(this is a reprint of a post from the Spring of 2021. It was valid then, it is still valid now)

I read a really good book over the Christmas / New Years break, “The Biggest Bluff” by Maria Konnikova. She uses poker to talk about making better decisions. Highly recommended for sales people. I liked it so much, I have already re-read it once, highlighting it like crazy, and have bought her other two books. Great stuff on the psychology of sales. 

One of her ideas is the basis behind today’s newsletter. In essence, she talks about not sweating the results of individual poker hands, but to focus on your process. Sometimes you are going to have a pair of kings, play the hand absolutely correctly, and have someone fluke a better hand and beat you. You did everything right, but still lost. The problem is many people will focus on that hand and that loss, how unfair it was, how they should have won. This is a waste of time. Instead, if you focus on your process, over time you will win your share of the hands played, and overcome the odd bit of bad luck.

There are two applications of this in our work in sales. The first is the obvious one in sales itself. You are going to get beaten by competitors, and sometimes that will be due to luck. I had a sale that I thought I had nailed down last year. Everything was in place. I especially had the key decision maker who had access to the funds on board. He was a big fan of using me to help his company. I was a couple weeks away from signing the deal and…that key guy jumped to another company, and everything he was working on became associated with the guy who left. I lost the sale. But I did everything right. What was I going to do, make him stay there? 

So when you lose a sale, don’t focus on the result, focus on the process. Is your process sound? Did you follow it? If the answer is yes, chalk up the loss to bad luck, and don’t think of it again. Over time, you will luck into a few too, and they will tend to even out. 

The second application is with LinkedIn. The same holds true for LinkedIn that holds true for sales in general. If you follow your process, you will be successful. Except that there are two problems with this idea:

1. Most people and companies don’t have a “LinkedIn process”
2. And even when they do, they don’t follow it. 

Most LinkedIn users have a vague idea of what they want to accomplish, but don’t articulate it very well (or at all), and then the activities they pursue on LinkedIn don’t necessarily fit with what their goals are. 

For those of us in sales there are four basic things that LinkedIn is good for: 

• LinkedIn can increase our reach, making more people aware of us
• LinkedIn can increase our credibility, having us seen as a viable alternative for our prospective customers
• LinkedIn research can give us info to build better outreach strategies and messages, increasing our hit rate with new prospects
• LinkedIn can be an extremely effective place to send those initial outreach messages. 

So my message for today is this: when you use LinkedIn, have a reason to do so. Know what you are trying to achieve. Have a plan for what activities or tasks will accomplish your goals. Have a process. Follow the process. Test the process if necessary. And you will make better use of the time you invest in LinkedIn. 

Lately LinkedIn seems to be trying to shift the focus away from connecting and towards following. For example you can now change the default button from “connect” to “follow” on your profile. And there is talk that this will soon not be an option but that “follow” will be the default.

But while LinkedIn may be hyping following, here are three good reasons that given a choice, I prefer connecting over following. When you are connected with someone on LinkedIn:

• you can send each other messages directly over LinkedIn. This doesn’t replace email, the phone or whatever messaging system you use, but it does come in handy for LinkedIn-centric messages such as referencing someone you know mutually on LinkedIn, or drawing their attention to someone or something of interest on LinkedIn.
• you rank higher in your connection’s search results on LinkedIn. As LinkedIn is one huge database full of people, an obvious application is to use that database for searches – for suppliers, vendors, experts, new staff, information or discussions on specific topics, practically anything. And one of the things you will find is that LinkedIn wants search results to be relevant to the searcher, and if one or more connections get found in a search, LinkedIn will tend to list them at the top of the search results. If you are looking for a WordPress expert, it makes sense for LinkedIn to list WordPress experts you are already connected with first.
• connections show pathways to other people on LinkedIn that you didn’t know exist. You may find a prospect on LinkedIn and see the little “2nd” postscript after their name and then the person or people both you and that person are connected with on LinkedIn. You can use this information in two ways. The first is to name drop the mutual connection’s name in a message or invitation to connect. The second is to use that mutual connection or one of your mutual connections as an intermediary, and ask them to introduce you to the person of interest to you.

With these in mind I always choose connecting over following. I think of connecting as “following, with privileges”. What’s the worst thing that can happen? Someone ignores your connection request, so you then just…follow them.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like today’s, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

When I started out in high tech sales back in the pre-internet 1980’s, clients could get their info from three places:

Trade shows. Trade shows were great but everyone couldn’t go.

Trade magazines. Very important. This is where most of the information came from.

And third was a vendor’s sales reps. This is where a lot of info came from. The informal “here’s how other people in your industry are tackling this problem” stuff.  What’s new, what’s coming, what other companies were doing…these were all important parts of a sales call. Salespeople were an integral part of a customer’s education and finding out what was going on in their industries.

Now your customers can do their own research. And they do. Your customers are gathering information.

They want to know if other people have problems similar to theirs.

They want to know how those companies tackled the problem.

They want to know if a solution to their problem is even possible.

Then, after gathering that information, they want to start looking for companies that have the ability to help them. These days, they will often select the finalists – the two or three or four companies that they think can help them – before they ever reach out and initiate that first contact.

That’s why you need content. If you can publish content that shows you have seen the problems your customers have or will have, understand what is involved in fixing those problems, and that you have experience successfully helping other people solve those problems, you have an “in” for getting on that finalist list.

And the more the merrier. A steady drumbeat of good content reminds people that you have this experience they need. It shows that you understand their problems because you have looked at those problems from a lot of different angles.

Salespeople used to be needed in order for companies to keep up with the latest and greatest developments in their industries. Not anymore.

The worst thing you can do if you are the best kept secret in your industry? Stay the best kept secret in your industry.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

As I am always going on about, “it’s not about you, it’s about them” in your interactions with others on LinkedIn – especially in connecting and outreach – it was only a matter of time before I got asked this.

I had someone ask me about this the other week. They were sending connection requests to prospective customers and they were having a tough time coming up with a good reason for the person to connect with them.

To their credit, they were honest with me in describing the situation. “I want business from them, so this is kind of a one way street. What can I offer them?”

This is what happens when we have the blinders on. We see something we want – in this case a connection to a prospect – and all we can see is what that will do for us. It blinds us to the other person’s perspective and their problems, wants and needs.

Here are three things you can offer the person you are connecting with.

1) Your knowledge. Everyone seems to forget this. Every day you help people like your prospect solve the problems they have. This is what you do. While their problem or issue may be a new and novel situation for them, it’s something you see all the time. It’s like they are the person looking online for the recipe for a dish, while you’re a chef who cooks twenty of that dish every night.

2) Your experience with their industry. This is different from your knowledge in that you are putting the knowledge into practice in different situations. This is important because your past experience solving problems like the ones they have will reassure them that you are someone worthwhile they should know.

3) Lastly, you have something that is uniquely LinkedIn: your network of connections. And this applies to most anyone you meet on LinkedIn. If you have any size network at all you have the ability to introduce or refer this new person to someone they want to know. Need help with CRM? I have connections who work for CRM companies, I have connections who are independent CRM consultants, and ones that are CRM power users. People in similar positions to themselves? No problem. Suppliers? Got you covered. Access to your network is actually a pretty powerful thing to be able to offer.

You have more than your pure product or service to offer. Be aware of it and take advantage of it.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two articles like the one above, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

I have a premium subscription membership on LinkedIn (Sales Navigator) and with one of its  features I can go back and see everyone who viewed my profile in the past ninety days.

I use this feature every day as I consider a profile view to be a plausible and legitimate reason to contact someone. And I like seeing lists of people that, for one reason or another, have taken an interest in me.

But while doing my daily look through earlier this week, I saw that some profile views listed sources and some didn’t. So I decided to go back through my profile viewers and look at the sources I could find, and see if there was anything I could learn from them.

I wound up reviewing the last 300 people who visited my profile and looking to see where they came from, that is, how they found my profile.

42 of them – around 14% – were connections. This may seem odd but is completely legitimate. I can’t tell you the number of times I have gone to a connections’ profile to check something. I can think of three times I have done it today already.

That leaves 258 people who were not connected with me.

And of that 258 profile viewers, 7 found me via Search on LinkedIn.

Seven. Less than one person a week.

Everyone else discovered me because of something I did.

They saw something I had published, they saw I had commented or engaged with someone else’s content or someone @mentioned me. The screen grab at the top of today’s newsletter shows my number of profile viewers going up and down over the course of this summer. The peaks correlate with the days I publish this newsletter.

The conclusion I draw from this little nugget of research? If you want to get discovered on LinkedIn, I have two words of advice for you:

Do something.

There are two ways to broaden your reach – that is to increase the number of people who are aware of you on LinkedIn. One is to be discovered in a search and the other is to be reacted to after you do something on LinkedIn.

In my case publishing and engaging with other people is more than 35 times as effective as being found via LinkedIn Search. 

If I relied on search alone, I would likely have a couple dozen people discovering me this year.

Now, you may not want more reach, and you may not want people discovering you. But if you do, your Profile isn’t going to do it for you, your activity is.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Then again, I have been doing this for over ten years. That’s longer than 97.5% of LinkedIn employees have been with LinkedIn (based on a search I did with Sales Navigator).

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer, or the statistic) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Just because it’s quiet around LinkedIn Groups doesn’t mean they have lost all purpose.

LinkedIn Groups get a bad rap.

I can think of three applications where LinkedIn Groups are awesome. I have found the key in getting the most from LinkedIn Groups is to not use them the way most people think of using them – that whole conversations thing – but to use them for what they are actually good for.

As most of you know, I have a Sales Navigator subscription. And one of the couple dozen or so filters on Sales Navigator is…Groups. When people join a LinkedIn Group, they are indicating their interest in a topic. I can filter and search through those thousands of interests to find the people that are interested in arcane processes, ideas or topics. A lot of people won’t put on their profile that they have an interest in Hubspot CRM software, but they will join the Hubspot CRM Group on LinkedIn, which is just as good from my standpoint if I am conducting a search for such people.

It doesn’t matter if they participate in the group, or if the group is active or a dead zone, I know they have that interest. 

And of course, most LinkedIn users will never realize that Groups can be used in this way.

The second reason is similar: advertising. One of the filters you can use as an advertiser on LinkedIn is by individual Groups. Using my Hubspot example above, I can choose to advertise to the thousands of members in all the local Hubspot user Groups on LinkedIn. This is a really powerful tool for putting together interest based advertising campaigns on LinkedIn. And again, this is something that most LinkedIn users will never realize.

You will note that these are two wonderful ways to get utility from LinkedIn Groups…without having to join any LinkedIn Groups.

What this illustrates is the sometimes hidden or buried rationale behind why LinkedIn has certain features, or in this case, why LinkedIn does not abandon a pretty derelict feature. As far as the LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Advertising people are concerned, LinkedIn Groups work just fine the way they are.

Now for the third way I use LinkedIn groups, I actually do have to belong to a group. I use Groups to send messages to people that I am not connected with. I know of three ways to send free messages to people I am not connected with on LinkedIn and this is the best one, with the widest range. One of the first things I recommend to my new clients is to go join the LinkedIn Groups their prospective customers would join which you can see right on their profiles. It doesn’t work in all cases – the Harvard Alumni Group likely wants you to actually be a Harvard alumni for example – but it does in enough of them to be worthwhile.

LinkedIn Groups are a classic example of a feature is really effective, just not in the way most people think it should be. This is why I always come back to saying that you should use LinkedIn as it is, not as you would like it to be.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter is a three or four minute read, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

You were hoping for an introduction, but usually wind up meeting the brick wall.

Kind of a Franken-Post today. I wrote a guide to using LinkedIn for Introductions and Referrals, and as it clocked in at over four thousand words, I chopped it up into eight installments for my email newsletter. Today I thought I would take a couple of those pieces and post them on LinkedIn in order to illustrate how hard it can be to get introductions.

Asking for Introductions on LinkedIn: The Hard Target Method

I call this the hard target method, in that you have a specific person that you want an introduction to, and you usually have one mutual connection with your target that you have chosen as the person that can make that introduction.

Here’s why introductions are huge: Credibility.

The introducer bestows upon you credibility with the other person. It is just a sheen of credibility, a starter kit of credibility, and it is often more implied than said outright. Often just enough credibility is conveyed that the new person gives you the benefit of the doubt and agrees to talk with you. That credibility only lasts until you begin your conversation with them, but that’s all you wanted in the first place, isn’t it?

You don’t get this credibility boost via InMail, email, or cold call.

What an introduction on LinkedIn decodes as is “This is someone I know. He or she is not going to waste your time.”

What does an introduction take?

“Alan, I would like to introduce you to Barbara. I have known Barbara for seven years, since her company was a supplier to the last company I worked with. Barbara has some unique insights into the widgets.”

“Barbara, I would like to introduce you to Alan. I have known Alan since he was at Spacely Sprockets. Alan has been in the sprocket industry for over fifteen years.”

“I think you two would benefit from knowing each other. I will leave you to it.”

And you leave them to it. That’s it. This isn’t rocket science.

The Problem With The Hard Target Method  

So now you’re all excited about Introductions and you go try it out on a connection or two but the only real introduction you get is to our friend the brick wall.

Well, what happened? This seemed like a really good idea.

Let’s look at why introductions can be problematic.

When you ask for an introduction on LinkedIn, you are asking one of your connections to introduce you to your target, one of his or her connections.

But if you are like most LinkedIn users, you have a decent sized network of connections where you really only know maybe 20% of those people well. The other 80% are people you met at a trade show one time, or they are someone that you worked with three jobs ago, or you connected with them for any number of reasons, but the reality is that you never did have or subsequently developed a relationship with that person.

So when you go to ask for a connection to perform an introduction, there is an 80% chance that that connection is someone who doesn’t really know you that well. And they aren’t that comfortable providing the introduction. To them you represent risk: someone who may make him or her look bad. Of course you are not going to make them look bad, but as your connection doesn’t know you that well, they don’t know that.

Even worse, if you do find someone in the 20% you know well that seems willing to provide an introduction, there’s now an 80% chance that they don’t know the target person you want to be introduced to that well themselves! The same thing holds true for them as it does for you: they only know 20% of their connections reasonably well. The possible introduction you wanted falls flat because your connection has no credibility with the target person.

So you started off all excited because you discovered a pathway through a connection to someone you really want to meet. But the odds of this working out in the end are only 20% (that you know your connection that well) out of 20% (that they know your target that well).

That’s a measly 4% success rate. You could have likely done better with a cold call.

So what can you do about it? Lots actually. Because understanding the “why” sets you on the path to figuring out the “how” to work around the limitations, and even use these limitations to your advantage. Hint: most people focus on the 80% failure rate and just give up. They should be figuring out what makes up the 20% and how to find them.

Actually, figuring out if someone belongs in the twenty percent who would enthusiastically give you an introduction is pretty easy: when you come across someone who is a potential introducer, just pretend it was the other way around. If they asked you for an introduction to someone in your network, how would you feel about it? There’s your litmus test.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

Someone very serious about their research

I thought today I would go over an example of the research I would do before talking to a prospect. Here are the steps I take:

I will check their company page to see how it matches up with their website and to review all their recent activity.

I will check their LinkedIn profile for the following:

• Current experience section for responsibilities and accomplishments
• Previous experience to get an idea of their career path
• Then I read the About section to see how they see their progression themselves
• I will also look for recommendations given and received.
• What their skills reflect (sometimes the order someone puts their skills in can tell you a lot)
• The companies and people they are following and the groups they belong to.
• Lastly, I will check their recent activity (if they have any) on LinkedIn. Is he or she  posting? How often? What topics? Are they interacting with other people’s or company’s posts?

This will take me ten minutes (I’ve done this hundreds of times) and it is time well invested for three reasons:

1. It gives me an overview of his or her professional career.
2. It helps me prepare and have ideas for my outreach message (if this is outbound) or the topics this person might be reaching out to me for (if this is inbound).
3. And perhaps most importantly, it will show them the respect I have for them in preparing in this manner.

This can make all the difference in tilting the playing field in my favour. Having the facts and a lot of ideas at my fingertips going into a discussion with someone gives me a huge advantage in coming across as a credible resource who respects their time, takes an interest in what they are doing and wants to help them.

So that’s the prep for an individual. But what about a company?

I will do all of the things I did with respect to my individual prospect, but will add five more pieces of research. Here are the applicable ones from the list above that I will repeat for a company:

• I will check the company website, to see what they do and to get a sense of their value proposition.
• I will check their LinkedIn company page to see how it matches up with the website and to review all their recent activity.
• I will check key contacts profiles, and carefully. Headline, photo, about section, work history. Focus on current experience section, but also look at  recommendations, both received and given, what their skills reflect (skills and which ones they emphasize are often a window into how people see themselves), where they went to school, the companies and people they are following and the groups they belong to. All these are things I can do very quickly, and give me a sense both of the person and how they view LinkedIn as a tool.

Here are the additional things I will look at:

• I will see if they are active as a company on any other social media and if they are, how they are using those networks.
• In looking at their company page I will examine the company insights LinkedIn provides very carefully (if they have more than thirty people with LinkedIn profiles, LinkedIn premium members can see these insights). Hiring trends, headcount, and turnover by department all give me clues as to how the company is doing. A company growing at 20% a year is very different from one that has had headcount go down by 20% in the past year.
• I will review the sales and marketing employees’ LinkedIn profiles, asking myself the critical question, “do they get LinkedIn?”
• I will look for active users in other parts of the company. I will often find people who are active LinkedIn users where you normally wouldn’t expect them.
• Lastly I will look to see if I have any connections who might know people at this company. I look to see if there are any company employees with a “2nd” beside their name.

Say that you were to land a new client this month. What would the value of that satisfied client be over the next five years? Does that potential warrant the type and depth of research I have listed here? I think it does.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

(shining the light on LinkedIn publishing) 

I was scrolling through my old articles in my LinkedIn Activity feed the other day, and it got me thinking about the vagaries of how we judge our success. Here are some observations on my writing for LinkedIn. See if they match yours.

If I look at my articles on face value, it is easy to see that most were opened and read a few hundred times, a small percentage a few thousand times and there are a couple outliers in the tens of thousands. Now that has changed somewhat as having a LinkedIn Newsletter gets my content in front of a lot more people than my articles used to. But even the newsletters only get opened a maximum of eight thousand times.

Being lucky helps. An article on the topic of Linkedin Search I wrote almost five years ago got over a hundred thousand click-to-open’s. And it still gets clicked on to this day. Why did this one do over twelve times better than my current LinkedIn newsletter does? It got indexed on Google and my topic apparently was one that people search for a lot. I had no clue. That article was no more or less good than the one I wrote before it, or the one I wrote after it. I just got lucky that week.

On the other hand, LinkedIn gives us pretty rotten tools for parsing our readers, so a lot of views doesn’t necessarily mean anything.

I know the best practices for publishing, or as well as you can know them when they are a moving target, though many I don’t bother with as I don’t write for views and I really don’t write for engagement.  I write for credibility, both to establish myself with my ongoing readers, and to have my articles and newsletters attached to my profile where people can find and read them. Publishing is the long game on LinkedIn for me. Every week I get one or two messages from people I don’t know at all saying they have been reading my articles – sometimes for a couple years! – and would like to connect and speak with me.

I have stuff I thought was gold and it was then met with complete disinterest. Ideas about aspects of using Linkedin that I thought bordered on profound and a couple hundred people read it. I had other content  that I was reluctant to publish and people loved it. We are all our own worst judge I suppose, we’re too close. I have learned to let go of my expectations for any single article or newsletter. I hit “publish” and it’s out of my hands.

Understanding how the algo works helps, but 90% of your readership, views and engagement will come from what you write about and how well you write. And when I say how well, it’s not well like Stephen King, it’s just being clean and relatable. The algo is always changing, best practices are always changing. Good choice of topics, and writing clearly about them, will always be in style.

Summary? Don’t overthink it. Once you have a handle on what your ideal reader wants more information on, write about that. I prefer writing articles and the newsletter because they stay findable through my LinkedIn profile. Don’t worry about the immediate reception or lack of one any single piece of content gets, let your ideal readers discover your work through your profile. I’m a believer in the long tail on LinkedIn, let the way LinkedIn works work for you.

Obligatory disclaimer: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

Want more like this? (the newsletter I mean, not the disclaimer) I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter is a three or four minute read, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/

 

 

Yes, it’s nice, but will it generate sales leads?

This applies to all three types of content on LinkedIn – written, video and audio

Part One: The Sales Lead Myth

Here is how people think it works on LinkedIn. They see someone publish a post and get lots of likes and comments. They think: “wow, look at all the sales leads that person is generating.”

Then they go off, write an article, publish it on LinkedIn and nothing happens.

You can generate leads through publishing. All you need to do is the following:

• Write about what your target audience wants to know more about. Not about how great you or your company are, but about providing answers to the questions that your target audience has.
• You publish regularly. “One and done?” Haha. No. You need to keep it up. In my case publishing a newsletter is easy. Publishing a newsletter every other week? Not as easy.
• You engage with your readers (or viewers or listeners, whatever the case may be). It is possible someone will view your video, realize you are a genius and call you to hire you. I don’t know about you, but sadly for me, that doesn’t happen very often. However, if you engage with someone who engaged with your content, something may come of that conversation.
• You follow up with logical leads. I make a point of reviewing not just the commenters on my content, but also everyone who liked it, shared it, and also the new people who followed me, or viewed my profile. If any of them match my target audience, I may contact them.

It takes a ton of work. Between my writing for my weekly email newsletter and this LinkedIn newsletter, plus the followup required and monitoring and responding to comments, I typically devote one day a week. An entire day. Every week. Are you ready for that sort of commitment?

Part Two: The Increased Reach Trap

Where most people go wrong is in what they assume publishing on LinkedIn is doing for them. Everyone assumes publishing will increase their reach, and while this is the case, this is misleading. Let me explain using an example. Say you publish a post or a video on LinkedIn and I get notified. I read your post and comment on it. This would seem great for you as I have over ten thousand followers. Although LinkedIn won’t say, it is generally agreed that after I comment, LinkedIn will alert a small percentage of my followers about your post and my comment on it. Some of those followers of mine may then go and read your post, may be interested in you and either follow or connect with you. Even if they don’t engage with you, they are aware of your existence and your goal of increasing your reach has been achieved.

But I would argue that while you have increased your reach you have increased it in a kind of untargeted and sloppy way. I may have ten thousand followers, but are they the people that you’re targeting? I think that’s highly unlikely. My followers tend to be people that want to figure out how to use LinkedIn more effectively. Some are self employed, some work for the government, some work for multinationals. They come from all over the world. Two thousand of them are in Europe. Does that describe your ideal customer? Probably not. So if thirty of my followers see your post, how likely is it that they are a good match for your target audience? Pretty unlikely.

The bottom line is that unless your only connections and followers are people going after your exact same target market – in other words, your competitors – your increased publishing reach will be with largely random people. There will be some “good” prospects there, but for most people, using content to increase reach will be not nearly as effective as they think it is.

So if publishing for reach isn’t effective, how can publishing help us?

Part Three: The Authority Game

The less measurable but important side of publishing is that some content stays attached to your profile, and most content is searchable on LinkedIn. That means that if you have written about a topic that your ideal customers want to know more about and search for it on LinkedIn, they can find your content…and you.

This is where content shines on LinkedIn, in building authority, credibility, thought leadership, whatever you want to call it. Building authority takes time. I often say to my clients that their goal should be to be seen as the number one resource in their area of expertise. It’s a great way to get a seat at the table of companies being seriously considered for a purchase.

And if you keep at it, the odd thing is that in the end, after a long time, the authority you build leads to sales leads and sales. People and companies that build authority get incoming requests and over the transom requests every week. People find you, seek you out, usually test drive your content, they have a feel for what you think, what you and your company are like and they have a positive feeling about you.

Every week I get one or two people messaging me out of the blue. Invariably they lead off with how long they have been reading my content, then they describe a problem they or their company is having, that they want to address the problem now, and can I help them?

The good news? This is just the type of lead that the person I described back in part one wanted to get. The bad news? It takes a while to earn this type of lead.

In the end, if you are willing to put the work in – something a lot of people are not that keen on – publishing content on LinkedIn can pay off big time.

Obligatory boilerplate: I do not work for or have any association with LinkedIn, other than being a user who pays them for his Sales Navigator subscription every month. 

I publish a weekly email newsletter on using LinkedIn effectively for Sales and Marketing. Each newsletter typically contains two to four articles, it’s free, and you can unsubscribe anytime. Here’s a link to the sign up page: https://practicalsmm.com/contact/