418: Become a LinkedIn Expert, with Viveka von Rosen – Part 2

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Positioning yourself as a LinkedIn Expert, Industry Expert, or Thought Leader is all around creating a personal brand and adding meaningful value to your business network.

Viveka von Rosen, Co-Founder & Chief Visibility Officer of Vengreso, is back for Part 2. She is the ultimate LinkedIn Expert and is sharing the 101 ways to rock LinkedIn. In part two, we discuss:

  1. Connect: Connect and network with target buyers with the objective of turning every online conversation into an offline.
  2. Feed: Feed or nurture your network with regular content to help them on their journey and create further engagement.
  3. Cadence: Develop a daily, weekly, and monthly set of digital selling activities to drive more conversations and/or expand relationships.

Cofounder of Vengreso, the largest provider of full-spectrum Modern Digital Sales transformation solutions. Known as the @LinkedInExpert, she’s the author of the best-selling “LinkedIn Marketing: An Hour a Day” AND “LinkedIn: 101 Ways to Rock Your Personal Brand!”. She’s been named in Forbes (4 years running) as a top social media expert and is a regular contributor and has been featured in Forbes, BuzzFeed, Inc, CNN, Entrepreneur, Selling Power, and the Social Media Examiner. Her business mission is to help sales professionals and business owners create more quality and qualified conversions on LinkedIn.

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Introduction

George: Welcome to the latest edition of the Conquer Local podcast. It is episode number two of this two part series with Viveka Von Rosen, the chief visibility officer and co-founder of Vengreso. We’re going to find out more about Vengreso in this episode. We’re also going to learn about how it’s important to take that audience that you are engaging with, and take personal brand that you’ve built, and that mindset you’re bringing to LinkedIn from our first episode, and now how do we connect? And how do we feed or nurture that network with regular content? And what’s too much, or is there such a thing? And then what cadence do we need to deliver? What should you do? And I’m hoping to find out what we shouldn’t do when we have Viveka Von Rosen join us for a second episode of this two episode series on the Conquer Local podcast.

We are back with part two, Viveka. In our first episode we covered, you know we’ve got the six phases of transforming into a modern seller, which is what we wanted to talk about. So we talked about mindset, and brand, and engaging, and you are enormously engaging, so thank you for delivering those three items. But let’s now talk about, you know, this ability to take that brand and connect. And then you’ve got this idea that I really love around feeding. And then how often are we gonna do it? The most, well, not the most overused word right now, which is actually you’re on mute, so mute is the most over. But cadence, I hear cadence as much as I hear transparency lately. There you go.

Viveka: I have a sign that says you’re on mute, I’m so tired of saying that, yeah, absolutely.

George: So we’re jumping into this connection idea, and how do you take that network that you’ve built around your personal brand, specifically on LinkedIn, and make something of it?

LinkedIn Expert

Viveka: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, a lot of times, especially when we’re talking to salespeople, it’s all about Lead Gen, Lead Gen, Lead Gen, Lead Gen which is great, but Lead Gen is more of a marketing function. Of course, marketing and sales need to be talking, especially these days. But the prospecting piece of it is really more for the sales person, and that’s more of the one-on-one engagement, so we talked about in the previous session, engaging with your prospects before you ever invite them to connect, and that is so important. As I mentioned in the last session, or in the last session, in our last podcast, you wouldn’t run up to someone, hopefully, with your business card going “talk to me, talk to me, talk to me,” but that’s how people are using LinkedIn. And so what we talked about in last session is you’ve got to engage with them first. One thing we talked very briefly about was engage on their content. See if they’re active on LinkedIn, engage on their content. That starts that top of mind awareness, that name face association, that KLT, it begins to build that know, and hopefully the L, like in trust, all things being equal, you want to do business with people you know, like and trust, that’s a Bob Bird quote. And so then, another great thing to do is ask for an introduction. I mean, we all know referrals are the very best and easiest way to get a new client to shrink down that timeline, to hold the value of your product or service. You know, you don’t have as much sniggling over the quarters and dimes, and yet people don’t use LinkedIn for those introductions. There used to be an introduction tool, they took it away, which is actually good because it sucked. But now, if you go to your profile and you, there’s two things you can do, so you can go to a prospect on LinkedIn and see who you have in common, and then don’t ask one person, but see how many people you have in common. Maybe it’s four or five, maybe there’s 10, choose maybe the five people you know the best, or three people or two people if that’s all you know, but ask the folks you know the best, number one, if they’re willing to introduce you, and tell them, don’t do it yet, just give me a yes or no answer. Yes or no, are you willing to introduce me to George? And they’ll either say yes or no. Now the ones who say yes, choose your best yes. So there might be one person who you know, like they were over at your house the other day for a barbecue, Oh no they weren’t because COVID, all right. You guys were on Zoom the other day eating your barbecue. And so that’s the person, that’s your best yes. And so then, say thank you so much, I really appreciate it. I actually wrote the introduction for you, please feel free to use this if you want, or, you know, write your own, but I just wanted to make it easy for you. And then the other key is have them CC you. So whether they send it through a LinkedIn message, an email, a text message, have them CC you, that way you can engage with the person whether they accept you or not. We call it our two-step referral, but it actually should be three step. Choose not one, but you know, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 people who you have in common and ask each and every one of them if they’re willing to invite you to connect, or willing to introduce you, rather.

George: Well, I wanted to jump in one second, I’m just noticing something. There’s this new thing in my messaging, so I popped it open and it said, connections to Viveka. So I got Craig Elias, I’ve got Mitchell Joel, who is a former Conquer Local alumni

Viveka: Yeah, Mitch. Oh my God, I love Mitch.

George: Who is on our show.

Viveka: Oh, is he? Oh my God, Mitch is my, love Mitch. Six pixels of separation.

George: Yeah, exactly,

Viveka: Pick Joel. Yep, yeah, it is new. You can get it right in your messaging or on their profile, either way, but you don’t want to land just one cause if you ask Greg to introduce me and I don’t really know Greg or Greg doesn’t really know me then, you know, now it’s done.

George: Right.

Viveka: But if you said, hey Greg, hey Mitch, hey John, hey Albert, are you willing to introduce me to Viveka? And Mitch is the only one who says yes, now you have, A, a yes, and you have your best yes. If Mitch and John both say yes, then you can say, hey John, thanks so much, weirdly enough, my buddy Mitch introduced me to her the other day, so cool, don’t need the favor, what can I do for you? It’s still an opportunity now to engage with your other buddy. But you choose your best yes, and then to your point, you write the introduction for them, making it easy, and then the CC. We have had clients, , we have a nine week training, nine module training, nine hours of training, and they’ve taken that one thing, that one strategy, and they’ve been immensely successful with it. So, as far as engaging and then connecting, I don’t think there’s any better way to get someone to say yes to you than through an introduction.

George: Viveka, I wanted to understand this question, and see if you’ve had an experience with this. So, I have the privilege of working with a lot of young sellers, or people who don’t want to admit that they are salespeople, and I got to convince them that you’re in the business of selling. And when we start to talk about networking tactics sometimes they get so excited, that no one’s ever taught them this before. And I’m sitting there going, well this is basic networking 101, but then I relate back that, you know, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I take it for granted. Are you finding that as well? That just these basic networking components are game-changers for certain people?

Viveka: Yeah, and interestingly enough, it’s because they’re digital natives, you know, our millennial sellers are, they’ve been on digital since the beginning, and they haven’t had the experience as much of going to chamber events, right? Doing the networking events, doing the lunch and learns, all that stuff that we, as older salespeople grew up on, they haven’t had that experience. So when you tie together the old and the new, right? When you tie together the old networking strategies with the, and I’m using big quotation marks here, with the new platforms because you know, LinkedIn has been around since 2003, that’s when you get the aha moments. And similarly, you know, we have so much pushback from our older, our more seasoned salespeople. Like, “I get all the business I need on the golf course.”

Well, you know, you didn’t have the golf course for the past year, and what if you could get as much business or more business, even more easily? So it’s the marrying of the old and the new, both with quotation marks. So yeah, both of our younger sellers are super excited about these new strategies, but our old sellers, once they get over the, “Oh, it’s digital,” right? They realize they can use these techniques that they’ve developed over 20, 30, 40, 50 years of selling, and still implement them, using things like LinkedIn.

Feed and Nurturing Your Profile

George: Well, we’re gonna move into a couple other components because we’ve got a lot of things we want to cover and there’s so much value, but okay, first off, I thought I was killing it on LinkedIn. And I was like, I wake up in the morning, I piss excellence, I look on there, the dashboard’s going up into the right, things are rocking. And I want to talk about feeding. And I actually like that term better than nurturing. And I’d love for you to talk about feeding, but let me give you an example. Now I want to bring this back to where we started here, over the last 10 days, we have increased the amount of content that we’ve been putting onto my profile. So I’m
not sure you’re like this, but there’s a team of people that are actually working on my profile. Thank God, because I need a life, and I don’t really have one. And what we did the other day was we’re like, we’re producing all this content on the podcast, are we really posting as much as we should? And there’s always this feeling of, am I posting too much, am I sending too many emails? And what happened, by increasing the amount of content that we were putting out there, or just maybe doubling up on it, our engagement is up 87% in the period of seven days, and I’m sitting here going, why the hell weren’t we doing this all along? And you know, I’ve been doing this for a while, so let’s talk about feeding, and how do we feed that network that we’ve now built with our brand and our mindset and the engagement?

Viveka: Yeah, absolutely. And I love that you brought that up cause that is a question that comes up every single time we get into the feed and nurture part of our training. Oh my gosh, I’m gonna flood my network if I share more than one thing a week. Well, first of all, this isn’t email. I wish it was, I wish worked like email and then more people would see it. But because of LinkedIn’s algorithm, if you haven’t been sharing it all they’re going to keep it super clamped down. And even if you’re an active seller or an active sharer on LinkedIn, they’re still only going to open it up to like 10% of your network. It’s only when friends of friends start sharing your content and they start actually sticking on your content. The algorithm is based on dwell times, so the more people who stick to your content, who read it, who share it, the more visibility it’s gonna get.

So first of all, I wish that one post a week was like spamming your network, but it’s not, it’s really spaghetti on the wall. And so we will share four, five, six to 10 times a day. The slight exception to this is if you know that everyone you’re connected to has a super small network, then it is going to be a little bit overwhelming. But chances are most of the people you’re connected to have more than 500 connections, which means the chance of them actually seeing your post is like 2%. So yes, if you want to get visibility, you need to share more content, you are not spamming your audience. That’s number one.

Being a Social Seller

Viveka: Number two, we’re social sellers, not psychic sellers. Again, I wish I was a psychic seller. I wish I could be like, , Oh, okay, I know that that SAS company really needs to see this particular article right now so I’m going to share it, boom. And then there it is and they saw it just when I needed to see it. But I am not a psychic seller, nobody is a psychic seller. We have to share content consistently so that our buyers see it when they need to see it, so that our referers see it when they need to see it, so that our prospects see it when they need to see it. We’re not psychic, we don’t know exactly what they need when they need. There’s all kinds of cool algorithms and tools out there that marketers use, but most of that stuff doesn’t work on LinkedIn. So just do the easy thing, just share content.

And then the third thing that I would recommend is, don’t just share a link cause that means nothing to anyone, you want to use that description section. There’s 1200 characters, it’s almost a mini blog post. So if you’re lucky like George and you have a team who can help you with this, awesome. If not, take five minutes out of your day and utilize that 1,200, well it’s actually 1,299 characters, to describe who your buyer is, what their point of pain is, how this piece of media is going to solve that point of pain. What’s in the piece of media? What’s in the blog post? What’s in the podcast? You know, it’s almost like show notes. What’s in the video? And then put in that call to action, right? So click through and let me know what you think. Click through, try this strategy, and let me know your results in comments below. Let me know if you’ve tried this strategy and what your results were in comments below. Like some kind of CTA. In fact, we’ve got a whole methodology, it’s called PVC, personalize, add value, and a call to action. And we use it on everything, right? Our invitations to connect personalized to the individual, we always add something of value and put in a call to action, which might simply be, hope you’ll accept this invitation to connect. Any private message we send, whether it’s a video private message, a voicemail via private message, or a written private message, it’s personalized to the individual, it adds value and a call to action. Our posts are personalized usually to a buyer persona not an individual, cause that would be silly, but they’re individual lives to a buyer persona personalized to a buyer persona. They always add value and we always put in that call to action, even if it’s read, or click here right? So that PVC methodology is really kind of the magic formula that turns annoying salesy, spammy crap content into something valuable that your buyer’s more likely to engage with.

Cadence

George: So this concept of connecting and then feeding. We talked a lot about value, so it’s feed them some value, not feed them, buy my stuff. So let’s keep that in mind. And that’s why I like the nurture thing. It’s been a long time since I nurtured anybody. So when you talk about top of funnel leads, people are like nurturing, I like feeding better because it’s an idea of putting the right information in the hand of the right audience with that brand that you’ve created. I was watching a thing the other day, Grant Cardone, I like Grant, I like his content. I read the book, and he talked about with his great accent, “hit the list, hit the list.” This is the cadence, right? Like, do I send out a daily thing? Do I send out a weekly thing? Do I send out monthly? Viveka, what do we do? How often, when, what times? Let’s talk about cadence.

Viveka: Yeah, yeah. And what I’m actually gonna do, I’ve got a really good article that’s all about prospecting and we’ve got a couple of different cadences in there, but first of all when it comes to cadence, it’s not one and done, obviously. You wanna make sure that you are using an omni-channel approach, right? So you want to hit them up on LinkedIn but you don’t want to forget the phone, even if you know you’re gonna be leaving a voicemail, you know, you don’t want to forget the phone, you don’t want to forget email, they’re all great channels. Maybe your audience is active on Facebook or TikTok or whatever. So it’s a really, really good idea to engage with people on as many channels as possible. And we actually have two different cadences that our sales people use. We’ve got an inbound sales cadence and an outbound sales cadence. Mostly what we’re talking about today has been the outbound sales cadence. So I’ll say it out loud for you, but just in case you can’t keep notes like that I’ll also share the link so that you guys can get access to all of our cadences. But the referral request, if you can start with that referral request that we just talked about, that is like number one the best thing that you can do. And then socially engage with the individuals. Now I get that not all of your prospects are active on the socials, but if they are active on the socials, whichever social they’re active on, with us it’s usually LinkedIn, make sure you engage upon their posts to keep that top of mind awareness, we talked about that in the previous podcast. Follow them on LinkedIn, they’ll be notified, but also you’ll see when they engage, of course if you’ve that sales navigator, then save them as a lead. Then go to an email if you have their email address, there’s a lot of fabulous email searching tools that can get you email addresses from LinkedIn. Send a video email, we use a tool called OneMob, but there’s BombBomb, Videolicious, there’s great video email tools out there. Follow up with a phone call, which usually means it’s gonna be a voicemail. But in that voicemail you want to reference the email or the video email. Then, only then do you send the connection request, they’ve seen you four, five different places, right? So they’re a lot more likely to accept that invitation request because they’ve seen you, they feel like they know you, hopefully they like you, because you’re sharing valuable content, you know?

And then maybe with their voicemail, let them know that you’re gonna try calling them again in a week. Once they accept your invitation on LinkedIn you follow up with a LinkedIn welcome video message using that PVC, personalized value, call to action, continue to engage socially with them. We do what’s a digital sales assessment video email. So we’ll actually go through their LinkedIn profile of their salespeople and be like, you think you got social selling down, ya don’t, here’s why. But you know, you think about your clients and what their points of pain are that they might not even know about and how you can help, and show them that, using video is really powerful.

Follow up with another call, maybe a text message, maybe another call. If after 15 engagements, they haven’t responded to you, send them that final email and then take them off your list. But chances are long before you get to that 15th action, you’re gonna have a response. And a lot of people are like, “dang, that’s a lot. “I mean, that is a lot of activity.” But first of all, each activity doesn’t take that long. A lot of times you might want to template it, you don’t want to automate it ever because LinkedIn hates that, but you might have a template or a script that you work off of so you don’t have to think of something new each time. But once you’ve done that enough times it builds that KLT and there’s a lot more likelihood that the person will talk to you. It certainly shrinks down that lead time because you’ve jumped into like and maybe even trust because now you’ve positioned yourself as the trusted advisor. So that’s our 15, 16 when you get rid of them if they don’t respond. But that’s our 15 step outbound sales cadence, we also have an inbound sales cadence. Well, I’ll send you that link so you don’t have to.

George: So we’ve talked about, write it all down. Viveka, I really appreciate that. We’ve talked about the mindset, we talked about the brand and engagement in the first episode. In this episode we’ve talked about connect feed, and then the cadence that you need to deploy but I want to talk about Vengreso, and I want to talk about this company that you founded and let’s get to the root of the name first and then understand a little bit about what you folks do, because I think our audience is going to find it very valuable.

What is Vengreso?

Viveka: Oh, thank you. So we have a great video, we just put it together, I’ll share that link too. But then yeah, people are like, what’s a Vengreso? And so when we met before we even formed the company were like, are we gonna be like, social selling experts.com? Or do we want to be a Google? Do we want a new word? And we obviously opted for the new word. So we took ventos and ingresos which is sales and revenue, and we pulled them together to create Vengreso. And now we’ve got , that we call it the virtual town of Vengresonia, we call ourselves Vengresonians, you know, our our clients have been Vengresoed. So we’ve turned it into a verb and a noun, but yeah, it’s basically sales and it’s a mashup of sales and revenue. Vengreso.

George: It reminds me of another V word that was created, a brand new concept. So let’s get to the award-winning 10 step digital selling program. First off, I just like to say an award winning around anything, but it really is award-winning, and our audience, I think would be really interested in this program.

Digital Sales Transformation

Viveka: Yeah, we do a digital sales transformation. And so we’ve really covered it in depth, it’s our six phases, which is, it’s either on demand, if you’re an individual seller, you can just buy the nine module program, six phases over nine modules which goes from mindset to cadence, truly everything in between, everything you need to build your brand. All the steps, the resources, the playbooks that you need for engagement and connecting, the best tools that we recommend for feeding your network. We have a free piece of software that you get, actually you can get it now if you want, called FlyMSG, it’s an auto text expander on steroids, it’s awesome. And then if you’ve got a bigger team of 20 plus sales people we customize it, obviously, not only will you have the on-demand training, but you’ll have live trainings with me and the master trainer and our fabulous coach. So we’ve got coaching sessions too. We customize the content for the training and we’re creating a whole new program called video sales mastery. So whether you’re on LinkedIn, whether you’re on sales navigator, whether you want to learn to sell with video, maybe you want to learn how to sell a Twitter or Facebook, or texting, right? So we’re pulling all of these elements into video sales mastery for individuals or teams and we’re actually reducing the price on it and I don’t know why we’re doing that, but there we go.

So I’m super, super excited about it. We came from nothing four years ago, to the big biggest digital sales transformation company with the most reach in four years, so we know what we’re doing .

George: Viveka Von Rosen, our guest over the last two weeks around the idea of becoming that LinkedIn expert. So thank you for all of those insights, but more than that, we’ve learned six key takeaways for becoming a better seller and using technology to your advantage. And I could keep going, I don’t think this’ll be the last our audience hears of Viveka Von Rosen, but we really appreciate your time over the last two episodes Viveka, and yes, I agree, you are awesome. So thank you for joining us and we look forward to hearing more from you, plus all the links, you’ve now set the bar very high as a guest, it’s like free stuff, free stuff, free stuff. Producer Colleen’s going crazy over here, but we’ll make sure all of the links are in the show notes as well. And thank you for your time, I very much appreciate the lessons that you’ve been teaching to our audience, and look forward to catching you again.

Viveka: Absolutely, my pleasure. And I do hope not only me, but the rest of my team can be on the show too.

Conclusion

George: Ah, Viveka. I could listen to her for hours, she’s a great interview and she brings such energy, she’s super passionate. Let’s talk about connect, connect and network with the target buyers. And this all ties back into that engagement that you need to have with your audience, building out that personal brand and the mindset that you need to bring where you’re not selling, you’re helping your buyers become better at buying. And then we got into that term that she calls feeding. Nurturing is also a name that’s used. How do we feed our network? How do we put our content in front of them in a way that it’s going to help them? How do we put the right message in front of the right audience at the right time? Which is a age old challenge of marketing. And there’s some great takeaways from Viveka and her team on how to do that. And then what’s the cadence going to be? How are we going to deliver and feed and connect? Are we going to do it daily? Are going to do it weekly, or are we gonna do it monthly? Are we going to use a combination? How do we put the right information in front of that audience at the right time so that we can either drive more conversations or expand our relationships. So some very key takeaways on how to use that environment of LinkedIn to be able to be more effective. And thanks to Viveka for giving us that extra time. Two incredible episodes from one of the top thought leaders in the space, Viveka Von Rosen. And also we’re looking for those reviews. Wherever you are listening to podcast today, if you love what we’re doing, please, I’m begging, if we could get a review, that’d be great. If not, we’re missing the mark, or even if you have those suggestions, we’d love to hear from you, just direct message me on our LinkedIn profile. And if we can’t get a review, or maybe if we can get a review, we’d love to have you follow us on our social media channels as well. Thanks for joining us on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.

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