you can use this to scale your business. It’ll blow your mind it blew my mind. So part one is it’s all based on this book by Chet Holmes called The Ultimate Sales Machine, and Paul and I did another podcasts on this, amazing book, buy it, buy it, buy it.

It is an amazing book, especially for b2b business owners.

There are 12 key strategies in there. But today I’m only focusing on one, the dream 100 list. And basically the strategy in a nutshell is rather than trying to do Facebook advertising to 1000s of 1000s of people and generating what could be quite poor leads, go the other way around. Let’s focus on your dream 100 potential clients. So getting laser focused on your ideal target. Exactly. laser focused and really pig headed determined to follow up with those people in a systemized and in a thought through way rather than just using hope marketing, hope marketing ad hoc marketing, which I’m guilty off, I’m guilty off, everyones done it, but once you’ve got that dream 100 list, we can really do something magic with them. This is how Chet Holmes is able to you know, imagine your dream 100, you could close two or three of those a year it would probably make a big difference to most businesses, yes to your bottom line. So the high value ideal clients that you’re actively seeking. Exactly, yeah, as I said before, for Warren Buffets business partner, Chet Holmes was doubling their magazine sales. year on year. Yeah, he turned around, these failing divisions didnt he using this strategy. Exactly.

So how do you get your dream 100 list well you can manually do the research. You may already have a list, that’s fine. Or you may just know from your industry, who are those ideal clients. You build from that , thats the start your list, but you’ve also got another valuable resource which is your LinkedIn account.

So from your LinkedIn account, you can manually go in and start researching. Now obviously, some of the best you will find in there are previous clients, yet people often forget about previous clients. They can often be a very quick win and also your prospects that have falling through the gaps. They never closed but would be ideal. So those are two big resources in your LinkedIn already. Tapping into your existing kind of lead assets within LinkedIn.

And then you go through your LinkedIn account manually start researching them. And then manually getting an email address because LinkedIn doesn’t get it out of the box. And the phone numbers as well. You manually do all that work. You can manually do it. Might be quite laborious might take use of time, which is a real chore, everyone is too busy for that sort of carry on. Yeah. So part two of my strategy is LinkedIn automation. Let the automation take the strain. Okay, so I’ve been using a tool called LinkedHelper 2 Okay, often when people are pitching you LinkedIn lead generation it might be a couple of hundred pounds a month. Yeah, LinkedHelper 2, there’s a little bit of a learning curve, but it’s 75 quid a year. I did the free trial and straightaway I thought this is the tool to use. For £75 a year, it’s a no brainer.

With this. So I’ve worked with clients where they had to 3000 quality contacts in their LinkedIn. 3000 and they were just not been used.

We tried to export a list from LinkedIn and it just gave us 3000 names and literally a handful of email addresses, useless, with LinkedInHelper over a number of days because you have to do it carefully with LinkedIn over a number days we extracted a list of all those contacts with the names, company’s, email addresses, which often personal email address as well which means you can reach them and phone numbers and other data like number contacts. Super resource, so you get your spreadsheet, scan down and you can sort the wheat from the chaff and just get your dream 100. It may be that you get only 50 or you get 500 it doesn’t matter the concept is we’re going to focus on a limited number of ideal clients, your dream 100.

So the first thing to do when you have your dream 100 you can take that list and import it back into LinkedInHelper and create a campaign as part of the dream 100 campaign you’ll see later, but you might send a monthly direct message to them in LinkedIn. Yep, almost like a CRM. It’s almost like being able to email them. Yeah, it’s almost like that, yes there is a CRM built in here? Yeah, it’s like being able to email them without the worry of spam and all that as it’s coming straight in as a LinkedIn message.

So thats one way you can get into them, yeah, now, I’m afraid here there is a little bit of manual work to go to the next level, with a little bit manual research you can add postal addresses so you’ve got the contact record. You’ve got the email address. You get a virtual PA or someone to do it quite cheap for you on Fiverr or PeoplePerHour. Get someone to go do the reasearch, go to the website, get the physical address. Yep. You see why later on. It’s only 100 so it’s not asking you to do 50000 from Facebook.

As a quick aside, LinkedInHelper does so much more. It can help you grow your first degree contacts, automatically inviting people to connect, sending the thank yous, etc. So, again, sorry, sorry, stop you. I’m just getting my head around it as well. So this is where most people like most people like me, you might be doing this manually. Dear so and so, hi, all this kind of manual connecting. Essentially this automates the whole lot. It automates the connection, the follow up thank yous, all that kind of stuff to hundreds of people. Exact Exactly, yes. Depending on your level of LinkedIn membership, there are various levels you can do so if you’ve got a free membership you’re more restricted of course, but if you bolt on LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you get much more and can start to filter people. I’ve got, (unfortunately they don’t sell it any more) an £8/mo LinkedIn Premium account.

And I can do search for things like accountants and owners, owners is a magic word for me because Owners brings in business owners. Yeah. And so you can narrow down and start to invite people that are in your tribe is just connecting organically leading with value all that kind of stuff.

By connecting to people, obviously that increases your second and third degree connections. Suddently, well I’ve got over 10,000 connections now . Suddenly, you’ve got a universe of millions of contacts to go at when you start to search them so you effectively turn your LinkedIn account into a valuable database that you can access using LinkedHelper 2, super powerful a lot of people just focus on the networking side of things. I don’t look at it that way I look at it as a valuable database. Yeah. always growing.

Part Three then is the sales and marketing automation. The successes comes from the following up and the pigheaded determination to follow up. This always stuck with me this little graphic – sales statistics, 48% of people never follow up with the prospect, how many times have you made an inquiry and they never even bother – 48% And it’s got all the stats here. The other telling stat is at the very end 80% of sales are made on the fifth to the 12th contact. Have you got the pig headed determination to make those follow ups. Yeah, doing it manually is again a real grind and a real pain in ****** And it is and you know life gets in the way other things happen and it takes our head out of the marketing game for whatever reason as business owners, so to be able to automate this and have it going on in the background is absolute killer. Exactly. Yeah. So we’ve got the automation. So obviously, I’m going to be talking about Keap because I’m a Certified Partner. I’ve used it for 12 years, and it’s the only system I found does it all the marketing I want to do. I’ll show you the minute. There’s other tools you can use other tools like MailChimp Active Campaign, they’re sort of similar, and they’ll basically do email marketing for you which is great. But as part of the Chet Holmes strategy you’re looking to do direct mail, lumpy mail, coordinated campaigns, integrated campaigns, wow, I just so heres the thing for so many business owners as well. We can become quite narrowly focused. And you know, I’m a big fan a big believer in email marketing. But when you are able to almost add more strings to your bow in terms of like you say lumpy mail – for that for those of you aren’t familiar with the phrase, which is connecting these kinds of dots behind the scenes with this automation, so that you’ve got their contact details and you can even ultimately get their addresses. So you’re sending them emails you’re sending them texts, you’re sending them hard stuff in the mail, Lumpy mail, almost kind of creating an omnipresent kind of marketing follow up approach. Thats exactly it. The only tool I have found that can do all this is Keap, say Active Campaign MailChimp and those will do the email marketing, but, you know, you know, these days there are spam fitlers and it’s a super crowded kind of space. And not everyone is good email marketing, you know, so you have to be a good email marketer to cut through the clutter. But this is really kind of it’s just adding so much to your marketing arsenal.

I’ve used Keap / Infusionsoft for last 12 years now, and I’ve never found anything that comes close to it. For Keap you are looking at £79 a month for it, but it’s consistent follow up, adding value building the know like and trust all on autopilot. Its not relying on me to send out monthly newsletter emails (but you can do that as well). So your dream 100 marketing campaign. Now you’ve got your dream 100 or it may be more.

So we always talk about 100. So creating a 12 month non spammy campaign that automaticly and consistently follows up and continues to build a relationship via LinkedIn messages. We have LinkedHelper doing that. Send an email, send a text, sending letters and packages in the post, which is a big, big part of Chets Strategy in this book, it talks about. You just cannot ignore that. Phone calls as well. So that can all be coordinated into an integrated campaign that just takes out the hard work. And again, if you’re listening to this if you’re a business owner, and ask yourself the honest question, you know, have you got a marketing campaign in place right now, this very moment? I mean, if you do great, if not, you know, start thinking about implementing some of these strategies, but even for those of us who do have campaigns in place, I mean, I’m kind of kind of I will build small campaigns. But for me, I would have to talk to a specialist like Julian to build something like a 12 month automatic automated campaign. Otherwise, my campaigns tend to be quite small, highly focused, maybe for a month or whatever. But then I have to start from scratch all over again. So imagine what this would do to your business like 12 months fully automated of your marketing follow it’s, this is why I love it. Well, in his book Chet Homes often mentions doubling your business in 12 months, just following these sort of strategies.

So what does the Dream 100 strategy achieve. With this strategy we have focused all our attention on your dream potential clients, not trying to mass advertise to Facebook or Google ads. They just can’t ignore you. Yeah, you’re adding value all the way and they don’t forget you. And it’s interesting what you’ve mentioned. There. And what Chet Holmes talks about, he talks about creating that, that top of mind awareness, and for those kind of spammy marketers and so on. We all know the kind of stuff that we that we don’t pay attention to you zone it out, but if you do have an amazing service, an amazing product, and you genuinely want to add value and help other businesses and so on, when you do lead with value, and you do it in an ethical, organic, non spammy way, consistently, persistently over time, you become you build that top of mind awareness of awareness in your prospect, you become the go to expert in your niche. And so when they are ready to buy your service, or your product, who are they going to think of first , the person who keeps in touch and adds value, helping them along their journey, no brainer. As we said before Chet Holmes was able to double sales year on year using the dream 100 strategy.

He didn’t even have the automation.

He just had had the pig headed determination and discipline to follow up – he did it manually.

He was using spreadsheets. To follow up each month with emails or letters.

Today with Keap we can do it all automatically and send out messages directly.

I don’t even bother with posts and articles in LinkedIn. I just go straight to them and drop messages into their inbox in their LInkedIn. Fantastic.

So I hope we kept it to less than the 20 minutes. I think we have Paul, I think I think I think we have thanks everyone for listening. You know, if you need any more information or you need any help with all this, of course. There’s my contact details JulianMills.co.uk, love to hear your feedback. And especially you know, if you got any ideas or improvements on my ideas then I would certainly love to hear those as I am always looking to improve. Fantastic. Yes. So key takeaways, guys, that book firstly Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. It should be a business Bible for for any business owner. It’s a book I’ve returned to time and time again, to kind of re inspire me rekindle my passion for marketing and so on. But it’s not just amazing, you know, tips and tactics, it’s strategy strategy, these strategies in there are absolutely world class. So that’s the first key takeaways go and get that book. Second one, as Julian said, check him out Julian mills.co.uk. He’s got a ton of other just free content free content. And literally, he’s got so much stuff on there useful free stuff, just to kind of go through digest and see how you can improve your marketing and automating your follow up processes, not just your marketing, but also other automations within your business. So highly recommended. Go and check him out. And thank you so much for joining me. Today. Julian always love our chats always love the the value and the insights that you bring. So thank you very much, guys, and we hope you’ve enjoyed it. But most importantly, you know, it’s one thing to know, but you’ve got to put this stuff into practice, and practice makes progress. So thank you guys, and I will see you on another one. Cheers guys bye bye