Dave Lorenzo (00:00)
This your Daily Dose of Dave. I'm Dave Lorenzo on the Inside BS channel. Today we're talking about how to use LinkedIn the right way. And here at Exit Success Lab, we are teaching our sales team how to use LinkedIn for lead generation. most people, most people are doing this wrong. So in 2025, we're going to teach you how to do it the right way.

Here's my five step process, but before we get into the five step process, I gotta remind you that the basics of marketing still apply to LinkedIn. In marketing, you have message, you have audience, and you have delivery. You have to select the ideal target audience. You have to select the ideal clients.

and then you have to hit them with a message that's going to resonate with them. You want to enter the conversation that's going on in their mind. You want to enter the conversation that's taking place around the boardroom critical. And then the third thing you need to do is deliver that message in a way that will resonate with the audience. LinkedIn lends itself very well to that if you're in the B2B space.

So if you're targeting CEOs or business LinkedIn is the place for you, but you gotta do it the right way. Spamming people with direct messages is not a good strategy to target sophisticated B2B CEOs. So here's my five step strategy. And the way that I think about this strategy is,

We're going to go on offense on LinkedIn. We're not going to use LinkedIn for defensive purposes. Now, what I'm talking about is very common among lawyers, among accountants, among other professionals. They will post something once or twice a week. Some of them who are really active on the platform will post something every day. The problem with posting as your sole purpose on LinkedIn

is that only a very small circle of people on LinkedIn will ever see your posts. LinkedIn only sends your posts to about 5 to 10 % of the people who are your active and engaged followers. If those 5 to 10 % of people who are active and engaged followers connect with your content and they comment, a substantive comment, something that's more than two or three sentences, if they make a two or three sentence or more comment,

on your LinkedIn post, then that post will get elevated. If enough of that 10 % connect with it and engage with it, then that post will get elevated to the second tier. So maybe it gets extended out to 15 or 20%. And then if those people engage with it, then it gets extended out to maybe 40%. That's a defensive strategy. You're throwing and praying. You're throwing up a post and hoping that people see it. And you're doing it once or twice a week.

Maybe you're doing it every day. Maybe you're doing a LinkedIn live every day or you're up a video like this one every day and you're just hoping and praying that somebody sees it. That's a defensive post. You should be doing that. You should be posting content a couple of times a week at least. If you can post every day, great post every day. But you also have to go on offense. And here is my five step plan for going on offense on LinkedIn.

Step number one is to tailor your profile so that it appears that you are someone who has something of value to offer to your ideal client. If you're targeting manufacturers of widgets, you want to have your profile set up so that when people read it, they understand that you provide value to manufacturers of widgets.

And in a perfect world, they want to understand exactly what that value is. So if you're looking at that profile and you start at the headline, you start at the banner even at the top of the page, it should be all about widget manufacturing, valuable tools for widget manufacturing, strategies for widget manufacturing, three years of success in helping widget manufacturers go from zero to $100 million.

30 years of success in buying and selling widget manufacturing businesses. Your profile should be full of things that highlight your involved and add value to widget manufacturers. The number one mistake people make is they try to target folks outside of their core competency and their profile has no resonance with them. So target people who you can add value to.

and make sure your profile is clearly demonstrable of the value you're providing to those targeted people. That's the first step. The second step is to visit and comment on your target client's posts and comments first. So if you're on LinkedIn,

and you're serious about growing your business on LinkedIn, you have to have Sales Navigator. It's the number one tool in B2B sales for people who are targeting folks who are C-level, targeting senior executives in corporate America, and targeting business owners and entrepreneurs. So go into Sales Navigator. Put in what you're looking for. Widget manufacturing companies, right? If you're looking in a specific geographic area, Ohio, select that. There's about

two dozen different categories that you can refine your target audience in Sales Navigator. It's beautiful. You can narrow it down by geography. And you're also going to want to check off, have been active on LinkedIn in X number of days, whatever it says up there. You want somebody who's been active on LinkedIn within the last 60 days or at most 90 days. And that's who you're going to target first. You're going to put that in. It's going to spit out a bunch of leads.

You're going to take those leads and then you're going to go into step two as I said and you're going to go into each profile individually. You're going to make a list in Sales Navigator of all those profiles. You're to go into each profile individually. They've all been active on LinkedIn because you checked that slider off in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator search and You're going to comment on a post they put up or you're going to reply to a comment they've made on somebody else's post.

You're going to try to start a dialogue. You're going to try to engage with them. You're going to try to build a relationship. This is the thing, my friends. LinkedIn is the corporate equivalent of a networking event online. So in the B2B space, you wouldn't just walk up to someone at a networking event, grab them by the lapel and go, I can deliver this type of value. You need to do business with me. Give me your money now. You wouldn't say that. You wouldn't do that. So what you're going to do next is you're going to

engage with them, you're going to engage with their content, try and start a dialogue with them. You're going to keep track in Sales Navigator of how you're doing this. And then the third step that you're going to do is you're going to send them a connection request and you're going to reference the fact that you love their content and that you commented on their content in the note you write when you send them a connection request. Self-explanatory.

I don't need much more detail than that. Don't send connection requests without notes and don't send notes that are not personalized. All right? And then the next step, which is step four in the process, is you're going to go off of LinkedIn and you're going to email them and that's where you're going to ask for the appointment. You're not going to ask for the appointment on the LinkedIn platform. Can't stress this enough. Spammers try and go cold on the LinkedIn platform.

You're going to go off the LinkedIn platform and email them. You should be able to find their contact information from LinkedIn or there are a ton of other databases out there. We'll go into those in a future podcast where you can get these people's email addresses. You're going to email them. You're going to reference that. You really like the LinkedIn post they wrote on X date about X subject and you even commented on it. You're reaching out today to start a relationship with them.

You'd like to see if you can set an appointment to come by and solve this problem or talk about solving this problem. Ideally, you would ask them a couple of questions in the email and say, if you'd like me to help you answer these questions, I'd love to sit down with you and talk on the phone or on Zoom or in person, whichever you choose to do. So that's the fourth step. And then the fifth step is you're going to follow up that email with a phone call. Now,

In a perfect world, you'll have engaged with them online and had a conversation in the comments, and then you'll be emailing them afterwards, referencing that. In the email, they'll agree to the appointment, and you can just schedule the appointment. The phone call is always something that you need to put at the end. And then if this whole process doesn't lead to an appointment, you just go back and start from the beginning. And you go back to their profile, continue to comment, continue to try to engage them.

Send another email referencing that second comment, flattering them, asking them questions, trying to engage with them. All of these things are ways to develop relationships. That's how you build business on LinkedIn in 2025.