Webinar: Defining Your Difference: Finding Your Genuine Edge to Shorten Your Sales Cycle

Join 4B Marketing’s Director of Strategy, Sam Grise, and “The Tech Sales Coach,” Dave Elsner, for an insightful webinar that promises to highlight your uniqueness and leverage it for a swifter sales cycle.

Expect to learn:

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

First off, I want to thank everybody for joining. My name is Sam Grise. I’m the director of strategy with 4B Marketing. And today with me we have Dave Elsner joining us for a great discussion around defining your difference. I think that this is a major topic in the space today in the tech ecosystem, especially, really from a brand perspective, but also from an individualistic level. And that’s one of the reasons why we love to have Dave on the call today to chat through this. But I think that this is a foundational pillar for anything that you’re doing, defining your difference of what you’re bringing to the marketplace. Whether it’s coaching baseball, or it’s selling something or it’s running a business, you need to have some kind of differentiator, and really understanding that to the marketplace is what’s really foundational, so that your sales team can go have success, your product can have success in the marketplace, and it really needs to start at the beginning. But before we dive in too deep, I want to go through some quick introductions here of who we have on the call today. Dave, why don’t you go first? Really excited for the discussion.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Sure. Dave Elsner. Hey, I was in tech sales for a 30 year career and did just about every job from BDR all the way up to executive vice president of sales. I was privileged along the way to work with three startups. The first one we took from zero to 300 million, the second 10 to 600 million, and then the third one that I’m most proud of, from zero to 800 million. And so I learned a lot of great growth strategies along the way. You know, how to build and how to build not only your company, but personal brand. And in 2016, I broke out and started my sales training and consulting business. I work as a fractional leader for several tech companies, helping them with their growth strategies. And then I’ve got three or four different sales training programs specifically for the tech industry.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Awesome. Awesome. My name is Sam Grise. I’m the director of strategy with 4B Marketing. We’re a business outcomes focused marketing agency. And so really what that means is we work with organizations all over the space, especially in the tech ecosystem. Whether it’s the OEM’s, it’s the resellers, the MSP’s really a big piece of that is defining your difference, because that is, as I mentioned, a foundational pillar. But also, what are those outcomes that we’re going to drive? We need to have that in place to be able to drive towards those outcomes. When I say outcomes, a lot of times in the capitalistic society, it comes back to those financial drivers, revenue, cost, risk, cash flow and asset utilization. And really we build a strategy around that. But this is really a foundational piece that we start all of our discussions off with, really is what is that difference? What makes you different in the marketplace? And so really where this starts is building your brand. 

And when we think about it from a marketing perspective, we think of what is your brand. And when we say, what is your brand? We aren’t saying, hey, I’m Cisco Systems, we’re saying, we know Cisco Systems is out there doing network telephony. So on security, all of those pieces. But what is the why behind why you’re doing this? Not so much the how you do it or what you do, but what is the why. And when we think about this, we think about it from a holistic brand perspective, but a big piece of it comes down to the individuals within the organization as well. And I know that my career was in the space as a seller in the space, and so I needed to build my own personal brand as well. And you can see, like I mentioned, I’m a Cubs fan, lovable losers, right? Hopefully they have a better season this year. But that’s a big piece of me personally that I like to convey to people to understand a little bit more about me individually and how that plays into the organizations that I work for and what that mission critical value statement, if you will, that we’re pushing out into the marketplace. And Dave, I’d love to hear your perspective on building a brand, right. Both from the side of the businesses that you took from zero to 800 million, but then also from an individualistic perspective, because the individuals are the sellers. They’re the ones talking to the marketplace and they need to have their own brand as well.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah, yeah. I think when it comes to building a company, you’ve got to start out with a niche, what you can be an expert at and who you can serve best in a niche environment. For instance, the last business I was involved with, we were really good at phone systems and really good at contact centers. And so we built an engineering ecosystem around that that demonstrated our expertise in those two competencies from there. And that became our brand, that we were the best in the business when it came to that stuff. 

But from there, we were then able to start launching additional technologies like LAN and WAN technologies and wifi and additional collaboration tools. And then we were able to grow up market, down market and into vertical markets. But each time we were very specific. For instance, when we launched public sector. We did that because we understood that there’s a special language working in public sector and a special sales motion or sales process. They don’t buy like everybody else does. And so we got into the public sector. Our first job was educating the community not only on our brand, but on how they can best take advantage of technology. And then we did the same thing with healthcare, same thing with enterprise accounts and so on. From a personal perspective, I really look at, what am I an expert at? And in my case, I’m an expert at tech sales. And one of the things I got a lot of pleasure out of throughout my career was mentoring salespeople. And so I got very specific and said, okay, I’m going to do sales training in the tech industry and help tech companies grow because it leans on the expertise that I built in the past. And it’s never been both in the business and personal. It’s never been a shotgun approach where I’m trying to capture everybody. I’m very specific in my targeted approach to the people that I know. I can solve their problems.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

I love that. I love that. And one piece that I want to call out that you mentioned that, I know our Director of Marketing, Tyler Jacobson, he got a big smile on his face, was the niche. We always say riches are in the niches. And when you’re building a brand or your personal brand, you need to understand what that niche is that you’re going to go attack. It’s difficult to do that shotgun approach to say, hey, we’re going to be a billion dollar company. We’re going to go after everything. Well, if you go after everything, you aren’t taking care of the little things and you aren’t being very specific. And one of the things that we talk about is personalization, which really goes into the next topic. 

And the next touch point is the personalization side of it. Whether you’re a brand going into these different marketplaces like you mentioned, such as healthcare, financial services, utilities, SLED, Fed, everybody has a different language and you need to be able to understand what that language is and that’s a part of your brand to be able to communicate that. I mean, we think about the federal space, right? It’s mission services or mission outcomes, right? It’s not business outcomes, right? They aren’t concerned about necessarily driving revenue. They’re concerned about those mission outcomes. What are we doing for the communities? What are we doing for the United States, right? That’s a completely different talk track. And even in the government space, they call it Govern-ees. Because it’s a whole different language that you’re speaking with these individuals. And so personalization of your brand to the marketplace that you’re speaking with is so important because when somebody comes by your website or somebody’s looking at your webinar or your podcast or so on, you want to be speaking to them. And it goes to that unique value proposition at the very beginning of building your brand so that you can have those proper conversations. And when you go into the individualistic level, the personalization is so huge as well. Right? The journey has changed from a buyer cycle over the past three years, so much more than it did ten years ago just because of COVID. 

And the touch points have changed. It used to be seven touch points to get the end goal, which was a meeting. Now it’s 20 touch points, 28 touch points to be able to get there with a wide variety of items, such as LinkedIn, which you’re an expert on, which we’ll talk about advertising strategy, email, newsletters, events, so on to get to that end goal, that’s just a meeting. So we’d love to hear your thoughts as well on the personalization side of the house.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah, I mean, first of all, you’re spot on. Sales has changed quite a bit because the buyers have changed and we’ve all heard it. They have access to so much information that when they identify a problem, they do their own research and then they go shopping. And what you want to be is a person that they recognize that they need to shop. And with that, you need to have a brand out there via LinkedIn, via a website, like you said, via email marketing and or email. But the end goal is to develop your brand enough that when they say “I need sales training,” they remember, Dave Elsner does sales training and that I’ll be one of those two or three choices that creates inbound for me from my community. And my community comes from personalization. It’s from networking primarily on LinkedIn. I’ve built a network of about 20,000 people in my ICP that sees my content, but more importantly, I engage with their content and try and be insightful so that my brand is constantly in front of them. And often conversations start, which then break out into instant messaging. And that may not be an opportunity every time. It may be me just giving advice, but at least my brand is there and I’m now personally connected to this person that I never knew before. And I’m having conversations about their problems and how I can help. And it’s really pretty phenomenal. I mean, I’ll show you later. My messaging and my engagement on LinkedIn. It’s a big part of my daily job because that’s where I get all of my business. So personalized messaging to these people is really important as well. I do a good study of somebody’s profile to find out what they’re all about, what problems they might have before I have a conversation with them. And I think they respect the fact that I took the time to learn about them and their business and be more personalized in my approach.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Definitely. And there’s two things that you mentioned there that I absolutely love. One is inbound. Who doesn’t love inbound as a salesperson? Right. It is the best thing in the world to have an inbound lead come in. And when you have an inbound lead come in because you’re an expert in that field and you’re sharing content on LinkedIn, and. And they go, hey, Dave does this or Sam does this. Right? I mean, I personally had it happen to me this week, and I was like, oh, that is the greatest feeling in the world because you’re providing value. And as a salesperson, that’s the number one thing that we want to do. Of course we want to help the business, and of course we want to land a contract. But the value side of it is what we always want to provide upfront. And having that personalization upfront of, whether it’s an outbound outreach or your profile on LinkedIn, to be able to show your expertise in that field, you get to hit that on two fronts. 

You get the inbound, which is great, but then also you’re providing value upfront, which is the best thing about being a salesperson, is being able to provide that value. So those were the two pieces that I wanted to touch on that you mentioned that I absolutely love. Again, the inbound side. Of course, we want more of those things. Really, the next piece that I wanted to touch on is the stakes are low here. You don’t have to do this to be successful, but if you do it, the reward is super, super high. And one of the examples that I like to touch on is when we look at a holistic brand and we’re talking about the tech space, specifically, how many companies are out there that say, hey, we’ve got the best engineers. That’s their differentiated statement. I’ve got the best engineers. We’ve got world class customer service. Well, everybody’s saying that. What is truly that differentiator? Yeah, you’ve got great customer service. You’ve got great engineers, but so does your competitor down the street. It’s all plastered over their website. What is truly the why that makes you different? It could be the fact that you have great engineers, but why? What is the process that’s different that’s going to be differentiated to the marketplace, especially when we look at the social selling side of the house, because that’s changed the module, if you will. 

From a sales perspective, having that expertise in that field and pushing that out, there can truly be a differentiator. I think that a lot of salespeople look at LinkedIn from a perspective of, hey, I can gather information about this prospect that I’m talking to and I can collect information and try to have a conversation with them. But very few have taken this to the point of, hey, I’m going to go be an expert in this field and there’s somebody that I’d love to call out and he doesn’t even know this, but I follow him and I’ve been friends with him for a long time and his name is Jacob Karp. He is somebody that absolutely has taken this by storm from a perspective of, hey, I’m going to build my own brand. And he’s worked for great companies and still works for great companies, but hes getting inbound leads now for conversations and he’s built a process around building his own brand for those companies that he’s working for. And he’s an expert in the field now his business. And he talks about his sales journey personally of being 28 years old, first software job, trying to figure out how to get into accounts and really investing into himself for this process and the difference that its made. But I’d love to hear your perspective on this as well, Dave.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah, first of all, let me just comment on the inbound. I have not done any outbound marketing in about three and a half years because of the brand that I established early on. You know, it started with referral based networking. I went to all of the people that I worked with in the past to let them know about my new business venture. And from there you develop this brand that you get this word of mouth going within that referral based networking. And so what I do is I educate people as much as possible on LinkedIn, about ways that they can improve in sales, in job searching, what have you to draw them to me, not as a person that’s asking for something, as a person that’s giving something to the community, which I think then the reward to your point is very high because I’m not sitting here doing cold calling and cold emailing and searching for people in ways that don’t quite honestly work anymore. And so inbound is where it’s all about. And then the reward becomes high as a result of that. And what you built, definitely.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

And something that you just mentioned to me that I’d want to touch on is your personal brand was built before you had great experience with your referral network. But this personal brand started way before the past three years of the tech sales coach and building this business. It started before that. How you interacted with people, the education you were providing them, the value you were bringing up front, and then it’s progressively gone to that. This isn’t something that you can just flip a switch on. It’s not something that’s going to happen today, but you need to start putting those steps in place to be able to get to that point. Right. And so for you, the success that you saw was the groundwork that you laid before you probably even knew that you were laying that groundwork. Right. That helped build to that point.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah. And it doesn’t happen overnight. I mean, when I launched, it was four months before I got my first inbound. Yeah, I got some good opportunities because of my network along the way, you know, to get things going. But the first person that ever reached out to me and said, “Hey, I’ve got a problem. Can you help?” was four months into being very rigorous. Rigorous with social selling every day.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Definitely. Definitely. And when we take it to a higher level from a brand perspective, it’s the same mentality. It’s providing value, it’s providing education. We talked about the buyer journey changing, but how are you meeting those buyers that are doing their own education in the marketplace? Is it Google searches? Are they going to Reddit threads? What are they searching on? That’s really where the marketing side comes in to provide that value. One of the things that we always talk about as well is you’re building your own brand or you’re building your business’s brand. But a lot of times we lose sight of really what we’re trying to do for the marketplace. And we look at the website and the website says, I’m the greatest engineer, I’m the greatest technology. We do this, we do this, we do this, we do this. And then we forget about the fact that we’re here to help you, we’re here to help your business, and how are we speaking in their language and how do we get to them to show this is the outcome that we’re driving with these technologies? And so it’s interesting to hear the personalized side of it, individual seller side of it, as well as the bigger brand side of it, because they need to work in conjunction. If you have one from a tech perspective that’s running this way and then all your salespeople are running this way, there’s a little bit of a mismatch there. So how do you get both of them working in the same exact direction? And it really is defining that difference holistically throughout the whole entire organization.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

And you talk about personal brand. I’ve seen with many companies, the people that develop a personal brand are outpacing the company brand. What I mean by that is you see company pages with 2000 followers, and then you’ve got a salesperson who’s developed a brand as an expert that has 10,000 followers. And so they’re amplifying the company brand even more so than the company itself. And then if you get all of those people on board in that company, all of the salespeople, social selling, you’re creating this inbound machine for your company that it’s a salesperson’s dream if done right.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Absolutely. Absolutely. The reward is so high. I mean, it’s there for the taking and the effort needs to be put in, but it’s there for the taking and a lot of people aren’t doing it. So how do you get through this process and get this started? And really I’d love to pass it over to you now to show us how, right, how to build that personal brand. Let’s take a look at some LinkedIn profiles and start to work through that. So I’m going to stop sharing my screen and I’ll let you share your screen, but would love to hear from your perspective and kind of walk through that.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

All right, let me get the share screen going. There we go. All right, so I thought we would start with my profile. By the way, you see how active my messaging is. It’s kind of non-stop. I hope it doesn’t continue to pop up. 

So what happens when buyers do research is they’re doing keyword research in the search bar here on LinkedIn and or they already have a network connection with you and they’re familiar with you and or an outbound message goes, and I can almost guarantee they’re going to look at your profile and they’re going to look at your profile before they talk to you because they want proof about what you do and how you can help. And so if your profile doesn’t represent the value that you offer, they’re not going to find you. And so the first thing when you look at my profile page is it is loaded with keywords, just like SEO. And so if somebody searches sales coach or somebody searches engineering, sales training or sales methods, my profile is going to be offered up. I also make sure that all of that stuff is represented in my banner. 

And what typically happens is somebody comes to your profile and they look at this area for 5 to 10 seconds to get a feel for what you do. And I believe that this page gives them a good feel for what I do, that I can help them grow and I have all of these things that I can help them do. I also turn on providing services and a lot of people don’t have that turned on. It’s meant so that somebody can click on it and request your services. But for the typical user out there, it creates more keywords. And so I’ve got nine more keywords that if somebody goes to the search bar and looks for somebody that can help them with brand marketing or demand generation, my profile will then be offered up as a solution. 

I’ve got my featured content turned on and the reason I do that is because it’s a scroll stopper. People come and they look at this for 5 to 10, then they start scrolling. When they see pictures, they stop and they stop and look at the pictures for about 3 seconds. So this is another opportunity to give them a brand impression. And you see I’ve got my different training programs here that they can click on to learn more about. What I do next is your activity section. And your activity can, you can default it to either posts, videos, comments, images or events that you’ve done and you can edit that with that pencil right here. I have mine set to video because I do a lot of video presentations and video training and then I use those excerpts to basically publicize my business. But again, it’s always giving free resources and free information. I love that.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

And I just want to interrupt really quick, I apologize. The free information, the value that you’re providing upfront, and it’s similar to a company LinkedIn page, but the majority of LinkedIn is on that personal level. So even on a company LinkedIn page, you need to have this information to provide value upfront, right? If somebody comes across your page. So even though we’re talking about the individualistic level from a social selling perspective, still from a LinkedIn side of the house, as a business, you want to have this information out there so that people are getting that value upfront of what we do, how we serve them, how we provide services to, in your case, grow their business.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yep. So the next important section, obviously, is your about section. And most people make this look like a resume. I’m okay with you maybe in the bottom of the section commenting on your accomplishments from your career because that’s part of your personal brand. But really this About section, you want them to know how you’re going to help them and what your offers are. That is, if you’re not looking for a job, if you are looking for a job, then, then maybe you want to put all your accomplishments there. But if you’re here about personal brand, you see, I’ve got all of my offers built out here and that’s because this is where people go to find out about you. And then finally, you know, down here in the experience section, I’ve got that all filled out for every job that I’m working, licenses and certifications, all of my skills are turned on. And then I get recommendations for my customers on a regular basis. And then I also make sure that I follow the appropriate groups. But one thing I want to definitely point out to you is you notice on my page, you can book an appointment with me. And as you scroll down that book, an appointment appears up here. And then if you go look at any of my posts, and here’s my post about us redefining, you’ll notice that right up here in my headline, they have another opportunity to book an appointment with me. And so every post that I put up gives the potential buyer a way to connect with me.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Man, I just learned something new. There’s something new with the Book an Appointment. And it’s funny because that aligns to the overall marketing approach as well. And something that we talk about from a business perspective is, you know, how many Call to Actions are you giving those people that are coming across your website and what do they look like? Right. We want it to be a seamless process and that allows for that seamless journey of a potential prospect, a potential partner, and so on to meet with you because you’re allowing them a spot to communicate to you in everything that you’re doing, right?

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah, and a lot of people don’t even have their contact info all set up. You know, you can put four different websites, like my YouTube, my company page. You know, I’ve got my calendly for my address so they can go straight to my calendar to book time. It’s kind of baffling that people use their Gmail account when what they’re trying to do is promote their business. 

And so let me just show you a couple other examples of people that I have worked with in the past. This is Michelle Harvell. She works for a very large security company called Trellix. And one of the things you’ll notice is quickly you can see what she does, and her headline doesn’t scream, I’m a salesperson. It says she helps people prevent loss. What that does is causes curiosity for them to start scrolling that she is into data recovery, cybersecurity. But then we’ve got this. And Michelle not only takes the time to educate people, but she allows people into her life. You see that there’s a video here of her and her son doing some work on the computer together. And as a result, I’ve seen Michelle go from less than 500 connections to 1000 in a very short amount of time. You notice she has all her videos turned on. You notice her About section is about the company itself. She’s up in Canada. She went ahead and explained more about the business here. She’s got her volunteering or certifications or skills and recent recommendations. 

And then another one that isn’t one of my customers that I’m always impressed with is this gentleman’s name is JR Butler, and he helps athletes, professional athletes, move into the business world when they’re ready to retire. It’s called the Shift Group. And he has, in four short years, turned this into a multimillion dollar agency. He quickly gets right to the point, I get athletes and veterans dialed in to be sales professionals. He’s posting content daily. And if you look at his posts, not only is he posting daily, but when I look at his comments, he’s super engaged with people. And primarily the people he engages with are his prospects. And if there’s one thing I would leave you with, developing a brand on LinkedIn, your profile is important. Your content’s important to educate and give people information that helps them. But engagement is where it really is at. By commenting on other people’s posts, they see that as you adding value to them in their networking. And you often get replies and separate messages as a result. As I scroll down here, you can see how many people have commented on this one post that he put up, but he’s always replying to that post. So this guy just says, two legendary coaches, and he replies almost every single time. And so my guess is JR spends more time engaging than he does on content. And as a result, it’s helped him build a brand that draws people to him. And then just one final note. When you make a comment on a second degree they’re probably going to look at your profile and that’s why if you go back to, you need a profile that shows all your value and why. Extremely important that is. So I’m going to minimize this. Sam, any other questions before I share some of the assets?

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Yeah, I just had a couple of questions for you. You mentioned some priorities as far as what’s going to be the most effective commenting and being engaging in that content from a process perspective. As somebody’s getting started in this first time, stakes are low, rewards high. What’s the first place to start? Is it the profile build because people are commenting and coming back to you? You may have this coming up on the plan, if you will, but what’s that first thing that I should start with and then what’s number two?

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah, there’s a couple different courses. I’m involved with two other guys where we train individual solopreneurs 1 hour every 2 weeks and we teach them this method. I also teach this method to companies. And so it’s six steps to being a social seller. It starts with understanding the modern buyer and how they like to be approached. I’m sure you guys have all got the connecting pitch where you get a connection request and the minute you click accept, you’re getting a message that says, can I get 15 minutes of your time? That’s a big no no.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Yeah, we call that the pitch slap.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yes.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Laughed across the face with it immediately. And then the next thing you know, two days later you get another one. Two days later you get another one and you’re like, I don’t even know who you are, really? You know?

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah. So step number one is understanding how to approach the modern buyer so you don’t burn your brand. Step number two is demonstrating your expertise, which is to update your profile. Step number three is how to search for your ideal client and engage with their content to create enough curiosity for them to come look at your profile. Then it’s what kind of content to demonstrate you’re a subject matter expert. Then step five is connect. And it’s all, I mean, total opposite of the pitch slap. What we want to do is demonstrate our expertise, engage with people, show them we’re an expert. And when they engage back, that’s when we send a connection request. And a lot of people don’t have the patience for this. Like I set up 20 people that I want to go after and I look at their profile and I start engaging with their content and they get impatient and they go ahead and send that connection request. You really want reciprocal engagement back. You want them to look at your profile. You want them to like a comment that you made, you want some kind of trigger or open the door to then send that connection request and then, yeah.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

I’ve got a question on that. So I’ve had personally, people look at my LinkedIn profile all the time. Not to brag all the time, but a lot of times people have their profile hidden, if you will. It says X, Y and Z Company X. It doesn’t have their name from our perspective, or somebody building out their LinkedIn profile and so on. Do you recommend them being hidden? Should it be their full name? Do you have a preference on that, just out of curiosity?

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

I mean, I would never accept somebody that has that stuff hidden. If I don’t know who you are or how you can help me or how we can work together, why would I want to put you in a networking relationship with me? And you also bring up something else really important, and that is when you send a message to somebody, they see this headline. So when I send a connection request to somebody, it says, Dave Elsner wants to connect, and they see the beginning of your headline. So say I’m a BDR and can help you get 1000 new contracts in the next two years, I’m probably going to say no, because I know you’re going to sell me something. So another reason why that headline is so important. And again, I wait for triggers. It’s all about the triggers themselves. Let me minimize this. Sorry, guys. And then we get into rhythm. And my rhythm for LinkedIn is I do 15 minutes of engagement before I post any content. So I engage. And the reason I do that is it turns the algorithm on. If I find that Sam posted something this morning and I write a comment on it when I post my content, the algorithm is probably going to share that with Sam because I was recently interacting with them. So I do 15 minutes of engagement, followed by posting content, and then I wait until the end of the day and I come back and I re engage with my content and re engage with the engagement that I did earlier. So I probably spend about 30 minutes a day building my brand on LinkedIn. And that’s what we call the rhythm section. And that’s, you know, if you go back to my profile itself, let me see if I can just find it quickly. You know, that’s why I’m getting that much attention, you know, with messages that come in daily. I also look at my notifications every morning. That’s really big to me because it tells me who has engaged with me. And then you see right here, these are the people that viewed my profile. So I go down and go, okay, this guy viewed my profile, but we’re already connected. Oh, here’s one that we’re not connected yet. And he looked at my profile, and now I determine, can this guy help me? Could I sell this guy something and decide whether or not I want to connect with that person? And notice when I can’t actually show you that, but when I do send that connection request, it gives that headline. But then I just go down and I looked for all the people that looked at my profile that I’m not connected with yet to expand my network even further.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

See, and that’s perfect. If you could scroll up just a little bit right there. Salesperson at Presidio, that’s what I was talking about, is that should probably be open to say, hey, Sam Grise viewed your profile. If you’re a salesperson, so that they know, hey, it’s Sam Grise, your face is there, they can see you. So on. That’s what I was curious about, that side of it. I can understand why people would keep things private from a perspective of if you aren’t in sales, they want to keep things a little bit tighter net. But it makes it difficult in this new world to be able to engage properly, to be effective on being able to provide value. And I would imagine that a lot of people keep that stuff private because of the pitch slap. They’ve been hit so many times that they know that if they view somebody’s profile, they’re going to get ten connection requests with the same chat GPT message out to them. That doesn’t mean anything about their business. Right?

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yeah. Also notice the title here, this guy’s business development. I’m probably not going to connect with him. Cause I know he’s probably gonna pitch with me. Now, if he said something like, I help people grow with performance marketing, I may look at it a little bit differently. So I always look at that headline as well, so that I learn more about them. And I always look at their profile. Like, if I can’t tell, I’ll look at their profile. But these guys down here, the salesperson at Presidio, is doing themselves a disservice. They really are. I have no idea who this person is. Sam, they say that 95% of people are lurkers and learners on LinkedIn.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Oh, okay.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

That is a great opportunity for the 5% that are active, engaging and networking regularly on LinkedIn. You’re going to stand out a hell of a lot more than this guy from Presidio.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s why the stakes are so low. That statistic of 95% learners and lurkers, you know, if you can be that 5%, you’re going to definitely differentiate yourself, which ultimately is defining your brand and being differentiated. So I love that.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

Yep. And you know what? You’re probably going to get some traction with the learners because you’re going to leave a brand impression. And, you know, maybe all they’re doing every day is scrolling through their feedback, you know, either on their phone or what have you, and stopping to pick up content that resonates with them and. And so you want to be that person that they find. So I think the last thing, Sam, we talked about giving everybody a profile makeover guide. And so I’ve got this guide for everybody that’s in the audience. Just shoot me or Sam an instant message on LinkedIn or email that you want a copy of this, but this takes you through step by step. What are the changes you should make on your profile? So there’s 14 that I recommend. It kind of walks you through, you know, the edit pencils. You know what my recommended content is, what kind of image you should use, how you should do your headline. If you want a copy of this to start your social selling journey, just let me know. I’m here for you.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Love it. Love it. If you don’t mind, let me go on ahead and share my screen and I’ll share some of that information, if you will, on how you can reach out to us to see how we can help you again. Dave, want to thank you, of course, for your expertise in coming on for the conversation. Excited to continue following along. I know the past three years have been growth, growth, growth, and excited to see where the next five years go for you. But as Dave mentioned, feel free to reach out to us, connect with us on LinkedIn. I’m happy to have a discussion, but if you want to shoot me an email at my email, which is sam@4bmarketing.com with the tagline “webinar”, I’m happy to spend a free hour of support with our team of just diving in through everything. It doesn’t have to just be LinkedIn on my side. Happy to go through the marketing side of things as well. And also feel free to email dave@yjetechsalescoach.com.

Dave Elsner, Technical Sales Team Coaching and Training, The Tech Sales Coach

You got it. Awesome.