How to Grow Your Business On LinkedIn Fast With Dennis Brown

Linkedin Expert & 6X Inc. 500 Fastest Growing CEO – Dennis Brown

Get more leads from Linkedin and start seeing results almost immediately. Why is LinkedIn the greatest networking tool ever. Avoid the mistakes that are costing you good referrals. Start positioning yourself as a trusted expert.

Resources Mentioned in the Podcast:

• LinkedIn Messaging Campaign Tracking Sheet

Check out LinkedAcademy.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript: Download

Jaime Tardy:	Welcome to Eventual Millionairre.  I'm Jaime Tardy, and I'm excited to have Dennis Brown back on the show.  He owned a company called Logistic Dynamics, and now he's coming back in.  He's got linkedacademy.com and I'm really excited to talk to him today.  Thanks so much for coming on the show.

Dennis Brown:	Thanks for having me back.  I had a great time the first time.

Jaime Tardy:	We were just talking about how it was such a long time ago that you were here.  Time flies. I thought it was, like, last year.  You said it was three years ago.

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, it was a few years ago.  I retired from LDI about two years ago, and I think it was about a year before that, so yeah.  Well you've been busy I hear.

Jaime Tardy:	A little bit, right?  A little bit.  So it sounds like you have too.  Hey, I'm not doing the company that I had before, now I have a whole new company.  Tell me what that transition was like.

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, well it's really funny because I get that question all the time.  "How did you go from logistics to LinkedIn'"  And I kind of got into this whole thing sideways, and so when I was at LDI, I was one of those social media naysayers.  I did not believe in social media.  Back in the early days I just didn't get it.  I really didn't.  It just didn't make sense to me.  I understood internet marketing and that made a lot of sense, but I just couldn't connect the dots on social, and so I used to laugh at my wife about Facebook and MySpace and all these things, and I'm dating myself obviously with Myspace, but ultimately the - I got a connection request from a good friend of mine in the banking industry to connect with him on LinkedIn, and so I quietly, without my wife knowing, decided I was going to set up a LinkedIn account so she wouldn't laugh at me, and it just made a lot more sense.  It seemed more business oriented, it was just framed very differently, the people that were on there were very different, the messages were different, and so I set up a profile and I checked it out, and I just started kind of kicking the tires a little bit, and the next thing you know I stumbled across a six figure client for my logistics company.  And so that was kind of like an epiphany.

	I said, "Wow.  One of two things just happened.  Either I'm the luckiest guy on LinkedIn and I just hit the lottery, or maybe I stumbled across the golden egg.  Maybe I found something that I could really use to leverage my business and to help it grow."  And so I dove in and tried to learn everything I could about LinkedIn, the good, the bad, the ugly, and you always hear about the 80/20 rule.  Well I tried to bring it down to kind of the 95/5 rule, right?  And so I really just focused in on those key components that I found were working to really transition the conversations offline.  Because in B to B, that's really where all the magic happens, right?  You can have as many connections on LinkedIn as you want, but if nobody knows anybody and nobody picks up the phone or goes and sits down and has coffee, nothing good can happen.  So I developed a system internally for my business on how to market our logistics services through LinkedIn, and in 2007 we were doing about $12 million in sales.  We were doing pretty well.  But by the time I retired from that business in 2013, we were doing over $45 million in sales, and the cool part is that 70 percent of that growth came through our LinkedIn marketing.

Jaime Tardy:	Really?

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, it was huge.  I don't know where the business would be today had I not stumbled across LinkedIn, and that's honest to God.  It was such a huge platform for us.  And it still is today.  I retired, the companies projected to do over $50 million this year, my management team is running it.  It's the greatest thing.  That was never designed for me to be a 20 year career.  I wanted to start it, build it up, build the team, and then let them take it over, and we've been very blessed that that's been the case.  So the system, so the segue is I used it very effectively for my own business, generated over $20 million in new business through LinkedIn, and then people started asking me when we got the PR from Ink Magazine and The Ink 500, people started asking me, "Well what are you doing?  What are you doing different?"  And I kind of lived in a vacuum.  I thought that everybody was doing this.  I thought that's what all business owners were doing.  They were just out there on LinkedIn and generating leads and getting business out of it.  Come to find out nobody was, and so I had people asking me, "Hey, can you teach me what you did?  Can you help me out?" 

	And so thus spawned my consulting business.  And for a guy that's supposed to be semi retired, I'm busier than I ever thought I would be.

Jaime Tardy:	That's awesome.  You're like, "Oh crap." 

Dennis Brown:	But it's a great problem because what I've come to find out is that what I've known previously is I love working with entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial type people, and so now I consult with business owners, executives, and sales teams, and I just teach them my system.  And because it works so well for me and the platform is teed up for B to B, you know, I enjoy working with those people.  I just enjoy getting the results.  It's been a lot of fun.  I made a very diverse group of people that I've been able to work with, so a lot of fun.

Jaime Tardy:	So we all want to know the how, right?  So it's awesome to go, "Hey, I had a six figure client," and everyone's like, "Great, thanks.  Appreciate it, Dennis."  How'd you get a six figure client?  Like, what did that look like?

Dennis Brown:	It's really funny, because the best part about how I got that client and why it meant so much and why it felt different was because I didn't try, I didn't set out to get a client.  So here's what happened.  I set up my profile, and of course you've got to start making some connections.  And I just started making some connections within the industry, just people within the industry.  Some of them were potential clients, some of them were vendors, some of them were carriers, some of them were just other people that did what I did.  But the difference was I made the objective to try and actually meet as many of those people on a quick introductory phone call as I could.  So I was just setting up five and 10 minute phone calls just so that they could put a face with a name and I could put -

Jaime Tardy:	How did you do that?  Like, how do you get some random person that you don't actually know to hop on the phone with you for five minutes?  Because no offense, but LinkedIn has gotten a little shady now, so everyone's like, "Hey, let me talk to you on the phone," and I'm like, "Nope."

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, and so what I did back then was I took a very direct approach, and I was developing the system.  I just took a very direct approach and I said, "Hey listen, I'm sure you connect with a lot of people on LinkedIn, but you probably have not spoken to very many of them.  I was wondering if you were open to just having an intro call."  And that was back in 2007 when I first got started.  Well what was great was when we got on the phone, you know, what I had committed to not doing was being that sales guy, right?  I didn't want to be that guy because nobody likes that guy. 

Jaime Tardy:	Nobody likes that guy.  Nobody.

Dennis Brown:	Nobody likes that guy.  I don't like that guy.  You don't like that guy.  And everybody listening to this, they don't like that guy, but unfortunately they probably are that guy or that girl.  So what I did was I got on the phone with them and I just started talking about him.  How did he get his job?  How long had he been with the company?  What were some of his struggles?  And I only had to ask a couple of questions and then next thing you know it's 15 minutes later and he had just been talking about himself and talking about himself and talking, and I just sat there and listened.  And I literally just listened, and then by the end of the conversation, he said, "So tell me a little bit about what you do, Dennis.  You said you're in Logistics.  What do you do?"  And I talked about what I did for about one minute, and I had framed it in the form of how I had helped a client that was similar to him, but I didn't ask him to do business with me, I didn't give him the pitch, I didn't give him the full core press, and we hung up that phone call and it was just a great conversation.

	And we talked about business, we talked about our families, we talked about football because he was a football fan, and we hung up that phone conversation, and then about a month or a month and a half later I get this call out of nowhere and it's the same guy and he said, "Hey Dennis, you remember me?"  I said, "Sure.  Of course, I remember you Bill."  And he said, "Listen, you do logistics right?"  And I said, "Yeah."  He goes, "Well I have a problem."  Bam.  All of a sudden we land a six figure client.

Jaime Tardy:	You're like, "I have a solution.  Thank you very much."

Dennis Brown:	But here's the best part about it.  Had I tried to sell him on that phone call, what would have happened?

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, he would have been like, "Who is this guy?  Get away."

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, he would have put his hands up, he would have given me the Heiseman, and we would have never spoken again.  So what I learned from that is that while I've always traditionally been a hunter and not a farmer, you know, business, I go out and I make deals happen and I put things together and that's been my forte.  What I realized even prior to that but even reinforce it even more is that you have to be more of a farmer.  You have to slow things down on social.  It's not speed dating, okay?  You have to slow things down.  You've got to slow the process down.  You've got to be willing to plant some seeds.  You've got to be willing to invest some time and energy into relationships.  And pe I've always traditionally been a hunter and not a farmer, you know, business, I go out and I make deals happen and I put things together and that's been my forte.  What I realized even prior to that but even reinforce it even more is that you have to be more of a farmer.  You have to slow things down on social.  It'sople, just being honest, people are lazy.  They don't invest in relationships.  They don't want to pick up the phone, they don't want to network, and for me it's just amazing because you have LinkedIn here, which is probably the greatest networking tool that's ever been built, even better than a lot of social media platforms, because they're very social but they're not very network oriented, right?

	You have a million people on Facebook, but a lot of which you've never spoken to, you never will because you can't, and people just sit there saying to themselves, "Well, I don't know how to use it," or, "It doesn't work," or any number of excuses why they don't but what I say, the golden egg is sitting right there in front of them.  You've just go to reach out and learn the right way to do it.  Just like anything else, they've got the right way and the wrong way and you get vastly different results based on your strategy.

Jaime Tardy:	So I want to know some hard core tips.  That's what everybody - it's so funny how many people like strategy and tactics.  We're like, "Give me the tactics," even if we don't do them, right?  I just want to know what they are.  So give me some tactics, because I know you mostly work with B to B and stuff like that.  So let's say there's a web design company, right?  And they're totally cool, and they're like, "Hey, we need more leads.  Oh crap." Because most people go, 'Sell sell sell sell, deliver deliver deliver."  So when they're delivering they're like, "Oh crap, we need more leads."  So what would be something they could do within two weeks or three weeks, right, a short period of time, to seed this stuff?  Because that's the thing that people are always asking.  They're like, "Okay great, thanks, we know we need to do social," but then they leave the length of time completely open and that makes it tough because when you don't know when things are going to be coming back, people are like, "Yeah, but I need leads now."  So is there anything we can do in two to three weeks that will make a big difference?

Dennis Brown:	Absolutely.  I'm going to give you one thing that anyone listening to this can do in the next week and start seeing results.  And literally I've generated over $1 million in business by using this one technique.

Jaime Tardy:	Okay I love that.  So smart to say that before you tell it. All right, listen in everybody.

Dennis Brown:	And it's so simple, it's so stupid, everybody's going to laugh at the end of it, but nobody does it.  But here's the deal.  That web developer has customers, right?  He's got, let's say in the last five years he's done business with a couple hundred clients.  Big and small he's done business with a couple hundred clients, while invariably he's not connected with the majority of those on LinkedIn because he didn't take the extra step to do it.  So all he needs to do is take those couple hundred clients that he's done business for, done business with, and all he's got to do is go connect with them on LinkedIn.  So it'll be very natural, it's not going to be uncomfortable, they've already done business, it's a warm introduction.  Connect with all those people on LinkedIn.  So that's number one.  Number two, just send them a quick message saying, "Hey listen, thanks for connecting.  If you need any help, let me know."  Right?  "If I can ever be of any help, let me know."  But more importantly what you do is you then go into their connections.

	You look at their profile and look at their connections, and you look at who they know.  Who do they know on LinkedIn?  Who have they done business with on LinkedIn?  Who is their network?  You know, the average person has 500 plus connections on LinkedIn, but even if they only had 100.  And then what you do is you identify some of those exact, say you pick five or 10 out of their connections, each one of their connections.  Let's say you pick five out of each one of their connections.  If you've got 100 clients and you can pick five connections out of each one of those, you've got a list of 500 people.  Now your goal is this.  You're going to reach out to that client, and you're going to reconnect with them.  And unfortunately what happens when people ask for referrals, first of all very few people ask for referrals in business.  But when they do, the customer always says, "Uh, yeah, let me think about it and then I'll get back to you," because off the top of their head, I don't even think they're trying to avoid it, but off the top of their head they can't place exactly who would be a good client at that moment.  Right?

	And so they don't give you a referral, and then they never call back because they get caught up in everything else.  

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, and I've even had one of my mentors go, "Make sure that they give you a name by the end of the phone call,"  and I was like, "I feel skeezy doing that."  Like, I'm like, "I'll wait.  Who do you got?"

Dennis Brown:	And here's the cool part.  Here's the great part.  Now rather than them giving you a name, you give them a name.  So now all of a sudden you say, "Hey, I see you know XYZ from such and such company.  I really think I could help them out.  Would you mind giving me an introduction?  Just shoot an email to them and tell them that we know each other and that I'd like to give them a call?"  So now all of a sudden, he doesn't have to think about who those people are, and you've already hand-picked who they are.  He's not giving you somebody who you don't want to talk to, he's giving you somebody that you've already pre-qualified because you looked at their profile, you know they're a decision maker, you know the company that they work for, you've got all kinds of sales intelligence.  You've got all the due diligence.  You've done it before you've ever gotten on the phone with them, and you got a mutual referral in.  I mean, that's going to be like a hot knife through butter, right?  I mean, that's perfect. You've got 500 of those that you could sort through.  500 leads of referrals, and let's say he only introduces you to one or two.  That's 100 referrals.  What would that do for the average web developer, 100 referrals, what would that do for them in the next year?

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, that'd be insane.  They're like, "Oh, now I doubled or tripled," or whatever.  

Dennis Brown:	Right.  And that's a very tactical way to do it, and that's something somebody could implement very quickly, without even really learning how to use LinkedIn, right?  They just need to know how to make some connections and pick up the phone.

Jaime Tardy:	So how do you get them on the phone though?  So let's say they do an intro, because especially in a web development company, and this depends on who the company is, but sometimes people aren't in the market for a new website, so they'll push you off.  You know like, "I don't need to talk to you right now."  How do we get them on the phone or make that intro call?

Dennis Brown:	Right, and so that referral, so say for example I asked you for a referral and you did an email intro to ABC to whoever it is, and you didn't say, "Hey listen, I met this really interesting guy, he's really handsome, he's got a bald head.  I met this really interesting guy and I thought you guys should connect," and it's as simple as that.  You're not saying I should do business, but, "You guys should connect." Then at that point I'm CC'd on the email and then he's going to reply back and say, "Sure."  Most times they're going to say, "Yeah, no problem."

Jaime Tardy:	Do they?  Okay, cool.

Dennis Brown:	A lot of times they do.  When you email them, because it's coming from you, very rarely are they going to say, "No, I'm not interested in talking to somebody."  It's pretty rare.  Very rare.

Jaime Tardy:	Really?  Interesting.

Dennis Brown:	Now if I just sent an email to them without you giving a little bit of a precursor there and just namedropped, the probability is going to be a little bit less, but because it came from you and you actually know them, these are people you know, these aren't social media friends.  These are people that you actually know and you've met and you've done business with or they're somehow directly associated with you.  So that's something very tactical you could do because now you've got that personal introduction.  And again, that's not really leveraging LinkedIn or the system that I use.  It's just something that anybody could use very tactically starting today.	Okay?  So now I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how I do it and how I teach clients to do it, okay?  So what I do is this.  And the question I ask any business owner that's listening to this right now is this.  If you could personally go out and handpick 100 high profile clients or potential clients, high profile leads that are on LinkedIn, and my system could help you get on the phone with them or meet them face to face, and you hand-picked 100 of those leads and you and I have had a conversation or meeting with them in the next three to six months, what would that do for your business?

	So I just had this conversation the other day with a CEO of an IT consulting firm.  I asked him that question and he instantly responded and said, "It would be at least $1 million in new business in the next 12 months, guaranteed.  If you could put me in touch with 100 of those people where I could actually talk to them."  And I said, "Okay, what you're telling me is I'm not charging you enough," and he laughed and ultimately we now do business together.  But the point is that it's much more targeted.  This is not going on on LinkedIn randomly trying to find somebody.  So when I talk to clients, what I want to do is I want them to put together a hand-picked list of 100 to 200 people that they want to talk to.  They've never had the opportunity to talk to, they're decision makers, influencers within the organization, and they are a strong potential buyer for what they do.  And then what we do is we put together a campaign and we put together a strategy on number one, they've already found them, number two, how to just get a connection with them to get past that first barrier which is a connection, and then from there we put together a messaging series that allows us to build repoire without me being that sales guy, okay, and it's more give give give.

	It's giving away information, it's being more of a trusted resource, it's being more of a thought leader, with them being the benefactor.  And then at the end of that it requests the phone call.  And this campaign might be a three, four, five message campaign that takes two months, but a lot of times they'll respond after the first message, a lot of times they'll respond after the second message, a lot of times they won't respond until the fifth message, but my numbers are if we target 100 people, you're going to get somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of them to connect with you if you do it the right way.  And then so let's say the number is 70, just somewhere in the middle.  Out of those 70 people, if you do it properly, you're going to be able to get on the phone or in a face to face conversation with at least half of those people.  So compare that to cold calling.  So now you've got 35 people out of 100 that you're in a dialogue with.  Now take the 100 that you tried to target before that and try to cold call them.  How many are you going to get on the phone?

Jaime Tardy:	Hello?  Nobody.  Yeah.

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, you might get five on the phone, three of them are going to tell you they're not interested and two of them might say, "Oh, you know, hey, maybe we have something," and you might get one quote out of it, right?  So what-s the alternative?  Your alternative is cold calling, which the return on investment, we know how dismal that is, or warm calling, which is really what this is.  This is more turning a cold call into a warm call by using LinkedIn and positioning yourself.  And what better tool can you have to position yourself than your LinkedIn profile?

Jaime Tardy:	So it's almost like setting up a funnel for, you know what I mean?  Like auto responder or something like that.  Can you tell me like what those emails are?  Like what's the first one, two, three emails?  Because no offense, I get tons of emails on LinkedIn.  I get tons of connections every day and tons of emails and it's sort of -

Dennis Brown:	That's good.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, I get weird - I got a marriage proposal the other day.  It's weird on LinkedIn too.  So I ignore most of the messages that come in, because they're either trying to sell me something or they're weird, right?  So how do you get past all that noise to somebody that actually, you know what I mean?  To actually get information from them.  And don't get me wrong, I have a pro, you know what I mean, random people listen to my podcast so they message me.  It's probably a little bit different, but how do we get past all the crazy emails that everybody gets?  

Dennis Brown:	You are in a different position because you're out there in the spotlight, you're out there in the public, you've got this podcast that you've been doing for years now and it's very popular and that's a high quality problem so people find you, right?  But for the average person, I'll look at it from the other side.  So the first part of your question is what do those messages look like?  So let me give you an example.  So a simple connection message, one of the things you have to do in order to get people to connect with you, the two most important things you need to do is you need to position your profile more like a trusted expert than somebody that is putting their job resume out there, and most people's profiles read like a resume, not like a personal bio or not like a personal website or a blog.  What they read like is they read like a resume, and people don't want to read a resume.  They have no interest in someone that's out there looking for a job unless they're looking to hire, and you're not in that position.  So you can always change it.  If you need a job later, change it to a resume, but for now it's not a resume.  That's the first thing.  You need to optimize your profile from a positioning standpoint, okay?  And there's a lot that goes into that, but that's pretty simple for people to do.

	The second thing you do is you have to bridge that gap.  So you have to create some common bond.  You have to be in a common group with them, you have to have had some organization like an employer or a college or some group that you're a part of, and/or you have to have some common connections.  And what I tell you is as many of those things as you can the better.  So if you can say, "Hey, we're in such and such group together and we also have a common connection of Jaime Tardy, and I found your profile.  It looks very interesting.  I thought it'd be great to connect."  Something as simple as that, very short.  What you're going to find out is when you bridge that gap, 50 to 80 percent of the people will connect with you.  Now they'll take the connection because they're going to look, and that's assuming your profile is adequate.  It's assuming your profile doesn't read like a resume and you don't look like a stalker and you don't have some crazy picture on there.  You've got to put yourself out there so you've got to put the right image out there, but that's how you would connect.  And then something very simple that I get a ton of dialogue and converts into a lot of phone calls is just a simple thank you message to people when they do connect with you.

	So when somebody connects with me, every one of them gets a thank you message.

Jaime Tardy:	What does it say?  Just, like, "Thanks?"  Why did they reply?

Dennis Brown:	Very simple, it says, "Thanks for connecting," and then it has one line.  "As you can see from my profile, I do Linkedin consulting, training, and speaking.  If I can ever be of any help, let me know," and then at the bottom of it it says, "I've already looked at your profile.  Please check mine out and if there are any connections that I have that you'd like to be introduced to, let me know."  So I become that giver.

Jaime Tardy:	You're like, "I'm a resource."

Dennis Brown:	I'm giving you, nobody does it, I'm giving you access to my network.  Now I'm going to be very selective on who I introduce and I won't introduce them to everybody and I'd have to kind of scrub them and make sure it's a good fit, but you'd be surprised, nobody ever even calls me out on it.

Jaime Tardy:	But they like you better for it.

Dennis Brown:	But they like me better because I wasn't asking them or beating them over the head.  And a lot of times they'll say, "Oh thank you so much.  I'm going to look at your contacts and I'll get back to you," and if they do that's great.  I get in dialogue with them.  I already know they're a strong prospect because I wouldn't be connecting with them if they weren't.  So that's an example.  And future messages might be something like rather than sending them a link to your website, which is what everybody does, or brochure or a proposal or pricing or something like that, I send them an article that's interesting to them.  It might not have anything to do with what I do, but it's an article that's interesting to them.  So if he's an IT consultant, it might be something about, an article about IT security or some security breach or something to do with that that would be an article that would be interesting to him.  I don't really give a hoot about that article because it's not relevant  to me but it's relevant to him. 

Jaime Tardy:	Do you like, "Okay, this is an IT consulting guy and I go Google this stuff and look at Google News and see if something fits?"  Or how do you find something that's a good fit?

Dennis Brown:	Well, when I put together a campaign and I assemble those people, if I were targeting IT consultants, I would have something because it would be the same article for everybody, or it would be a series of articles because it would fit them.  But for me, for example, I target business owners and business owners all have the same problems.  I don't care if they're in the IT business or they're in the software business or they're in the consulting business or they're in whatever business, they have all the same problems.  There's about a handful of problems, they fit into a handful of categories, and they all have the same problems.  I learned that a long time ago through a group I was involved with, Vistage, and we were all non-competing business owners, and it was funny because we all had the exact same issues.  

Jaime Tardy:	Common bond.  Sales leads.  Come on people.

Dennis Brown:	Exactly.  So the bottom line is it takes on a more campaigned approach.  It's not a haphazard approach.  It's much more life hold approach, much more targeted approach.  And when people deploy it, and when I teach them how to do it, it's really more of a half an hour a day system because people can't spend four hours on LinkedIn doing this, so you've got to be able to do it in about a half hour a day, but you can get a steady stream of five to 10 new leads a week coming in through your LinkedIn marketing.  That's huge.  For most business owners that's huge.

Jaime Tardy:	How do you keep track of it?  So I'm figuring if some of these have four or five emails to go to and you're doing quite a few a day, how the heck do you keep track of all this and who gets what email, is there a software for that or how does that work?

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, I have a campaign tracking sheet that I use.

Jaime Tardy:	Is that like a Google Doc?

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, yeah, it's really what it is.  It's exactly that.  It's a Google Doc.

Jaime Tardy:	Can you show us that or is that bad?  Like the template site?

Dennis Brown:	Yeah I can show you.  Am I able to show you on the screen?

Jaime Tardy:	Oh yeah, maybe.  I've never screen shared in an interview before.  I can totally screen share.

Dennis Brown:	I'm not sure.  I've never really done it. 

Jaime Tardy:	Well can you - maybe we'll do it after.  So can you just send me a screen shot of the website and then we'll include it?  

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, I'll send you a screen shot then you can post it as well.

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, that would be awesome.  Because that's the thing, everyone's like, "Well this is great and all, but I start doing this and I get confused," because there's so many people and I don't know what I said to who, and it starts to get a little crazy.

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, and that's one of the biggest challenges with people is that they start trying to do something, whether it be LinkedIn or email marketing or Facebook marketing or whatever they're doing, and they don't start seeing immediate results, but the biggest problem is they're not tracking it.  They don't track what they're doing.  They don't track the input, and so therefore when they don't get immediate output, they quit.  They quit doing it and they say, "Oh, it doesn't work.  It doesn't work."  With this you can track the input and you can see the results that you're getting because you can see how many new connections you've made.  And when you put a list of 100 people together that are high profile targets and you can get 50 or 60 of them to actually connect with you, you've already passed the first level of scrutiny.  If you were to do nothing more than to give them a phone call at that point after that, it's no longer a cold call.  It's no longer a cold call.  Now I don't recommend that, I suggest, but the point is because they've looked at your profile and because they've connected with you, it's no longer a cold call.

	They know who you are, and unless somebody else is managing their LinkedIn account, which is possible but it's not very likely.

Jaime Tardy:	But having that connect - it's so funny because my mentor used to make me send letters to people first so when I'd call them it'd be a warm, like, "Oh, did you get the letter I sent?"  And people were like, "Oh no," or, "Yes, I did."  You know what I mean?  And it's so silly, but that's sort of the same piece.  You're going, "Oh, but we've connected before, so now I'm willing to accept you instead of going, "Who the heck is on this phone call?""  

Dennis Brown:	Yes, it's not cold.  And they've seen what you do, and if your profile positions you properly then they're not going to be as resistant to getting on the phone with you.  So there's a lot that goes into it but the point is that you have to be much more strategic, you have to be much more rifled, you have to have a tracking mechanism.  Most people get on LinkedIn, they make connections, and hope is their strategy.  They make a connection and they hope, "Well maybe that guy will call me," or, "Maybe he'll see my update," or, "Maybe he'll see my post and he'll call me."  Listen, if you rely on that to generate you leads, you're up the creek without a paddle.

Jaime Tardy:	That's what half of the business owners do though.  I think that's the problem.  They're like, "I'm on social and I have lots of followers," and I'm like, "That doesn't necessarily mean anything at all."

Dennis Brown:	Right, and in the B to B space, it's all about converting it offline.  And that's, so that last mile is where I connect the dots.  Nobody really needs a whole lot of help getting connections.  They can get random connections.  But are they getting the right connections? And then what are they doing afterwards to develop that repoire and relationship to convert it offline so that when you do get on the phone with them, it's not a sales call, it's an intro call.  It's a networking call.  And you can't beat them over the head, just like I didn't beat that first client over the head.  The conversation was all about them.  So it's a little bit of a paradigm shift also meaning that they have to adopt a little bit slower process.  They can't be that hunter, they've got to be a little bit more of a farmer.  So it's a little bit of a transformation for a lot of people, but once they make that, all I can tell you is what it did for me and all I can tell you is I've been fortunate enough to work with a lot of clients and it's helped them, and it's not that hard to learn.  It's not that complicated.  I didn't reinvent the wheel.  I'm just taking something that's been around forever.

	Referral marketing, relationship marketing, and LinkedIn and social allows you to do that on a global scale and you can hand pick whoever you want to talk to and if you have the right approach, you'll get on the phone with them.  If you have the wrong approach you won't.

Jaime Tardy:	So tell me, what's that email to get them on the phone if you haven't had a referral connection?  Because that's the thing.  You've sent them things, you've built up repoire.  What is that email to get them on the phone look like?

Dennis Brown:	Sure, and it could be a little bit different for different campaigns, different targets that you're going after.  But it might be, for example, you connected with them, you sent the thank you message, and then you followed up with a few messages that have not been asking, they've been all giving.  And from that a lot of times they'll respond and they'll say, "Hey, thank you so much.  Why don't we set up a call?"  So they'll ask you for a call, which is ideal, right?

Jaime Tardy:	Yeah, definitely.

Dennis Brown:	And if they don't ask you for the call and you get to the end of that campaign, you just simply say something like this.  You just say, "Hey, Jaime we've been running across each other here on Linkedin for the past month or two, but we've never had the chance to meet.  I was wondering if you were open to a quick intro networking call."  That's all you say.  It's very short, very sweet, but because I've had multiple touch points, I sent you a customized LinkedIn request, you accepted.  I sent you a thank you message that offered you value.  I sent you another message that offered you value.  I sent you another message that offered you value, and then I, at that point, asked you for a phone call.  We've talked to each other.  You've seen me five times, five plus touch points, before I ever asked you for that phone call, and I didn't say, "Hey listen, I want to talk to you about how I can save you money on your X, Y, Z," or how my web development is the greatest in the world.  It's very non-adversarial and it's more relationship driven and it's more networking driven, but because you know they're a high value target, all you're trying to do is get on their radar.  And you're right.

	They might not need web development for a year, but do you want to be one of those guys that gets the call'  And you will be, you're automatically differentiating yourself from every other guy that beat them over the head with their web development stick and didn't do it the right way.

Jaime Tardy:	All right, can you give me a timeline on, because people, like, I love the planting seed idea, right?  That's what I tell people too.  Like, we need to - you know, don't assume that every single one of these seeds is going to work, but let's just keep planting a bazillion and then you'll have a ton.  But people are like, "I'm watching these seeds and they're not growing."  So give me a time frame of what you can see for an average of actually being able to hop on the phone with someone or actually sell them.

Dennis Brown:	So are you asking the timeline from when you connect with somebody to when you get on the phone with them, or are you talking about once you get on the phone with them and then them giving you business?

Jaime Tardy:	Giving you business, because I think a lot of people are going, "Okay great, I love planting seeds.  When's the money coming in?"

Dennis Brown:	Right.  Well let me give you an example.  The system that I designed, I use to market my LinkedIn consulting business, so I use the exact system that I teach.  So I'll give you the numbers.  When I target, say out of 10 business owners that I get on the phone with, by the end of the first conversation four of them ask me for a proposal and pricing on what it would take to teach them my system.  And out of those four, one out of those four engage me within a two week period of time.  Now the other three, some of them will come in later, right?  Some of them are three, six, nine, 12 months down the road, because it's just the wrong timing.  A lot of times you're in the summer people are on vacation or they're business travel or they're a lot of turnover in their business or whatever, but the point is that it's going to be a little different for every business because some are more complicated sales, some you're talking about seven figure digit sales, high six figure sales, my sale is much less.  It's under $5,000.00.  So they're not betting the farm here to learn the system.  So it's going to be a little bit different for everybody.

	But what I found is that by making, by focusing in on the right people, see one of the problems on social is that people are spending time with all the wrong people.  So they're spending time with people that, while it's great and it's very social, it's not very profitable, right'  The only time it can become profitable is when you're talking to the right people.  And so that's where your return on investment and time, not just resources, but your time, really pays off.  Because I know this for sure.  You have a consulting business, right?  You teach and consult, right?  Ask yourself that exact question.  If you could pick 100 high profile people that you know, that there's a very strong likelihood that they could use what you offer, and you could get on the phone with them in the next 30 to 90 days, what would that do for your business?

Jaime Tardy:	I could make more money.  Well that's the thing, it's huge for anybody.  I mean, I've been talking about hiring a sales person.  I mean, we have leads coming in which is amazing and awesome and I'm really thankful, but I'm going, imagine what more could happen if you actually go out and get leads too, right?

Dennis Brown:	If you were proactively reaching, right?

Jaime Tardy:	Right, right, it's insane.

Dennis Brown:	Well you've built a great system because of your web presence and your podcast and your book and everything you've got.  You've built that brand.  You invested.  You did what most people won't do.  So they want what you have and they've got to do what you did, right?  But if they don't want to do all of that -

Jaime Tardy:	Like, I can make you just as much money doing this.

Dennis Brown:	They can go direct, right.  And don't get me wrong, they still have to be positioned as an expert, they still have to build their brand, they still have to provide good value, but nothing's going to happen until you start getting on the phone with people, at least in the B to B space.  And then one thing I just wanted to just touch on in the B to C space, you know everybody's like, "I sell direct to consumers," or, "My customer end user is a consumer," and I say, "Okay great, well then you're not necessarily looking for customers on LinkedIn, but have you ever thought about finding partners for distribution?  Have you ever thought about international expansion?"  Let's face it, out of 350 million users on LinkedIn, 250 million of them are not in the US.  So have you ever thought about strategic partnerships?  Have you ever thought about using it to hire high quality talent?  Have you ever thought about it to connect in the media space?  So for example, what if you were able to connect with, you know, editors, writers, contributors, to national publications and develop a relationship with them, and you could get your product or company featured in an article or an interview or a magazine. 

	What would that do for your business?  So there's a lot of strategic ways to use the connections on LinkedIn even in the B to C space, other than just going direct for clients.  It's more relationship driven than it is just client centric.  I just have a tendency, most people I deal with business owners, they're looking for new business, right?  They want to focus in on, "Hey, who can I do business with?  Who can I provide value to?"

Jaime Tardy:	Definitely.  But it is about who you know, no matter what anyone says.  There really is about who you know, and if you know more people and more amazing people and more people who have money and they can put money in your bank account, that kind of makes a big difference.  It changes your life.

Dennis Brown:	For sure.  I mean, look at your experience in podcasting, right?  The people that you've met through that.  The network that you now have is incredible.  I mean, you could get some incredible people on the phone that you know, but more incredibly the people that they know you could get on the phone because of the relationships you've built.  And you've used podcasting to do that, but most people aren't going to have that ability but they can do the exact same thing with LinkedIn for free.  It costs them nothing.  A little bit of time, a little bit of elbow grease, a little bit of getting out of your comfort zone and talking to people on the phone or just being willing to reach out to people and connect, and great things can happen.

Jaime Tardy:	But way less than the five years I've been doing this, so yeah, it makes a huge difference.  I know we need to start wrapping up.  I'm so sorry, but I'm going to ask the same last question I asked you last time that neither of us remembered your answer from before, so everybody should go listen to that one and learn about how he built his logistics company.  It's an awesome interview too, but Dennis what is one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Dennis Brown:	You know, in working with, meeting, and talking to a lot of entrepreneurs, which is, I think, the primary audience you have here is probably entrepreneurs, one of the biggest challenges that I see is that they're so afraid to fail.  They're so afraid to fail.  They want everything to be perfect.  They think that all the moons have to line up perfectly, and it prevents them from moving forward, whether that be launching a product, launching a business, expanding their business, whatever it is, I think the fear of failure holds a lot of people back.  They get in that comfort zone.  So what I try to teach people, when I mentor other business owners outside of what I do on LinkedIn, because I work with a lot of business owners and just mentor them.  It's not something I charge for but I like to work with people.  I mean, I have to hand pick them obviously.  But when I mentor an entrepreneur, a lot of young entrepreneurs I try to work with because I really feel, I'm passionate about it.  One of the first things I tell them is you have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone.  I don't care how smart you are, how much money you have, I don't care who your daddy is.  What I care about is you have to be willing to get out of your comfort zone.

	And if you're not willing to do that then there's nothing that I can do to help you.  I can give you all the greatest tactics and strategies and feedback and advice, but you've got to be willing to get out of your comfort zone, because all of this success in business is just on the other side of uncomfortable.

Jaime Tardy:	I agree with you 1,010 percent.  So good, kick some people in the butt.  Tell them to go do something uncomfortable right now, man.

Dennis Brown:	Get uncomfortable.  Really, seriously, get uncomfortable. When you feel uncomfortable, I tell everybody, when you feel uncomfortable, when all of a sudden you hesitate and say, "Should I should I?"  Go into it.  Go right into it.  Because as soon as you do that it gets easier the next time and then your confidence builds and then that starts to snowball and when your confidence starts to snowball, you start seeing success, nothing can hold you back at that point.  But that's one of the things, and it would have been great to tie it into LinkedIn, and maybe it is, maybe it is.  Get out of your comfort zone.   Do something a little bit different.  Start reaching out and connecting with people that are high profile, valuable targets, influencers within your industry, and ask them for a phone call.  Ask them to mentor you.  Ask them for a meeting, and you'd be surprised.  Great things can happen when you ask the right way.

Jaime Tardy:	And so many people have a really hard time just emailing someone, even though it's super simple, not a big deal, they're never going to yell at you via email, but still people have a heck of a time doing that, so I really appreciate you saying that.  Where can we find out more about you and Linkedin and all that fun stuff that you've got?

Dennis Brown:	Yeah, I think the most valuable thing that anybody on this podcast listening can get is to, I wrote a book, an ebook.  It's called The Seven Habits of Highly Successful LinkedIn Users.  Catchy title, right?  And so I took the seven habits and I converted it into LinkedIn users.  And what it does is it's free, I'm not charging for it right now, and anybody who's even curious about how LinkedIn might work for you, it's going to give you a little bit of a road map on how to get started and then how to start making some progress and kind of take some of those nuggets we shared here and shows you how to execute on them.  And that would be a really important first step.  And like you said, linkedacademy.com.  Www.linkedacademy.com.  And then if anybody needs any help or they just want to connect, feel free to connect with me.  I accept all non-creepy connections, but yeah, feel free to connect with me.  I'll be glad to try to share some tips with you.  I'm creating that online product Linked Academy, which is going to be an online training platform that will open it up to entrepreneurs from a cost basis.  It's going to make it much more affordable.

	I'm going to be launching that this fall, so if you get the book you'll get notified when that launches and it may be something that you might want to take a look at.

Jaime Tardy:	I love that you care and you're like, "Oh, connect with me."  I think that's amazing, right?  You're just a person, right?  So just be careful, you might get bombarded.  My people love being able to connect with as many people as humanly possible.

Dennis Brown:	That's a high quality problem.

Jaime Tardy:	Exactly, right?  We are so lucky we have the highest quality of problems ever.  Thank you so much for coming on again, especially a couple of years later.  It's so amazing to see sort of the transition and I hope you have an awesome awesome day, Dennis.

Dennis Brown:	Thank you Jaime, I really appreciate it.

Jaime Tardy:	All right, bye.

Dennis Brown:	Bye bye.

[End of Audio]

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Tags: Business Growth, business network, Business Scaling, Dennis Brown, LinkedIn, LinkedIn campaign, millionaire interview, network, networking, networking tool, social media, trusted expert

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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