Connect and Sell on LinkedIn Without Spamming Your Audience

Outreach culture is in a fever pitch and everyone on LinkedIn knows there is value in using it as a sales tool, but what happens when outreach is lazy?  Getting the most out of connections on LinkedIn isn’t a spray and pray numbers game.  It’s about following a process.

Michal Bohanes has a unique three-step process to help sales professionals connect and sell effectively on LinkedIn.  Some might call this a relationship growth hack, but Michal take the mystery out of outreach and puts personal back into personalization.

In this episode find out how to:

• Use LinkedIn to build a steady stream of sales
• Connect with a 60%+
• Personalize outreach at scale
• Build relationships that compound your community

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: 0:00

Welcome to the summit. A podcast focused on bringing you the knowledge and insights for industry leaders. I’m your host Kyle Hamer, and I’m on a mission to help you exceed your potential. As a sales guy, turned marketer, I am passionate about building sustainable businesses. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 20 year career, say you won’t find an overnight growth scheme, a shortcut to success or way to hack yourself to the top. Nope. Success is the by-product of hard work, great relationships and deep understanding done over and over. We’re here to help you unlock that success with some secrets from other people. One conversation at a time.

Kyle Hamer: 0:33

Welcome back to another episode of the summit podcast. I’m your host Kyle Hamer today. I’m joined with by Michael Bohanes, Michael welcome to the show.

Michal Bohanes: 0:44

Thank you very much for having me come.

Kyle Hamer: 0:46

For those of you who don’t know, Michael, you’re going to want to know Michael Michael is well he’s published in Harvard business school as somebody who had a startup that people must read about. He’s currently the founder and CEO of content three 60, a online advertising agency and LinkedIn consultancy, and his experience is vast, broad and wide. Michael, thanks and welcome to the show.

Michal Bohanes: 1:15

Thank you very much, Kyle . I’m really excited to be joining you and , following I’m following some very illustrious guests. So I’m a little bit starstruck being here.

Kyle Hamer: 1:26

Well, we’re excited to have you now for, for folks listening in today, we’re going to talk about LinkedIn. what’s the right way to use LinkedIn to sell, to connect, to be a part. And Michael has a really unique strategy and principles that he works with folks on, but before we get into all of that, I want to let you know how I met Michael. I met Michael because he told me that my baby wasn’t ugly. And if you have any experience on LinkedIn, the odds are, if you have a title of manager, director, VP, or owner, there’s somebody reaching out to you with something that they wanted to sell. And I had made a post about the , well, I had made a post about my experience with somebody reaching out and Michael’s approach was just totally different. So Michael, you want to tell us a little bit about how you got so experienced in , in LinkedIn? Well, I think, first of all, thank you for the compliment. I just simply believe that you need to mirror real life conversation as much as possible. And the mistake that so many people make is that for some reason, t hey’re g et their brain twisted up when they’re online. And they think that they have to communicate in this weird way where I think the word pitch slap is an accurate description of this behavior, where people seem to feel like they only have one chance to get your attention. And they just blurt out everything at you in one go,

Michal Bohanes: 3:00

Instead of simply having a conversation. And I always like to compare it to a cocktail party. When you’re at a cocktail party, you would not just walk up to someone and say, hi there, I have a brochure, and this is all about our services. Would you like to buy? I mean, they would be running away from you it’s justifiably. So, and so you would add the cocktail party. You would just strike up a conversation based on something that they said or something that’s on their profile, just like you would at a cocktail party. You would there strike up a conversation about , t he, the entree or about the speech that you just heard or about their interesting tie that they’re wearing. Right? So it’s just has to be something contextual and you have to build a rapport before you can go into any other a rea. So that is k ind o f my main thing. And I , it feels to me strange that so few people seem to get it. And just as a little anecdote here, I’ve been on LinkedIn for 15 years, twice, has someone started a conversation with me that was along those lines. It’s a really rare thing. And if somebody gets it right, it’s a massive competitive advantage.

Kyle Hamer: 4:12

So you said you’ve been on for 15 years. Thanks. So give , give, give a little context. Cause I , you know, when we were talking before we got on the show, you talked a little bit about your , your story and how you were, you know what I think the word you used, where you were these guys with this funny German accent, trying to sell some things and you wanted to go a different direction, but your CEO said no . So give us a little bit of context of your story and , and what made you interested in LinkedIn because being on there 15 years and there’s a lot of people there, but there’s a reason that you came to this conclusion that there’s a right way to, to engage folks.

Michal Bohanes: 4:48

Yeah. I mean, I was on LinkedIn for 15 years, but in the first seven, eight, probably only like how most people were on it back then, which is, yeah, you’re just there. You sometimes connect with people, but you don’t really think much about it and what you do with it. But then when I kind of, as I became more senior in my roles, I consider it more and more important to build my network. And when I joined that company that you just mentioned, we were selling to , y ou k now, small to mid-sized companies in London. And one of, one of the best ways that I thought that would be to reach them would be, I ha d t his idea of content marketing just really reach out to them via an create relationship, build a relationship via content. And LinkedIn would have played along a strong part in that. And my CEO was very much against that. He was , y ou k now, German sales guy who just wanted to us to be literally walking around the city and like going into offices, just getting past security and just looking for the d ecision m aker, if you can imagine. And t hat’s tactic actually worked really well in Germany, in London, it was really difficult. T hey h ave much more, it’s much more difficult to get through to the d ecision m aker in this way. And so I thought instead of just walking around and literally just going, being like the proverbial, you know, v acuum cleaner salesman, I just thought th at w ouldn’t it be much better to actually build a relationship with them online via content, by serving them valuable content. And he rejected that. And despite, and because of my insistence on it, he then fired me. And then he had to withdraw from the UK market three months later because there was nothing going on. And so it was quite a satisfaction to me, I have to say because it was the first time I was fired. And that was a rather unpleasant experience. And it , I have to say, I’m not an angel that I followed his future fate with a certain dose of glee. The fact that he was himself fired and that my content marketing agency, w as doing very well. So that was a source of satisfaction to me.

Kyle Hamer: 6:59

Well, it it’s, it’s fun when those stories have , we’ll call them happy endings or at least, you know, fair outcomes. But you, you saw something in the market, you saw some things happening with LinkedIn, and then you coined this term pitch slap, where did pitch slap come from?

Michal Bohanes: 7:17

I have to admit, I did not coin it. I heard it somewhere, but it’s just a perfect description of what is happening. And it’s just where you, somebody connects with you on LinkedIn. And then all they do is to just blurt out their spiel that they have for you. 99% of the times, it’s through some automated tool that they’re using and they are doing the equivalent of what I said there at the cocktail party, right. It’s just way too , too, too early to be pitching them. And the main reason why it doesn’t work, there’s two reasons. Number one is that you haven’t built any rapport and you cannot sell someone something. If you don’t have like a shred of rapport, that’s the first thing. And the second is that you have not really analyzed or you have not really found out if there is a need on their side, right? I mean, there’s only 3% of your potential target market would even consider and are actually looking for a solution that you’re selling. That’s kind of like the general rule. So you are just alienating 97% of your potential target market by pitch slapping them. Isn’t it much better to just build a bit of a relationship there. And I know that there will be, and we will discuss that we will discuss scaling issues. How can you actually scale that? But I just believe that this is a really strong trend in the market. That’s why I also see quite a lot of nice inbound demand for what I do, because people are recognizing this, that the automation is something that really can hurt people in the long run. Yes, for the short term , you will get clients . If you spam a thousand people a day, you will get yourself some clients and in the short run, you will maybe win, but in the longterm , that’s not a recipe for success. And so I see this, there’s a strong trend towards this towards more real conversations,

Speaker 3: 9:10

Cannot hear you, Kyle,

Kyle Hamer: 9:15

As well as somebody who sees a countless pitch slaps on a daily basis. What I can tell you is , is that this is a real problem in the market. And I think it’s a real problem because there’s, there’s a part of cells and a part of process that, you know, like your, your German CEO, he’s like, you just go call you, make the call. And these are the techniques that you use. Nobody’s really broken it down to be able to do LinkedIn with elegance, with grace, or really with relationships in mind until you know, you and I chatted. So talk to me about your formula. Talk to me about your, or share with us, you know, kind of the , the steps or the process, the way you, you break down, what do you start with, how you analyze things and begin that relationship component. Sure.

Michal Bohanes: 10:01

So for our viewers on video, would it be a good idea? Could I share my screen and go ahead and look at that schematic that I come up with? Yeah .

Kyle Hamer: 10:08

And go ahead and do that. And then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll talk about what we’re seeing.

Michal Bohanes: 10:11

Exactly. Exactly. I will describe it for those who are only listening. Let me just quickly pull

Speaker 3: 10:16

That up. Okay.

Michal Bohanes: 10:19

And now we are sharing the screen.

Speaker 3: 10:22

Can you see it?

Michal Bohanes: 10:25

I can run the first , Oh , this I call it , for lack of a better term, cybernetic, social selling, cybernetic being g oal o riented, striving. And so this is the model y ou, and it’s really simple. If you really think about it first, you start with an opener and you have to build some rapport. You may have done that already via the opener, but just to be on the safe side, make sure you build some rapport. And then you explore that is the longest part, because t here, you need to find out if they are someone who is in the market for your product and then follows the c lose, you simply offer a call as soon as they indicate that they are indeed in the market for your service, which will be infrequently enough, but still you then offer them to jump on a quick 15 minute exploratory call. Okay. And of course you have to bear in mind that this only works for clients that are worth a certain customer lifetime value to you. So I usually painted a $2,000 below that is going to get really difficult to have this kind of personalized connection. And you may want to consider a different route, but for any customer lifetime value, $2,000, plus you can absolutely use this. All right . So let’s look at what actually happened there between , between you and I. So I started with the opener saying, Hey, Kyle, I see we’re both fans of Matthew seltzer and his content. And that is because I saw that you had, I believe commented on or liked one of his posts. Y eah, I had, I

Kyle Hamer: 11:54

Had commented on , Matthew seltzers post, which I think he said was, is today is the perfect kind of day for our cardigan, a cup of coffee and beating around or padding around the house in a pair of slippers.

Michal Bohanes: 12:05

Yeah. And I believe you commented something like that. You don’t wear slippers. And so I’ve , I’ve found that funny. I don’t do wear slippers either. So I just wrote to you from one non-slip era to another would be great to connect. And that was you then accepted a couple of minutes later, I believe. And then I said, and then we get into the report stage because arguably with this, I already had a level of rapport because I could imagine that that was, that, that kind of painted a smile on your face probably, but I wanted to be sure and just said, Hey, Kyle, great to be connected. I think your baby’s gorgeous. And that was a reference to that post that you mentioned where somebody had pitched slapped you. It was not really a pitch lab. They were just criticizing you for your, for your visual branding. And this just , they thought that they’re being edgy and , and cool, but it was just plainly rude. What they did. They just said, Hey, it just doesn’t look professional. You know? And it’s like, yeah, great rapport building there. And so I remarked on that saying, I think your baby is gorgeous because you had commented that the guy actually said that your baby was ugly. Right.

Kyle Hamer: 13:14

W well, and, and, and, you know, to, to his credit or to this person’s credit , I think there’s a language barrier and a communication barrier, but I , I mean, fundamentally when you’re building rapport and you have something to lean into like that, what I think you did here, that’s really, really powerful is as you are referencing, like you did a little bit of research. It wasn’t like, you just showed up and you’re like, Hey, Kyle fits in mice sales navigator feed. It was like, Oh, I go in whether it was looking at my content, there was something you were consuming and had done on LinkedIn. And you were referring to that. And that, that, you know, the, the, back-to-back the opener of seltzer to talking about a recent posts . Those were just , those were great. Yeah ,

Michal Bohanes: 14:03

No, you’ll have to take a little bit of time. Every single time you connect with someone or you see, Oh , somebody use somebody is potentially my target market. Do a little bit of research, you know, spend one, two minutes. You know, it’s not that you have to do a massive Google search about them. Right. But that kind of stuff. And in your case, that was a great opportunity. I don’t usually have that. You know, the opener here, they were great. And that’s why also we build rapport printed nicely, and that’s going to become irrelevant. That’s going to become relevant later on. I’ll show that to you. Why this there’s great level of rapport that we have then led to where it led to, but let me continue here. So you said, thanks, Michael. I said to then , congrats on growing to a team of three. You only started in March last year. That’s great. I painted, I drew this yellow just to show that I’m getting into exploration mode here already. I’m getting into phase three, but then we kind of, as it happens on LinkedIn, you then still comment on the previous thing. So we kind of are going back and forth between rapport and exploration. So you then say I’ve been railing on poor show up and throw up outbound on LinkedIn for years. And this one just left me going. You’re referencing the guy who was commenting on the baby. So to speak, you said, this one just left me going. And then you posted a funny gift . it’s a meme , but I don’t know who that is. Basically. Somebody just being very surprised. And so I said, ha ha . And then we get into the exploration stage where you then respond to my comment about growing to a team of three. You said, thanks. We’re growing at the pace I can predict and still maintain quality, which is a comment that I, a statement that I clicked like on. And then I again, went into rapport. You know, I still collected something. I still mentioned something about those pitch slaps , but then I asked, how have you grown referrals network? And then you said, you, again, still quickly dipped into rapport, but we are now firmly in exploration mode. And you said, relationships creating interesting educational content. And then being intentional when a project ends to ask for referrals and here comes the interesting thing. I normally go much longer in exploration mode because you so far, you have not indicated to me that you have a challenge that you could use my services for. And so that’s why I usually explore a little longer, you know, so, Oh, but is this sustainable? Can you keep growing like this? And so on, just so that I get you to the point where you say, well, yeah, I don’t really know what’s going to come beyond those existing relationships. And so once you said that, but we had policies I need to, I’m sorry. Maybe you can cut that out. Apologies. I need to mention, I need to close my in here. Okay. So I’ll start with, and then you say relationships creating interesting educational content and then being attention to when a project ends to ask for referrals. And now, because we have created this great level of rapport here already, at least I felt so. And you also can feel it when you see the speed of responses. When you see that somebody is responding immediately, which you were, that is a great indicator. You have good rapport because the person is really focusing on you now. And normally I would have stayed longer in exploration mode because I still have not established whether you are indeed in the market. Right. I normally would have asked something like, okay, but relationships and content. Is this something that you can scale or, you know, will, what is the plan for the next stage? What’s going to get you to the next level, but I didn’t need to do that here. I felt, because I thought that I could go straight into what I call the close . And I said, cool, I’ll be upfront and ask anything we could help you with in terms of we’re pretty good on outbound, starting friendly, non spammy conversations. So maybe that’s something new to add to your quiver. And then you said when the time is right, I might take you up on that. And so on, we should reconnect in January, February. And then you said, I appreciate your approach. Also, I’d like to interview you on my podcast. And so here we are. So, and this staged approach, it seems like pretty kind of elegant that it flows from one stage to the other, but it is actually, there is a system in the madness, right? So you start with the opener, you build rapport, you explore, and then you offer the close. So in your case, the only atypical thing was the clothes , because normally I wait for you to indicate that you have a problem, a need. And then I say, this may sound, this sounds like something I may be able to help with. Would you like to jump on a quick call? And so that model I can replicate, basically I can do that all day everyday . All right. So that’s,

Kyle Hamer: 18:46

That’s the, that’s the technique for creating connections for creating relationships, for getting openers, but how do you transition folks and do this at scale? Because if you’re busy connecting and doing these conversations, how then do you do it across multiple people to , to grow a business? How do you fight against the autism ?

Michal Bohanes: 19:10

So I am not a purist. As far as automation is concerned. I do believe that it does have space. You can do a little bit mainly at the very top end of the funnel. So to connect, I think it’s okay to use automation, but as soon as you get the connection established, I believe it’s really important that you, you just don’t want to anyone off. That is important to me because I value every single relationship that I have. And I don’t want to mess it up. So, and every single time you use automation to do messages, there’s always a chance you’re going to mess something up, like having an emoji in the first name, right. That many people have now, or that you just say something and they, whatever posted yesterday about that very same thing. I don’t know. You know, there’s always an opportunity that you have gotten something wrong. And so I don’t want to do that. And that’s why there it’s okay to copy and paste. So to your question, how do you scale that you can then after you’ve done this for a while , where you see certain patterns in how those conversations go to elements, how you can scale this. Number one, you extract the kind of the essence of the good conversations you see, which conversations have led to calls. And you create a script based on that. Just chunks of text , where you, that you have in on another screen that you have on another screen, as you are doing this, as you are a social selling and you then copy and paste them, right? And that’s why you have to have the presence. You cannot do this automated. So you adjust a couple of wordings here and there is as an if needed, but that can , that can save you a lot of time just having those text modules done. And also because they’re nice and polished, they’re going to get you better results. So that’s scaling tip. Number one, it’s getting tip. Number two is involve your junior team. This is then really something that can scale you considerably. And usually the best people on a junior team that can do this are people who are in customer support because they are used to chat conversations. They don’t have to be even senior as in, they don’t have to really have your level of expertise and so on, right? As long as they are relatively quick on their feet and are good in conversations, right? You can tell you when you go and once COVID is over and we can go back and have beers again, you see this who’s good in conversation. Who’s fun to be around with that is the person you want to have on this, right? Because they’re quick, they’re, they’re witty. And so on you, those kinds of people are the best to , to run these kinds of conversations. And so these two things where you are over time, training someone to log in as you on LinkedIn, and to have these conversations, and then you can define the cutoff point beyond which they say, all right , Kyle, I’m handing this one over to you. Seems really good. I’m a little bit stuck here. I don’t know what to say. Could you take over? And then you take someone over. Who’s like so far down in the funnel already, that all you have to do is a little bit of back and forth, and they will schedule a call with you. Or if your junior person is really good at this, they can essentially be the full-time scheduler of your , you know, in doing the prospecting, the outbound prospecting for you. And so this is a model that I’m right now implementing with two of my clients. I’m really excited about this because so far my clients have been mainly kind of preneurs and doing this themselves. Now I have small B2B companies where the CEO simply does not have the time to spend. And I’m really excited about this because now we are proving this out with some junior people that they can do it just as well. But it’s really important that initially you have a short phase where the CEO is also involved. It doesn’t have to necessarily have to do it, but he checks in he or she checks in on a regular basis, see that it’s working well. And that is how you scale. Well that’s okay .

Kyle Hamer: 23:04

So those first of all, the, the four steps in making a conversation, right? Your , your opener build rapport , what was the m ystery

Michal Bohanes: 23:14

In their exploration?

Kyle Hamer: 23:17

And then , the close those four steps are, I think they’re , they’re pieces that if I’m a sales person , I can understand, Oh, I need to work on my opener. If you’re not getting enough connections where your connections are going on answered, you’ve got to work on your opener. If you show up and you pitch slap somebody and you haven’t done a good enough job building rapport, right. If you’re not, if you’re not moving into exploration in a way where that’s maintaining a level of conversation, you know, Hey, I got to work on building my rapport, building my , my exploration, all of those particular elements that you talk about become really, really interesting when I look at applying that as a , as a single person, but it gets even more interesting when you talk about scaling up in the, the elements that you’re talking about, as it relates to building snippets, those small parts o f, of p olished texts that I can give to a junior person, or have somebody else do on my behalf, if I’m an organization that’s not a s olopreneur, or I’m say I’ve got a sales team o f, of five or 10, would you recommend that they do this at scale for them? Or does this really, this particular process work when you have really small one, two people teams and you’re a consultant or a doctor or a lawyer, is it, is it only made for a certain specialty or does it scale up to larger sales teams as well?

Michal Bohanes: 24:37

So the key thing to understand here is that the junior person is logged in as the CEO. And it still has to be at a level where the CEO is realistically talking with their prospects on LinkedIn. It would be rather strange if Jeff Bezos himself approached , it has to have a certain level of credibility. I would, I would surmise that. But the thing is in, in larger companies, you can then do this as you can log in as the director of sales or as the head of sales somewhere, you know, because people would much rather talk to somebody in a scene , more senior position than with the junior person. But I , this is something that is not my specialty. I do work with the larger corporates as well, but they usually ask me to train their team, my specialty, and kind of also personal passion is I like to work with small businesses. So solopreneurs and small B2B companies where it’s absolutely credible, that the CEO would be on LinkedIn and starting conversations. So I think, you know, beyond probably a hundred, 200 people, it becomes a bit unrealistic, but below that figure, I think it’s perfectly okay. That, especially if it’s a large, potentially important deal, that the CEO themselves would be starting these conversations.

Kyle Hamer: 26:03

Okay. That makes, I mean, that makes sense. When you, when you think about , the size a nd the intentionality, you know, I think there would be some credibility loss to find the CEO or logged in as the CEO or even the VP of sales for a four or 500 person company. And I’m out, you know, connecting with people on LinkedIn. Like don’t, you have better things to do other than trying to sell people on LinkedIn. So I do think that t here’s some benefit to that. However, it seems to me like this would also work if you were, if you were deploying it in a team selling environment where either your customer service or your customer success teams were reaching out on behalf of your enterprise in like an account-based marketing approach where it’s like, you know, your title might be director of sales for a Mayo, or you’re, you’re, you’re targeting a specific region an d a specific type of client couldn’t you have a junior team do this on your behalf as well, or , or really at that point, should it be personal? It , should it feel that continuity feel the same, even if, y ou know, even if I not using a junior person,

Michal Bohanes: 27:14

You mean, I mean, look, the reason why you would use junior people in the first place of course, to save time and they then log in as you, the more senior person, why would you do that with why should they log in as the senior person? It’s because you want the senior person to maximize their reach. So that then when they put out content, for example, that it has a wider reach, right? You ideally want to bundle the forces into one single person who then can have this audience of potentially 20, 30, 50,000 people. That is the goal, right? But there’s absolutely no reason. And to your point here, there’s no reason why you could not do and apply the same technique simply under your name. Let’s say you are a senior sales executive. You’re not high up in the , in the organization. You are just t he, you know, standard salesperson. And you simply because you kind of, you own your domain. You know, you’re going to be with the company for a long time and at least in that sector. So you want to grow your network, you expand your network every day, you add a half, a couple dozen people every day, and then you start conversations. That’s perfectly fine. It will simply have more oomph if they can do it as the more senior person, because people are more likely to respond to director than they are to a junior person. Okay. But still they can get good responses and can just build those relationships. So to your point, I really believe that it can absolutely work in this context as well. You just won’t have that benefit of everyone bundling the forces and, and focusing everything on that one person.

Kyle Hamer: 28:48

So there’s been, there’ve been techniques where there’ve been things that I’ve seen deployed on LinkedIn, where , somebody claims that t heir founder or t heir CTO, or t hey’re a, a senior person in an organization, but really they’re a sales development rep or a business development rep behind a false profile. And then when you go to book the appointment, or you go some t o set up, it was like, Oh, well, I was supposed to meet with Michael, but it’s actually Bobby, that’s g oing t o end up taking you through the conversation. D do you think that that would work or should work if I deployed this? And then i t w as like, well, the junior person we’re not going to do with the senior person, we’re just going to do it behind a fake profile and not our CEO, but we’re going to make up our CEO’s name. And w e’re never going to have a COO, but we’re going to make up one and that’s going to be the person that’s reaching out. Y eah. Does it work or d oes it, does t hat hurt?

Michal Bohanes: 29:42

Well, first of all, I am strongly opposed to lying at any stage during this whole process. And you may argue that logging in as the senior person is a form of lying. I do believe that this is , excusable. And, but this is, you know, where everybody draws their line individually, if you really wanted to be holier than the Pope. Yes. Then you should only have the individual SDRs do this kind of work. I think it’s perfectly legit that you then log in as long as you simply don’t. I would say the scenario that you outlined really sounds borderline unethical because they think that they are scheduling with someone t hey w ill be talking w ith with Michael, but then it’s B obby. And to kind of do this bait and switch i s not okay. So here’s what I would recommend that you do in this kind of scenario that you simply say, Hey, w w w e great. If we could have a conversation, would it be okay if I can book you in with one of my team who will take the call with you? Because people understand that, you know, how like exploration calls tend to not be done by the most senior people, and they will understand. So you simply say, would it be okay if one of my team picked up the phone with you and people say, sure, no problem. Here’s a scheduling link. Boom done. And then it is Bobby who was logged in all the time anyway, as Michael will be, you know , taking that call with them. So I think that’s a good middle ground kind of solution.

Kyle Hamer: 31:13

So, so talk to me about the success. I mean, we’ve talked about our , our particular exchange and how we ended up having this conversation, because for me personally, the, the experience that I had back to back one, I had a really bad experience with that person that showed up and basically said I wasn’t professional. And , and by the way, there are lots of rooms who improve. If the person was like, Hey, I think you could do X, Y, or Z better by all means. I’m not saying that I’m perfect or holier than the Pope, but in that particular scenario of this person did not recover. And then followed that right up with the conversation that I had with you, where, you know, we , we had this exchange that we talked through today. Talk to me about other other folks and how they’ve seen what it’s done for their business, what this means for , for their pipeline or for their, their ability to grow. You mentioned the 2000 plus, so, okay. So I follow this system. What does it actually mean for me? And what, what can I kind of expect?

Michal Bohanes: 32:09

Yeah. So I think there are, there are stages in LinkedIn client acquisition. And if you are, let’s take the example of a solopreneur and you are basically at ground zero, you , you basically have few clients. And those that come in are based on pure luck with this method, you can reliably get yourself to 10,000 a month to simply generate. And the breakdown I would say is something like if you start a hundred conversations each week, and that let’s say, just for sake of the argument, you will, you charging 5,000 us dollars as a per client. That’s your customer lifetime value. And you start a hundred conversations, then you will be able to get yourself two clients a month with this , right? So half a client each week, that means, of course you have, and that is you’re working. Part-time on this, you’re working maybe three hours a day on this, including you post content. Okay. So content and doing this to two to three hours a day, you should absolutely be able to get yourself to a $10,000 in revenue. And that is what we’re seeing with our clients. Just recently, we had our first , our, one of our clients use, she is currently the, the leader in the, in, on the l eader b oard. She got herself, her first client, exactly in this way, following this recipe into weeks after u p to starting to do this. And she is someone who is running essentially her coaching business as a side business. So she did not even have those, let’s say 15 hours a week. She’s having barely 10. And she, she got that because of this approach. But one thing that this approach has a huge impact on is p eople’s many coaches have an aversion to sell many s olo preneurs. They love their craft. They’re good at what they do, but selling is icky to them. And if you can say that selling is nothing other than you start conversations and have great conversations with people from end to end. And the great thing is that I have wonderful relationships with so many people now on LinkedIn, who probably will never become my clients, you know, but we just connected well with, I don’t know if you and I co are ever going to be working together, but here we are, we are on a podcast. And so, and I have plenty of that. There are very few people on LinkedIn who hate me. I would presume I hope so, at least, but if it happens, no big deal, but this is the great thing about it that this kind of approach as manual as it is upfront, only creates Goodwill. And that is this fascinating thing that I just I’m mesmerized that people don’t get it is that while you are doing the spamming and the pitch slapping, you are getting yourself maybes there , 0.5, 1% of clients, but the other 99% have a negative attitude towards you. And that’s going to compound over time. So I , it fascinates me that people never think about the downside. Okay. Back to your original question, sorry, I digressed you asked what are the results here? What you can see? Well, this method we can see with , with our clients, this gets you reliably to a 10 K a month level. Or if you are a business, this can like, let’s say a slightly larger B2B business, for example, yourself. This could, if you started to do this, I’m very confident that this would add one to two clients to you a month, maybe with a bit more of a delay. I could imagine you maybe have a longer sales cycle than the average coach, but you would be seeing the new clients coming in with this probably also one to two new clients a month. And then you can transition into the next stage, which gets you from cold approaches into, I call it the stage two is content and warm, where you now have established a presence on LinkedIn that allows you to, as you are publishing content and more and more people are seeing what you do. You get more inbound leads. And also you have done this, the snippets that we talked about. So because you becoming more efficient and becoming better at what you do, you’re going to convert more. And that’s where we see that people can get to two up to 20,000. So they convert out of the hundred that they approach. They convert one into becoming a client. So we see one new client per week means 20,000 a month. And beyond that, you then start in order to get to 40, 40,000. We see that you have to start a community like a Facebook group, where you, then you , you, you can operate a little bit more at scale and you then slowly start transitioning this to a junior team member. And that’s where you can then go to 50 K per month and pass that. But I, myself, I only work with people who want to get from that , lower level of like, l et’s say zero to 5 k. Currently, I’m going to get them reliably to 10 K and then to those 20 K, because that’s where we are right now. I have not yet. I’m kind of in phase three, we’re kind of scaling from 20 K to the 40 K. And so I have not perfected that myself. I’m building that right now, but all those two other phases, that’s where we help people to get. So these are the results. These are the results we’re seeing with our clients.

Kyle Hamer: 37:21

So it sounds to me like you’re in America, we call it eating your own dog food. So it’s, you’re, you’re, you’re doing it. You’re living it. And you’re building as you go, but you’re teaching people along.

Michal Bohanes: 37:31

Yeah, exactly. I mean, that’s, that’s the only way to do it. I think that’s the only way how you can maintain integrity. I could not claim that I could get you to whatever, 50 K a month with scaling, you know, via teams. If I haven’t done it myself,

Kyle Hamer: 37:47

Well, there’s a lot of people out there that haven’t done it themselves. The claimant. Yeah .

Michal Bohanes: 37:51

I know. But I just hope that my approach of honesty and candor will pay off in the long run. One would hope. Right? Yeah. So now

Kyle Hamer: 38:04

Look, I don’t want to give away all of your secret sauce. Cause there would need to be a reason why people would work with you, Michael. But

Michal Bohanes: 38:10

When you look at , I can’t give you all my secrets out , believe me.

Kyle Hamer: 38:13

So then how do you find it then? How do you find people to reach out, to, to connect to you? Can’t just build a list and start using sales navigator Dux-Soup and just say, Oh, you meet these parameters and reach your reach, reach, reach. How do you find people and identify who you should connect with on LinkedIn?

Michal Bohanes: 38:30

Okay, good. Well, I’m going to give away one of my best recipes and , that’s i s giving me 75% connection, acceptance rate in a very competitive space. A ll r ight. So what you do is that you find yourself, and this is how I found y ou c all you, find yourself. Somebody w ho’s like a local opinion leader, a local influencer in one particular niche who has good engagement. Then you look at all the people who have liked their content and you open them in separate tabs, and then you just s ent them the message. hi Kyle, I see we’re both fans of Joe Sc hmoe a nd his content would be great to connect. People are way more happy to connect over a shared passion in content th an o ver their demographic identity. It’s that, that was a real epiphany for me. And this is when also your, your conversations become way richer and more fun. If you connect with them over the content. I mean, what are you more passionate about, Kyle? Are you passionate about a topic that you just kind of had an exchange over, or the fact that you are a CEO of a marketing agency,

Kyle Hamer: 39:43

But it’s always going to be content. I mean, I think that that’s a, that’s a brilliant call-out that if nobody else listens to anything else in this podcast, just simply focusing on sharing somebody else’s passion as it relates around content or, or things that they’re showing interest in is a way better premise to connect on versus, Hey, I noticed you’re the founder of this and you have these common challenges that might be true. That might not be, but If we’re consuming somebody’s content, we might be targeting the same person. You need to find that out in an exploration. Or we could just talk about the things that really get us excited.

Michal Bohanes: 40:23

Exactly. And also I think people can, if they feel it intuitively, if something could have been automated, that’s why I always tell my students, my clients that make sure that any of your templated outreaches always contain some kind of an element that you can customize based on their profile so that they can instantly see, ah , he couldn’t have automated that because people sense that, and every single time you are listing one of, for example, their company name or their job title, they can sense that you are using an automated tool and they, the , the, your response rate goes down. The gutter. My response rate is currently at 60% of all the conversations that I start , I get 60% to respond to me. And that is because I connect with people over the content that they share. And that doesn’t mean that you have to be crazily passionate about every single thing that you post or you comment on, but it’s just like, again, think about the cocktail party. If the only thing you knew, the most awkward conversations at cocktail parties are, if the only thing you know about them is their job title. Hey, so , how is, being an HR manager at this company? You know, crickets, that’s terrible, but if there is content, if you saw, for example, that they laughed about a joke, as the speaker was speaking, you can then approach them and say, I saw you laughed at the joke. I wonder, I wonder what resonated with you and you have a conversation going, you know, because they will tell you, well, it’s because my wife told me the same thing yesterday, and it really reminded me of how our kids mi ddle u p . And then you get into a conversation suddenly and you have rapport. So it is the harder way. No doubt. It takes more time, but it builds relationships. And in the end, this is what we’re here to do. We can only influence people. We can only sell to them successfully. We can only change their lives, their companies, if we can sell to them. And we can only sell to them. If they like us as people, there’s just no other way around it, you need to be at least somewhat liked so that you can close a s ale. I cannot imagine this going otherwise.

Kyle Hamer: 42:37

Well, you know , marketing marketing has been saying for years that people only buy from people who they like know and trust. And I think what you’ve done is you’ve packaged it up nicely into a formula that people can follow on. LinkedIn, not only for their, if they’re a solopreneur or if they’re a coach or if they’re growing small business and there’s, there’s a practical way that they can scale up using, using your techniques. And I just think that that’s, that’s a part that a lot of folks miss when it comes to how they create experiences and how they create connections. Cause they’re, they’re thinking about it as well. It’s just another billboard. It’s not going to matter if they don’t respond. But to your point earlier, there’s a lot of collateral damage for your personal name, your brand, any of your outreach, when you show up and you pitch slap somebody, they will talk about how bad it hurt when you pitched , slap them , right. Or, or the thing that leaves a negative connotation in their , in their mind and on your brain. Yeah ,

Michal Bohanes: 43:39

Exactly. And the positive, the flip side of this is that there’s so much positive upside from not doing this. And I can tell you, if you look at my content right now, the majority of people who are regularly engaging with my stuff and are commenting on it, are instantly elevating it and giving it wider. Reach are people who I was on. I ended up on a sales call or, and then they, I mean, there’s a few clients who also like my stuff, but the majority are non-clients. And there’s also a lot of them who I just had a good conversation with like uni who we then did not end up on a sales call, but still because we had good rapport, they then elevate my content. So LinkedIn is really a long-term relationship builder, especially because of content. Now you, you and I will be watching out for each content because we know each other now, and then we will be elevating each other’s content. If you just do that, it compounds. It really does. So the downside of the pitch slapping is just so much longer-term because there’s opportunity cost in people not engaging on your content. Most definitely not so

Kyle Hamer: 44:52

Well. And yeah, I’ve been , I couldn’t, I couldn’t echo that any louder for people that are trying to figure out how to use LinkedIn, to get clients or to , to engage. It’s like, you cannot, you can’t just show up and post a link to your services page or to the, the latest event that you’re having. You’ve got to have content that people want to consume. You’ve got to be interesting. You know, the channel, your inner Doseck is commercial, be the most interesting person on LinkedIn so that people will, people will amplify it. They will, they will engage with it. And that will create experiences that you’re talking about, where if it’s good, it gets shared, it gets engaged with, and then that, that increases your reach. It’s definitely a long-term game.

Michal Bohanes: 45:34

And that’s why I also love your tagline and your mission that you have stated on LinkedIn, you reconciling , how did you exactly phrase it reconciling differences between sales and marketing, because a good person w ho’s doing this well on LinkedIn is doing this perfect m ashup of sales and marketing because essentially t he, the c onversations that we talked about, this whole c ybernetic social selling framework that I showed you is sales, of course, but then you are blending it with marketing because you are putting out good quality content. A nd then as you put out, the marketing people engage with it. And those engaged people are now much warmer. So you add them, you start a conversation, it’s this perfect constant intertwining of sales and marketing. That is exactly along the lines of what you are talking about, Kyle.

Kyle Hamer: 46:24

Well, and look, I, we could spend another week has been another several hours talking about the dance between sales and marketing. And I think what I say is, is ending the rivalry between sales and marketing for busy CEOs, because there really is this rivalry of , well, the content I posted is what brought you that that sale and sales is saying, well, what I did was I closed the deal that you gave me. They didn’t even know who we were. There’s really a beautiful dance in those two. And marketers are going to have to learn how to s ale and salespeople are g oing t o have to learn how to market b ecause in this new world they’re required f or, for success on either side.

Michal Bohanes: 46:58

Yeah , exactly. I couldn’t have phrased it better. Love it.

Kyle Hamer: 47:02

Well , I think that’s a great, I think that’s a great way for us to kind of end today. But before we, before we fully wrap up, if somebody wants to get ahold of you, if somebody really, really interested in this LinkedIn , selling or getting more information, Michael, how do they get ahold of you?

Michal Bohanes: 47:16

Best ways to go on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn almost every day. Saturday is my day off with the family. But other than that, I’m always on LinkedIn, my cabanas , Michael, without any B O H N. He is easy to find pretty unique name. That’s great.

Kyle Hamer: 47:30

And if they , what kind of things do a 32nd commercial on your business? I mean, the , the stuff that you guys serve. Yeah. So

Michal Bohanes: 47:38

We have a course in group coaching program where we help you learn and in-house your LinkedIn client acquisition. So you will learn to connect with people on LinkedIn to talk to them naturally, to get them on the phone and sell them your service. And we do this as a year long course and group coaching program. You can be in it for up to a year, but you will get results much, much faster, but we give you the opportunity to stay in for a year.

Kyle Hamer: 48:10

That’s great. Well, thank you so much for being , being on the show and being super generous with all of the information, man, t here, t here folks that have shared tips and tricks, but the way you broke it down, the way that you’ve shared, I think this has just been excellent for our listeners. So thank you, Michael, for being here.

Michal Bohanes: 48:24

Thank you so much, Carla , for giving me the opportunity. Always great to talk to you.

Kyle Hamer: 48:28

Likewise, for those of you who are listening, make sure you like following subscribe, share if you’re so inclined, but this one has been a juicy one. So I think you’re definitely going to want to share it out. I’ve been your host, Kyle Hemer and until next week you’ve been listening to some podcasts , stay true, stay you and keep growing.