USING LINKEDIN FOR PROSPECTING, LEADS, & SALES

Tips from Jason

Take the time to personalize your messages on LinkedIn and cold Emails
LinkedIn is a GREAT prospecting tool compared to other platforms. People are on it to talk about and do business
It is worth it to take some time to learn about your prospect before contacting them
Tools to help you learn A LOT about your prospect and personalize your messages (See Resources below)

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Doug: Well welcome back listeners. Today I’ve got a special guest joining me in the studio. I’d like to introduce you to Jason Bay. Now Jason’s entrepreneurial experience dates back to 2008. At 19, he ran his first six-figure business, painting houses while attending school at Oregon State University. He’s worked with hundreds of sales reps and personally closed millions of dollars in revenue during his career. At Blissful Prospecting, he’s in charge of growing companies’ revenue through meeting their marketing and sales needs. He specializes in these types of challenges for small business owners, those who struggle to proactively find new customers or help in your prospecting efforts to keep your sales pipeline full, those who love your business, but are losing business to competitors and they’re looking for a better service, and those who just simply don’t have the skills or the resources or the time to properly promote their business and land more sales.

When Jason’s not working, you can find him at the local comedy club doing stand-up, hiking and camping, attending a concert or traveling with his wife, Sarah. So, welcome to the Real Marketing Real Fast podcast.

Jason Bay: Thanks for having me on, Doug. I’m excited about this.

Doug: Well it’s really cool to connect. I’ve been on a bit of a rant the last couple podcasts about people not using social media correctly and why it doesn’t work. How did we connect?

Jason Bay: We connected on LinkedIn.

Doug: There we go. How does that work on LinkedIn? You just put a post out and then people flock to your business?

Jason Bay: Yeah. It’s funny you say that because whenever I tell people, “I can help you grow your business with LinkedIn,” they sort of associate that with someone helping with Twitter or Facebook. “Oh you can put organic posts up and create content and all this other stuff.” No, that’s not exactly how it works. You’ve got to use LinkedIn as a prospecting tool. It’s a way to strategically, in a targeted way, hunt for new business. It doesn’t just come to you. You’ve got to go out there and get it.

Doug: Yeah. I hear ya. It’s just interesting because I was interviewing somebody just the other day on the podcast and I connected with her through Twitter. It was the same thing, though, because somebody has to make an effort to do more than publish. To actually reach out and start a conversation. And then you and I ended up with an offline conversation a few months ago, and here we are today.

Jason Bay: Yeah. There’s this guy, Mark Hunter, he’s another person in the prospecting space. I love the analogy he used. He said, “If you want to catch those whales, those big clients, you’ve got to bring a spear. You can’t catch a whale with a net.” So just posting content on social media is like casting a wide net. You’re not gonna get any big clients that way. Rarely do big clients come to you through a Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn post. It comes through engaging with them.

Doug: That’s right. I liked your picture on Instagram, I’m gonna hire you.

Jason Bay: Yeah. It just doesn’t work like that.

Doug: Why do you share with us, creating a six-figure business while you’re going to college is a pretty major effort. I’ve been to enough networking events and business events to see people that are way past college that would like to have they’re first six-figure business. Share a breakthrough with us or a major success that you had.

Jason Bay: Sure. The thing that was really interesting is that I originally went to school to become a forensic scientist. My parents didn’t run businesses. I associated entrepreneurship with my aunt was running a hair salon. I had a grandma that had one of those antique stores. So I thought there was that and then I thought there was running Google. I didn’t realize there was the in between, all of the stuff that’s in between, what 98% of business owners do.

Doug: Yeah, that’s right.

Jason Bay: So I didn’t really have a lot of business acumen. The big challenge I had was, and a painting business is more B to C, but it was the same sort of challenge in that there was a couple things that happened. When I got hired, there was some training, but it was more like, “Hey, go knock on doors. Go find some houses that need painting.” And I noticed that in the small town of Brookings, Oregon that I was in, if you found a neighborhood where there was a lot of peeling paint on houses, just because they need painting doesn’t mean that they want to hire someone or can afford to hire someone.

Doug: That’s right.

Jason Bay: That was the first lesson I got in that need is just one-third of the equation. You’ve got to make sure those other things are in play there. And then the second thing I learned was that when I tried to see if the person was interested in painting their house at the door and tried to sell the service at the door, people were not interested. I learned that hey if I sell a free estimate, if I just sell the appointment, people are a lot more inclined to meet with me, and it sort of helps me … I like to say, “You have to earn the right to sell someone.” With prospecting specifically, you have to treat it like I’m not here to make a sale, I’m here to start a conversation. That’s where I sort of learned that stuff at the very beginning, but it was really hard because I had a lot of doors slammed in my face and I was just wasting a lot of time in spinning my wheels.

Scouting territories, as we called it, so making sure I was talking to the right people that could afford it, and then also making sure that I was very conversational about it really helped me. That was the big breakthrough for me.

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Doug: Well it’s interesting because you brought up a couple things that I relate to, and one is selling the appointment. I think in marketing, often when your people are marketing their business, they try to get everything done in one fell swoop. So, I’m gonna run an ad and I want people from not knowing who I am to click on my ad and pull their credit card and buy something. And I understand why we want to do that, but often, depending on what it is. I mean, if it’s a low ticket item, that’s fine, if it’s a commodity. But there needs to be a relationship. Someone once told me it’s like dating. You need to date just a little bit before you ask your wife to marry you.

Jason Bay: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s really easy. I’ve made these mistakes. A lot of salespeople do and a lot of marketers do. You assume that the prospect is already aware of a problem that they might not even be aware that they have, nor do they know how to fix it necessarily or that there’s a service or a product that exists to fix it. You can’t make all of those assumptions. Really you just need to get the person on a phone call or an in-person meeting, where you can actually sell the person.

Doug: Well, and like you said, I had interviewed somebody else, Alex [Sharfin 00:06:30] a while ago, and we talked about customer avatars. I think it was him that had mentioned making sure that … He was tired of his clients coming to him and saying they didn’t have enough money to pay for the service. And so, just because their house needs painting, there might be a whole neighborhood that needs painting, there might be a reason for that.

Jason Bay: And they’re definitely less.

Doug: They don’t have the money to paint their house.

Jason Bay: I always made the joke that if you went into a neighborhood and you felt like they might try to sell you something at the door, you’re probably in the wrong place.

Doug: That’s funny. Why don’t you share with us some of the successes that you’ve had? I mean, prospecting, not everybody likes to do it. I say that often business owners find excuses or they procrastinate by being busy, doing things that look like marketing, but at the end of the day, they don’t have a business card, a contact, or a conversation.

Jason Bay: Yeah. I think the big thing with LinkedIn before I dig into that, is just I want to address a myth that some people think that LinkedIn is dead or that it’s not where people are having B to B conversations. So I had some stats I was looking at earlier today. LinkedIn published these. They said that 80% of B to B leads come from LinkedIn, 46% of B to B website traffic comes from LinkedIn, and they have 530 million users. So, it’s a place where business conversations are happening, and it’s not that Facebook and all these other social platforms are not good, it’s just that people go to LinkedIn with the expectation of having a business conversation, and it’s not really what people go to Facebook for. Which is really why I recommend LinkedIn as a platform.

But in terms of results, for our business, it’s really been a game changer from a prospecting standpoint. We used to do a lot of cold emails. We do cold email for clients, but we haven’t really done much for ourselves because essentially sending out 100 to 150 personalized connection requests per day has really built our sales pipeline to where I can hop on the phone with anywhere between 10 and 15 pre-qualified prospects on a weekly basis. So, that’s been really good. It’s created several hundred thousands of dollars in our sales pipeline and turned into deals.

For us, the big deals are between 10 and 20K, so it’s helped us produce these deals and get in contact with people who do have a budget because we could use the tool to make sure that we’re reaching out to people that have a particular employee count that we notice predicts budget. An employee count maybe in their marketing department or their sales department. It allows us to look for a lot of the cues before we even have a conversation with someone, that really indicate they’re likely to have a budget.

Doug: Yeah, that’s a really good point. You’re right that it’s great to use the tools to define. Cold email is a tough game because if you don’t have those other details, you really don’t know whether these guys have the budget or they’re the right target audience for you.

Jason Bay: Yeah. I know you and I have actually talked about email quite a bit in the last time we talked, several months back. But on the B to B side, cold email really only works if you’re taking the time to personalize the emails, and you’re taking the time to be like, you know what, instead of sending out 1000 emails and getting 10 or 15 appointments then off of that, I’ll take the time and really personalize 100, so I know that these people absolutely need what we have and could afford it, and I’ll get 10 to 15 appointments off 100 emails instead of 1000. That’s just the approach that I’d rather take. And LinkedIn, I mean the conversions we notice across the board are twice as high.

It’s so easy on LinkedIn to have a conversation. I could ask you, Doug, on LinkedIn, and this is how our conversation went. It’s like, “Hey, what’s going on? How’s your business going?” And you would respond to that. You wouldn’t respond to an email if I sent you a cold email and said, “Hey Doug, how’s business going?” You’d be like, “Delete. I don’t have time for this.”

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Doug: That’s right. The other thing is that I use LinkedIn as my shopping mall if you want to call it that. That’s the first place I go when I’m looking for contacts. I’m looking for a writer, I’m looking for a graphic designer, I’m looking for more web guys or PPC guys. I go there first. If you’re not there, you’re not using the tool, you’re not gonna get a connection. And you’re right. Not only from a sales point of view, because I have conversations like you do every week where people contact you because of LinkedIn, but I’m also the proactive side going, “Hey I need this. I’ve looked at your profile. Can you help me?” So it’s been a great tool for me sourcing suppliers and partners.

Jason Bay: Yeah. And you make a really good point there in that something that’s really overlooked is whether you use LinkedIn or not for prospecting, you’ve got to make sure that your profile’s pretty dialed in because it’s essentially a landing page. So when people search for things, and let’s say you’re looking for a freelancer to help you with marketing or a company or whatever, and someone’s profile just looks like they don’t have a very good looking profile image. They don’t fill out the summary that talks about what they do and who they can help and how they can help them, and it doesn’t have a company page attached to it, why would you even get in contact with that person? So, there is an inbound component to LinkedIn, too. If you’re not gonna be aggressive with prospecting, at least make sure it’s set up and looks nice and resonates with someone that would want to hire you.

Doug: So, is that your primary tactic at this point? Is that what you’re finding is working the best for you guys and for your clients?

Jason Bay: Yeah. It really starts … We take our clients through a five-step process essentially. Essentially what that looks like is helping them to find who their ideal client profile is first. And I know that might sound really straightforward, but most small businesses under 10 million dollars don’t even really have a very good idea of who their ideal client is. They’ll be prospecting or marketing or putting Facebook ads in front of a prospect that is not actually a good fit. So, that’s the first thing that we do. And then the second thing is finding places online for them to engage with. And then we go through and optimize the LinkedIn profile and that sort of thing. Then from there, it’s about the messaging strategy.

I don’t know if you want to dig more into that, but there are several components to the outreach process.

Doug: Yeah, happy to have more conversation on that side. I mean, you probably saw some messaging come back from me when we connected. I don’t have a deep sales funnel that folds up, but there are some ways to automate that, and the least you should do is have a pre-prepared response to people who want to connect, and if you’re gonna reach out to, like you said, to personalize it and not just hit the connect button without an introduction.

Jason Bay: Yeah. I would say a couple things. Here’s a tactic that works really well. If you can find a place outside of LinkedIn where your audience has already been gathered, you can mention group affiliation. It’s one of those things where people like associating with people that are fairly familiar to them. So I just go with how we connected. I said, “Hey Doug, I saw that you’re in the Facebook club,” this Facebook group called Founder Club. “I just wanted to reach out and connect on LinkedIn. Is there anything you’re working on right now that you’re super excited about? Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” And then you said, “Thanks for connecting.” Then we had a conversation back and forth. That’s a really good example of, like that Founders Club, the reason why I joined that is I know there’s people that run businesses that are the size that either I want to connect with for networking purposes or that I could do business with.
So, finding a Facebook group, a LinkedIn group, company awards, review sites, there’s all kinds of places you can look online to find if a company’s legit or not and if they’d likely have budget. And then just mention how you found them on LinkedIn. You can use that same stock message. It’s nothing crazy. It’s just got a little bit of personalization to it.

Doug: Well it’s interesting because what you’re talking about, it’s not an algorithm. It’s not something you have to spend years learning to do. It’s common sense and putting in some sweat equity to build that relationship. It’s amazing that people think, “Hey I can just push the button and that’s it. That’s y work for the day. I’ve done my marketing.”

Jason Bay: Yeah, it is crazy. I mean, just a little bit of effort goes a long way. We’re talking like one or two minutes just quickly looking to see if someone might be a good fit before you message them. I mean, you could have a virtual assistant. I don’t send those connection requests out myself. I handle it once the person responds to me, but I have a team that helps me send out 150 of those connection requests per day. So, if you’re not gonna do any sort of volume on this or spend the time to do it, this is not even worth doing.

Doug: Well I mean, that’s a great point. I have one of my assistants manage my LinkedIn, and that’s one of her main tasks. I found with my LinkedIn group getting so large, there’s a lot of traffic that comes through and I don’t need to look at all of it. I just need to have the conversations that I need to have. But you mentioned something as well. It was a little bit different. You said that we first connected on Facebook because of a group and then went to LinkedIn. What is your thought on connecting across multiple platforms? I’m assuming that we did that with two platforms. Is that something you typically do when you’re prospecting with people?

Jason Bay: Yeah. Usually only from Facebook is where I find people unless it’s some other place online outside of a social platform. And the only reason why I do that is that … Well, there’s a couple reasons. One, the LinkedIn group feature just completely turned into garbage like a year ago, so LinkedIn groups are graveyards. No one’s really using them, so they’re not very engaged. Otherwise, I would look at LinkedIn groups. The other reason for taking the conversation onto LinkedIn is that there’s quite a few steps involved with, if I find you in the Facebook group, I have to add you as a friend. Otherwise, if I send you a message, it’s gonna get filtered into a different category of people that are not friends with you. You’re probably not gonna see it.

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Doug: That’s right, yep.

Jason Bay: So I’ve got to connect with you and then having a business conversation that starts out as a business conversation on Facebook, it just doesn’t work that well. I know that people do it, and this does work. I’m not saying Facebook’s a bad B to B tool, but for prospecting, it’s weird. You add someone’s personal Facebook and I’m like, “Hey Doug, how’s your business doing?” And you’re like … You’re probably not on Facebook all day throughout the day either. There’s this faux pas, I don’t know if that’s the right terminology, but it’s okay to have a LinkedIn profile open during business hours and not feel like you’re slacking. If you’re on Facebook, everyone’s gonna be like, “Dude, you’re on Facebook. Come on.” So that’s the reason to bring it to LinkedIn where we can have an actual business conversation.

Doug: Well it’s funny because I spend so much time online, and in the online marketing space, and you’re right. I do have both open. Actually, I have LinkedIn open, then I get notifications when Facebook. I don’t know why I’m in the business. I don’t know why it irritates me when people send me a DM on LinkedIn. It’s like, “This isn’t a business tool. You have my email. Quit engaging with me here.” I have Slack. I have Skype. I have LinkedIn. Quit sending me business stuff on my Facebook page.

Jason Bay: Yeah. It’s super weird. To me, it’s no different than getting a cold call from someone or getting a cold text, which people really aren’t supposed to do, but they do a lot of that still. It’s like, yeah it’s gonna work. Some people are gonna respond to that, but it’s gonna irritate more people. To my knowledge, I haven’t irritated anyone by sending them a LinkedIn connection request. No one said, F off or unsubscribe, you know. No one’s done that sort of stuff. It’s just a place where you can have a business conversation.

Doug: Well, and I think if you’re pushing hard, you’re gonna get some resistance. That’s life. Get over it and keep going, right. I had someone post a really negative comment on LinkedIn about something I was doing. It’s like, “Yeah okay. Thanks for your comment.” Go away.

Jason Bay: Yeah. You wouldn’t get very far in sales or entrepreneurship if you cared if people said no to you. That was honestly, going door to door as a freshman in college really helped me get over my fear of rejection. I got had hundreds of doors slammed in my face over the course of the four years in college. It’s just like, it’s not a big deal. You just don’t take it personally.

Doug: Now you said you outsource this. You’ve got some VAs or assistants working with you. What do you think the biggest myth is that holds people back from doing what you’re doing?

Jason Bay: I think a couple of things. I really think that people thinking that cold calling and cold email is dead, I think is a huge myth. Now, I think that if you’re doing cold email or cold outreach or cold calling with no research prior to reaching out to that person and having no reason, yeah that’s not gonna work. But we have so many tools today that allow you to do the research up front that just because you’re calling someone that doesn’t know who you are, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a cold call anymore if you’ve done the research. I think getting over your fear of rejection and being like, “You know what, I’m not gonna reach out to someone unless I have a purpose for doing it,” is really where most of the people are in kind of resistance that I’ve seen. If you just have a reason for doing it, it’s gonna be easy to reach out to them, and if you really believe you can help them obviously and have a product or service that you really believe, don’t be afraid to reach out.

Doug: Now are there any special tools that you use when you’re prospecting, in terms of technology?

Jason Bay: Yeah, there’s a few.

Doug: Any that you want to share? I don’t want to take your secrets here and give them away.

Jason Bay: No. I don’t mind sharing that stuff, man. With LinkedIn, there’s a few things. There’s a tool called Grouply, that’s Group-L-Y. And what that allows you to do is scrape Facebook groups. So you can essentially put it to work on a Facebook group and it’ll scrape all the names and Facebook URLs and roles of the people, and then you can use that as a way to shortcut the process of connecting with them on LinkedIn. That’s a really cool tool. Another tool I just love right now is called Crystal. It’s C-R-Y-S-T-A-L. So, Crystal, it’s at CrystalKnows.com. It’s this Google Chrome extension. What it does is I can open up your LinkedIn profile, Doug. Let’s actually look at yours. I’m curious to see what it’ll say.

Doug: Oh no. I haven’t opened it. I invited you to do this.

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Jason Bay: A little tab will show up on the right, and it’ll say, “View personality.” And what it does is uses all the data that it scrapes from what you post on LinkedIn, other places online, and it especially works the more people that use this, the better it’s gonna get. But it shows a really basic disk profile on you. And it also coaches you on how to talk to people based on how they’re likely to want to be communicated with. For you, it says, “Doug is a decisive creative influencer, forward-thinking, ambitious, and spontaneous, with a natural aversion to a rigid structure. The tips are casual and express enthusiasm.” Email greetings, it says, “Use Hey Doug, instead of something really formal.”

Doug: That’s freaky.

Jason Bay: It says you like new ideas, that sort of thing. It may or may not be spot on, but everyone I’ve done this with, and including myself, it’s three-quarters of the way there enough to know certain things you may or may not say to someone based on how their communication preference is, but how accurate was that?

Doug: That’s pretty darn close.

Jason Bay: It’s creepy, right?

Doug: Yeah, it is very creepy. I’m thinking this is not good.

Jason Bay: So it’s good. It’s even got stuff in there … So when you install that Chrome extension, if I start writing an email to you, if your email address is the one associated with that account, it’ll actually help me, it’ll give me feedback on the email. So for example, if you were someone that didn’t like casual conversation, if I wrote, “Hey Doug,” in the email, it would correct it and say, “You probably shouldn’t do that because he doesn’t like casual communication. He’s a very formal person.” It’ll actually do some of that. That’s probably one of my favorite prospecting tools right now. So, Crystal Knows-

Doug: I-

Jason Bay: Oh, go ahead.

Doug: It’s called Crystal Knows. Yeah, and I’ve downloaded a tool that I’m using now called Clear Bit.

Jason Bay: Oh yeah. Clear Bit’s a great one.

Doug: Yeah, I mean it shows you all the contact information for the people that come into your inbox. I’m looking at my Gmail account now. You know, there’s your name, your picture. It’ll have your website, all your social media attachments, or links as well.

Jason Bay: Yeah, it’s super cool. Another tool I really like, there’s a lot of tools out there that scrape email information, but LeadIQ.com is a really good one that works within the LinkedIn workflow, so you could just be on LinkedIn with sales navigator or whatever. You click on the Lead IQ button, the Chrome extension, and it’ll just pull it up right off to the left, and it’ll allow you to do account based marketing. It’ll be like, “Hey, here’s a company. Do you want other people at this company?” And it’s really good for just account based marketing and sales. That’s a really cool tool to gather emails and contact information.

And then my favorite one, which happens to be the most expensive, is the tool we use to send cold email, is called Nova.AI. They’re a pretty new tool, but they’re the most robust from what I’ve seen from a cold email standpoint, and it works within Gmail, too. So it’s not like Mailshake or Close IO or any of those other ones where it operates outside of your email inbox, and you do everything outside of the email inbox. The workflow is set up specifically to work inside of your email, and it has AI and machine learning to help you personalize the emails, too. So, it’ll scrape the LinkedIn profile and help you personalize the first sentence of the email. It’s pretty cool.

Doug: There you go. That’s really slick. I mean, technology’s moving along at a super fast pace. Yeah, I think people right now are just struggling to use the basics.

Jason Bay: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I have dozens of tools to use. Those are probably my favorite though, the ones that I’d recommend.

Doug: Well it makes sense. I mean, you look at the way that people buy and sell. I had a guest on my podcast earlier and he was talking about people, why don’t you sell the way that I like to buy. There’s a tool that’ll give you a heads up on somebody’s style. It’s exactly like you said, you know how to reach out to them. So I’m gonna definitely give that one a try. I’m prospecting some guys now that I want to hire, so it’ll give me an idea if our personalities are compatible. So even on the hiring side, if somebody’s gonna be too formal and too structured and too rigid, unless I’m looking for a new accountant, that’s probably not gonna be a good fit.

Jason Bay: Yeah, it’s a great HR tool. Even employees, that’s really where the tool was built at the beginning, was to help people communicate better with their same company. It’s like 29 bucks a month or something. It’s pretty cheap for the power that it gives you.

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Doug: Now what are you most excited about today, as it relates to marketing? What do you see coming in the next six to 12 months?

Jason Bay: There’s some really cool things going on in the AI machine learning category when it comes to prospecting. I’ve been talking to some people that are helping create tools that will help you create the optimal sales cadence for reaching out to someone. So for example, based on the ideal client profile, these tools are gonna help you, between LinkedIn and cold email, be able to create the optimal sales cadence. So how often they might want to receive emails, what time this person typically opens up emails, etc. So it’s gonna be able to predict based on the person, the type of company they work for, but also based on their behavior on social platforms to be able to predict when the best time is to reach out to that person and what messaging. I don’t know if that’s within the next six to 12 months, but people are working on that right now. I’m really excited about that.

And then also, just being able to bridge the gap between the platforms to create more of an omnichannel feel to people that you’re prospecting with because one thing that really doesn’t work well together right now is LinkedIn and cold email. You really should be doing both and using a combination of ways to reach out to people. There isn’t a lot of tools that sync up and work with LinkedIn and then help it work together with an email. It’s all very manual right now. There’s some stuff there that I’m excited about, as well.

Doug: Well, one of the tools that I’ve been using on a couple projects for clients is a CRM tool called Zoho.

Jason Bay: Oh yeah. Yep.

Doug: And I like the social side of it, how it draws in all the information so not only can I hook up and connect on LinkedIn and Twitter, but I can actually see your last post. So when I pull up your profile, I can see the last things that you posted and put up there, so when we’re having a conversation, if I’m using that tool for a follow-up, I’ve got the most recent information sitting right in front of me. If you’re away on vacation or you posted something about your dog or your cat or your kid or whatever, it’s gonna be there.

Jason Bay: Yeah. See that stuff’s super cool. I’m looking forward to the day where it can automate like you can create a 10 or 15 step sequence and it’ll automatically … I was just talking to someone the other day that’s actually working on this solution right now, where it’ll automatically visit the person’s profile and then a couple days later, it’ll send them a customized connection request, like a merch field essentially, and then it’ll send them a template, an email with some personalization. Like it just happens all automatically. We’re not far from that. We’re getting pretty close to that point. And I don’t know how that’s gonna … because marketers, we tend to ruin everything. So that’ll probably ruin LinkedIn and cold email for everyone, but I’m looking forward to making it smarter but in a personalized way. In an un-spammy way.

That’s what I hate about growth hacking because I feel it’s like how to spam people at scale because if you do it at scale, then the numbers will work out. If we get more towards just putting messages in front of people that they’re likely gonna want to see, I like where that’s heading.

Doug: Well, it’s a more responsible way to run your business. For people who complain about, oh I get too much spam, too much this, stop doing it yourself before you complain about somebody else sending you an unsolicited email.

Jason Bay: Yeah.

Doug: What advice would you give our listeners who might be shy or not that willing to pull the trigger and take this next step? What would you suggest they do?

Jason Bay: I would say there’s a couple things. I think that if you go into the mindset of, I’m not gonna prospect to make a sale, I’m just here to prospect to start a conversation. That’s really big. Just the mentality and LinkedIn allows you to do this at scale, is start conversations with people who could do business with you. That’s it. Stop trying to sell people so early in the cycle. Just start conversations. I would say that’s the big thing. And then number two, I mean there’s so many great resources out there to help people with LinkedIn and prospecting. There’s so much good content out there. We have a newsletter on our site where I put out free information on this stuff. That’s a place to go. There are so many good blogs. All of the software out there for cold email, the Close.IOs and the outreach, all those companies, they have really good content on their website. There’s no excuse to not be doing this.

Doug: Well, and maybe the best advice is to take one tool and get good at it, or find someone like yourself and hire you to focus on one. So don’t be on 20 platforms. Get one, leverage it, have it making money, and when it’s constantly producing cash, then scale it up. And then when that one’s gone to the max, then move on and add another platform.

Jason Bay: Yeah. I firmly believe in that. I see so many people like, “Oh, we have a Facebook page and we have a Twitter page and we do LinkedIn and we do Instagram.” It’s like, well if you’re a B 2 B, honestly the best tool for you is gonna likely be LinkedIn if you’re selling services or high ticket products. Master LinkedIn and then move to the next thing.

Doug: I think you’re the first guy that I’ve talked to on my podcast so far that’s been a huge LinkedIn fan. I don’t think that people necessarily don’t like LinkedIn, but I totally agree with you. It’s been a huge win for me. I grew my LinkedIn profile more out of spite. I got tired of one particular guy in my town giving talks and being a LinkedIn expert when he had 1000 connections, so I just thought, “This is ridiculous. I’ve got to see what he’s doing. I’m gonna blow him up.” And then I set a goal to get to 20,000. I thought then maybe I could talk about how LinkedIn works as well.

Jason Bay: Yeah, yours is looking pretty impressive, man. 20,199 followers. Yeah, I just don’t know why people aren’t using LinkedIn. It baffles me. It has all the data that you would want to know before you reach out to someone, and it’s a platform where people have conversations willingly about business.

Doug: Well, maybe it’s not cool. I mean, it’s not the cool tool anymore.

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Jason Bay: It’s so weird. Yeah.

Doug: Well that’s fine. That’s more business for us. I’m happy at LinkedIn.

Jason Bay: Yeah.

Doug: Maybe we’ll just delete this episode. None of you use LinkedIn because Jason and I are making lots of money from our clients on LinkedIn.

Jason Bay: Yeah.

Doug: So where can people find you?

Jason Bay: BlissfulProspecting.com is the best place to find us. I would love to connect with anyone on LinkedIn, obviously. We also have a free newsletter there called Small Business Ninja, which I know you subscribe to, Doug.

Doug: I do, yes.

Jason Bay: Essentially what I do in that email is I take about five to 10 hours of just consuming content every week, you know the blogs that I was talking about, podcasts, etc., and I condense that down into a five to 10 minute thing that you can skim that’s gonna give you really actionable takeaways. I’ve been talking a lot about prospecting and sales lately. Instead of reading that book, you just read a quick review with actionable takeaways that I put on there. I recommend new apps, most of them are free, every week. And I’m consuming those YouTube videos, those podcasts on prospecting, on sales, and I’m just putting it into a format that takes like five to 10 minutes to consume. So that’s the best place if you just want to get a better idea of who I am and what we do at Blissful Prospecting and how we help people. That’s the best place to get started.
Yeah, go ahead.

Doug: That’s really cool. I appreciate you taking time today and sharing because I think you left a lot of information, a lot of meat on the bones here for people to take and pick away what they like. And Jason, he walks his talk. Lots of people get up and they’re experts on this and experts on that, and I often say, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” But I’ve seen him connect and we’ve had many conversations and it started social, and I’m sure at one point we’ll cross paths physically face-to-face at an event. So, I would recommend, check out his website, sign up for his newsletter. It’s bang on. It’s easy to digest. There’s nothing better than having three or four things you can take away and implement right away.

Thanks for being a great guest and sharing with us. Who is somebody that you think would be beneficial for our audience for me to have on as a guest?

Jason Bay: Well if you haven’t had him on yet, Josh [Fector 00:34:38] over at Banff Media would be a great guest. He’s got a really badass … I don’t think I’m supposed to use profanity on your podcast. I apologize for that. He’s got, well it’s in his name. It’s called Badass Marketers and Founders, is the name of the Facebook group. He’s really into the growth hacking, but more importantly, he runs a B to B business, so he’s really good about this prospecting stuff and got a lot of cool hacks, especially for LinkedIn. He’s a guy I would definitely try to get on.

Doug: Well, excellent. Hey, thanks so much listeners for tuning in. Make sure you check out our show notes. We’ll make sure they’re transcribed as always. We’ll have all of Jason’s contact information, links to his LinkedIn page, and his business Facebook page, his newsletter, and all the details, so make sure that you check it out while you’re there. Don’t be shy, subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on iTunes if you’re not doing that. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll catch you next week.

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Connect with Jason

Resources

Links to other podcast and or blog posts:

Real Marketing Real Fast Podcast – host Doug Morneau – Episode #42