[00:00:00] Hala Taha: What's up my young and profiting family? I always say that knowing how to sell is the most important skill that an entrepreneur can have. Selling is at the core of every business. It's how you connect with your customers, build your brand, and grow your business. And today I'm going to give you a mini masterclass on how to sell.

I recently partnered with Pipedrive, which is a CRM platform, to host a webinar about how you can crush your sales goals in 2024. And we're going to be replaying it right now on the podcast for anybody who missed it. Now, this was a webinar where I had like a fancy slide deck associated with it. So this is going to be more like a workshop that we're doing together.

So in the show notes, You're going to have a link to the actual presentation and also a link to a pipe tribe demo that we created for the presentation. So as I'm going along in this webinar, you can click those links, follow along in the presentation. You can also watch this on YouTube. We'll put the link on there.

That way you don't have to be clicking around. But if you want to listen to it on audio, you can also pull up the slides. If there's any specific slides you want to look at, we're going to link that in the show notes. So in this webinar, it was an amazing webinar that we had. It was about an hour long and I dived into mastering the art of sales.

We talked about getting in the right mindset for sales, how to pick the right market, how to ensure you're hitting your sales goals with bottom up forecasting and driver trees. Then we went into how to visualize your sales pipeline and we go into a pipe drive demo. And I talk a bit about pipe drive, which is the CRM that we actually use at Yap Media every single day.

It's how we run our meetings. We have a deal desk meeting every day and we pull up pipe drive and it's been a game changer for us. We love it at Yap. It's helping us close deals faster, helping us close bigger deals. Deals just don't fall in the cracks anymore like they used to. We're just more organized.

Then we go into LinkedIn for business, LinkedIn DM funnel strategy, which I know a lot about. And then we talk about the art of sales and how to ensure that we close more deals. We also talk about how to avoid getting ghosted after doing all your sales work. If you enjoy this webinar and you're ready to step up your game, I highly recommend that you get a 30 day free trial with PipeDrive.

It's a hundred percent risk free, no credit card required. You can just go to young and profiting. co slash pipe drive for a free 30 day trial and 20 percent off your membership. So we'll put that link in the show notes. To make it super easy for you. Again, that's young and profiting. co slash pipe drive for a free 30 day trial.

And before this webinar, I actually highly recommend that you take a minute, put this on pause and go sign up so that while I'm talking about pipe drive, you can click around. It's so intuitive. And it's risk free. You don't have to even put a credit card. It's young and profiting. co slash pipe drive. So go sign up now before the presentation so that you can click around.

And while I'm doing the demo, you can give it a try for yourself. Who's ready to make it rain with me. Let's jump into my webinar with pipe drive and learn how you can become a top notch seller in 2024.

 So today we're going to talk about how to crush your sales goals. And today's presentation is sponsored by Pipedrive, which is my sales visualization tool.

So I can't wait to tell you about Pipedrive as well. 

So one of the things that I wanted to start us off with is just to understand that the internet is abundance. Okay? We live in a new world now, where all of your target market is at literally your fingertip. You need to find your target market in mass. You need to have a clear brand and messaging and offering need to have an offer that converts and you need to take your right sales actions.

And if you do all those things. With the internet now, you will always generate sales. There is abundance. You don't need to think about competition. You don't need to get overwhelmed with not being able to stand out or whatever you're worried about. Because literally, if you take the right actions, if you have a target market that is viable, if you have a converting offer, you're always going to generate sales because now we have the internet.

So that's the first thing that I just wanted to like start off with is just realize that you have the capability to generate sales and to 10x your business right now if you just focused on the right things and you've got to figure out what is broken in your process if you're not generating sales.

Okay, so let's start off with having the right target market, because this is something with entrepreneurs that I find that they get wrong all the time. And this is something that you have control over. You can decide who your audience is. Even if you already have a business that's well established, you can reevaluate what your target market is so that you're swimming downstream and not upstream all the time.

So if you were going to open up a hot dog stand. And you could only have one advantage over your competitors. What would it be? Put your answers in the chat right now. I'm going to call them out. Best mustard, location. If you are going to open up a hot dog stand and you could only have one single advantage over your competitors, what would it be?

The buns, radish, location, sell bagels well, hungry clients, location, vegan, word of mouth, gluten free, a hungry crowd. Location, collaboration, buy one get one free, best tasting, repeat customers, know your competition.

Okay, so we get the idea. You guys are throwing out a lot of things out there, but there's really one thing that matters the most. And some of you got it. A starving crowd. A starving crowd is what matters the most. You could have the worst hot dogs in the world. They taste like garbage, cardboard. Terrible prices.

They're exorbitantly high prices. Terrible location, on the street, a terrible branding, no name, just a stand. But if you're the only hot dog stand in town, and a local college game breaks out. Or, uh, the bar closes down and you're the only thing open and there's a starving crowd, you're going to sell out, So what is the lesson in all of this when it comes to sales? You never want to create demand. If you're creating demand, you're doing something wrong. You want to channel demand. That is how you become downstream with everything that you do. All of my businesses, I don't have to try hard to get sales or clients because I'm always trying to figure out what demand can I channel?

What do people want? What are people's problems? What do people have mass problems in? And how can I solve that problem? I'm not trying to figure out a problem that nobody has, right? So you never want to create demand, you want to channel demand. So if any part of your process, you feel like you're creating demand, you're trying to like find that needle on a haystack person that wants your services, you're doing it wrong.

You want to channel demand, okay? So what are the key components of having a right niche? One thing off the bat, Again, this goes with mindset. Don't be afraid to start over if you have to. If you're already in business and you're not, you know, generating sales in your sleep, then you may have the wrong audience.

So your audience is your choice. You have a choice in this. So choose wisely. Okay? So what are the key components? Pain. Your audience needs to have a problem. They have to be really, really frustrated about something. Something that they're going to spend their hard earned money on to fix. Okay? So they have to have pain, they have to have frustration, there has to be a problem that they need to solve, okay?

Buying power. Your audience needs to be able to afford your services. So for example, I have a lot of people who join my course and I do a LinkedIn course and so, uh, sometimes people are like, yeah, I'm targeting people who are looking for jobs. I'm a resume writer. And my first thing to them is like, okay, these people have no job.

How do you expect to have high prices? How do you expect these people to be able to afford your services? If they don't have a job again, your audience is your choice. Could you take your skills and do something else other than resume writing, right? Easy to target. Your target should be able to be found in mass.

Your target needs to be hanging out in one place. They need to describe themselves in the same way. They need to be part of the same schools, part of the same companies, part of the same organizations. They need to have identity that they align with. Once they have an identity they align with, they're going to hang out in the same places and be easy to target and mask.

The last thing that you want is an audience that's like finding them like a needle in a haystack, where you have to go on many different platforms and do many different things to get one or two leads. That is going to be a waste of your time. Your audience needs to have identifiers that they all align with.

Okay. And then lastly, your market should be growing, right? Pick a space that's. growing exponentially. If it's not growing, then it's really just decreasing in size, right? So don't get into newspapers right now because they're dying. Pick something on the internet that's growing fast, right? So make sure that your market is growing as well.

So hopefully this gives you guys some ideas about your niche. 

 once you guys have established your core audience. now you've got to serve them. You've got to start your sales funnel. Okay, so I feel like everybody knows what a sales funnel is. Basically, you're bringing in your target client and you're bringing them along the buyer's journey to eventually pay you for your product or services.

And so there's top funnel lead magnets, which is really a lot of like how to types of things, which are e books, white papers. Research studies, quizzes, checklists, calculators, templates, cheat sheets. Those are all top lead magnets. Then mid funnel, when they're a little bit warmer, you want to be doing more one on one or one to many engagements where there's two way communication, just like this webinar.

So webinars, live events, podcasts. live streams, free coaching calls, discovery calls. These are all mid funnel events as your target client gets warmer and warmer. so you always want to serve your client with lead magnets and mid funnel activity. So if you don't have a lead magnet, that's something that you want to start right away so that you can start getting emails, retargeting people, and so they can start to learn from you and identify you and your business as an expert in whatever you're doing so they know that you solve their problems, okay?

So one thing to know with sales is that really you want to have a bottoms up strategy. And so, over here, when you're just starting out, there's going to be a lot of experimentation, okay? You're going to have many different sales funnels. You might have a sales funnel related to your e book, where you've got a splash page.

Uh, you've got an ebook download, people have to put their name, their email, they download the e book, then you might be retargeting them on email, asking them to book a one on one call, and then closing the sale. Then you might also have social posts. As a lead gen, you put up a social post, you are pointing to a quiz that people can take when they do the quiz, they have to put their email, then you're retargeting them on email, and then you're getting on them on a webinar.

And then you're closing them straight from the webinar. So you're going to have so many different sales funnels. And in the beginning, it's all about experimentation. Try a lot of things, see what starts to work, do those things multiple times. So that you can start to capture data and trends and understand what you need to optimize in your funnel.

Okay. So bottoms up strategy is realizing that sales is part art, part volume game. Okay. And you can get visibility into the day to day health of your sales funnels by working backwards. from your sale to your lead magnet. So this is something that I feel like not a lot of people do. A lot of people who are in sales and have businesses, they've got lots of different sales funnels, but they're actually not tracking all the steps in their sales funnels.

They're not tracking all the data. They're not tracking all the different patterns and rates and things going on to understand how they need to adjust every step of their sales funnels to hit their sales targets. So how many clicks, calls, and conversions do you need to do? What is the volume of things that you need to do to hit your sales targets?

and then you got to track your data. You got to figure out how many actions you need to complete each part of your sales process to hit your revenue goals. And then once you know all that, you got to set a stretch goal. So a good number is 80 percent confident hitting.

If you feel like you're 80 percent hitting your number, then that is a good stretch goal to have. You don't want to do something too out there where you're just going to be discouraged that you're not getting close enough. And then you're going to break the target into easier chunks so that your team and yourself, you can digest everything and put it into meaningful action.

So what I'm about to teach you is literally what I do at Yap Media to make sure that I'm always selling out my masterclass. I'm always selling out and performing for my sponsors. I literally always have a wait list for my social agency. And it's because we do this. We look at our sales funnel, we break it apart, we identify trends, and we track our data.

let's talk about it a little bit more. So make data your goal setting front. You're going to track the performance of your campaigns by monitoring the volume of actions they take and the associated results that they get. So there's two things that you need to create a driver tree. And in the next slide, you're going to see a visual example of this.

So you need driver metrics. So what are all the actions that you take to drive results that can be calculated with raw data that you extract from your systems and applications? So clicks, calls, webinar attendees, email signups, this is just volume of actions. Who showed up? How many people clicked? How many people did you call?

What are the actions that's going to drive your end outcome? The next thing that you need to analyze is your results and rates. So looking at your past data and patterns and using that to forecast future performance. So what does that mean once you've done your sales funnel three times? I think that's a good number to start.

'cause two is just not enough. Once you've done the sales funnel three times, you can look at your average conversion rate, your average click-through rate, your average order value, your average customer lifetime value, and you can start to identify patterns and you can start to identify if I do X, calls.

I make X money. If I get X clicks, I make X money, right? And you can start to work backwards and figure out how many things do I need to do to get the results that I want, okay? So, driver trees identify actionable insights so that you can act on opportunities and solve bottlenecks proactively. So, here's a driver tree example.

This is literally an example from Yap Media, okay? And this is actually Converting people to our masterclass that I have. The numbers are a little bit different cause I just want it to be easy. So I put a thousand dollars as the cost of the class, just to make it easy to understand. So. On the left side, this is basically the data side.

We've done this sales funnel where it's basically a webinar sales funnel. I'm driving people with DMs on social media, and I'm driving them to register to my webinar, a webinar just like this. We get their email, we retarget them on email, and we convert people to sign up for our two day masterclass through this webinar campaign strategy.

so we've done this a number of times, and based on our data, if we send 10, 000 direct messages on social media, we get a 10 percent average click through rate. With that, that means there's 1, 000 clicks. With 1, 000 clicks, 70 percent of those people that clicked, actually register for the webinar.

So with a thousand clicks, we get 700 webinar registrants plus their email, which is great to build an email list, by the way. Out of those 700 webinar registrants, only 50 percent actually show up to the webinar. So for example, today we had actually, uh, we had like, almost 500 people who signed up for this webinar and we had just about half show up, right?

But people will watch the replay, you can retarget them on email, and so on. So we get a 50 percent average attendance rate for our webinar. So if that's the case, we'll have 350 webinar attendees. And on average, there's a 6 percent conversion rate to the course. So that means if we sent 10, 000 direct messages, it results In a round, like this is obviously estimated, but it's, it becomes very accurate.

The more and more you optimize your sales funnels and understand what your results and rates are. So if we do 10, 000 direct messages, we will likely get 21 webinar conversions and make 21, 000 in revenue. Okay. Now working backwards, this means that if I tell my team, all right, next masterclass, I want to make 35, 000.

I don't want to just make 20, 000. I want to make 35, What does that mean? What do we need to do? What actions do we need to take? Right? So if I have 35 webinar conversions at 1, 000, that means we need 584 webinar attendees, which means we need 1, 168 webinar registrants. And that means we need almost 1, 700 clicks, which means we need to send about 1, 17, 000 direct messages on social media.

So it went from 10, 000 direct messages to make 21, 000. Now we need to do about 17, 000 direct messages to make 35, 000. So now this is so easy for me to tell my team. Now I have, all right, guys. I need you to do, you know, a hundred DMs a week, there's three of you, we're going to do it for X amount of weeks, we're going to make sure that we send this so we can get X amount of webinar attendees, and then these people are going to show up, and then we'll retarget these people on email, and then we're going to hit our goal.

And we literally always hit our goal. Because it's just the data that you, you know exactly what the data is. It's based on your past data, So, once you do that, you're also going to want to look at individual goals, right? So, especially if you run a sales team. So, uh, if you run a sales team, you also want to think about what is that team member's individual past performance.

How many calls, emails, sales meetings do they typically need to close a deal? Because what I just went over was like a team wide driver tree. You can also do individual driver trees. And so if it takes them 10 calls to make a sale, then their close rate is 10%. Then you need to calculate how many calls they need to hit their target.

If you want them to close 50 deals this year, they need to make 500 calls. But 500 calls seems super overwhelming. So you can break that down into smaller targets. Which means they need to do an average of 40 calls per month, or 10 calls per week if you consider time off. So this is what you can start to do for individuals as well.

And you can see how if you did this at the macro level for your business, plus at an individual level, how everybody would know exactly what actions they need to take. And it takes a lot of the guesswork out of your sales process. we already discussed. How activity based goals allow your team to win back control, but now you also need help to prioritize these goals.

So, like I mentioned earlier, it's probably the case, especially if you're already in business, that you actually have a lot of different sales funnels going on. And something, this is something that I'm doing at Yap Media right now is like, What is all the different sales funnels? So you've got social posts, you might have a webinar sales funnel, call sales funnel, uh, there's probably a million, a website blog sales funnel.

What are all your sales funnels? And start to identify all the steps. track all the information, think about all the results and rates that you want to calculate, and then you're going to make bottom up forecasts for everything and you're going to drop the sales funnels that don't make impact. It's going to help you clearly see what are your top performing sales funnels and how can you focus on that and optimize those rather than doing so many things that just drag your team down, that don't actually.

Help you generate the sales results that you want. So you wanna do that so that you and sales reps can focus on the right things. So just wanted to call out, focus on your goals, around the actions so you can empower your sales teams to crush their targets. This is what driver trees are all about.

So a little interactivity with you guys. What pipeline actions are you going to start more closely monitoring in your business? Type it in the chat. What are the actions that your sales people take that you take that you need to start monitoring more closely in terms of the clicks, the calls, the, the open rates?

Like what are you going to monitor more closely?

Numbers, emails, LinkedIn messages, DMs, yep,

calls and email, yeah. And here's the thing, when you're just starting out, it's actually a good thing. Like, if you guys are thinking, like, man, I haven't been tracking my data, I haven't been tracking, it's okay. This means that you've, you've, probably can go retroactively look at a lot of these things.

And if not, you can put the processes in place so that you can capture this data moving forward. What is holding you back from more closely monitoring your sales pipeline for you or your team? What do you feel like holds you back from tracking data or tracking your sales pipeline more closely?

Time, yeah, time, systems, processes, all the hats you wear, ego.

 The biggest thing that holds back people from actually doing this, and basically, you know, what's the definition of insanity? You keep doing the same thing and nothing changes, right? So if you really want to level up your sales, the reason why I made Drivertree such a big part of this presentation is because I feel like that's step number one.

You need to figure out what is your sales funnel? You know, what does it look like? Which sales funnels do you actually want to concentrate on that work the most? and then how can you optimize the volume of what you're doing? Because that's something we can control, right? Sales is art and volume. I'm going to talk to you about negotiation and, and being a better influencer and everything like that later on.

lot of it is just about how many actions are you taking. And if you take the right amount of actions and you've got a right, Target market with the right, uh, converting offer that solves problems. And it's literally just about the number of actions that you take in every step of your sales funnel.

But tracking all that is a pain in the butt, right? So we need the right systems in place to facilitate pipeline management. We need a dedicated CRM software that visualizes our sales process, that's not super cost intensive, that is made to scale with us. And that's because, you know, it's not going to be conducive or efficient to manage your entire sales process.

G sheets and slides and back of the napkin calculations. Trust me, I tried it before pipe drive and it was a mess. Once I moved over to Pipedrive, everybody's on the same page because we can see everything visually in one place and everything's connected with each other. So having the right CRM, a CRM preferably made by salespeople, is the best way for you to track and get organized with your sales so that you can start to do some of this stuff to optimize your sales funnels.

So what is Pipedrive? Pipedrive is a CRM by salespeople for salespeople. Uh, it's specifically designed to help business owners and sales teams visually organize their work so they can feel confident about their results. So it's this Kanban format, which we basically drag and drop. It's super intuitive to use.

We're going to show you a demo in a little bit. And in a nutshell, it streamlines processes and consolidates sales data in one unified CRM tool. So all of your deals are in here. Every step of your funnel is in here. You can track actions manually, you can integrate with like every tool under the sun to automatically track actions and what's going on with your sales team.

And you can track the progress of your sales opportunity and see this sales data in real time. So like for my sales meetings, we don't have spreadsheets anymore. We don't have individual project plans anymore. We just pull up pipe drive and we know what's going on. There's also a ton of like, it's very technically advanced.

So there's like lots of Automated features. So you can automate email follow up, you can automate creating new contacts. You can automate passing a deal to another team member. and you can also automate reminders to your team on what actions they need to take next to move the offer down the line. So Pipedrive helps us close bigger deals and close deals faster, and it also assesses team performance.

So there's AI tools. And it basically will tell you like you guys need to do X, Y, Z to hit your outcome, if you should use pipe drive in a different way, that's more beneficial for your team. So there's actually like AI insights that gives you clues on how to create a better dashboard, create a better pipeline, and what actions are you need to take.

so another thing that I just want to call out before we talk about the demo is embracing automation. a lot of people with sales. You get really bogged down on the administrative tasks. Because it's like a lot of emails, keeping track of these emails, it's a lot of repetitive things.

Pipetribe lets you automate the repetitive steps of your sales process. So it really helps to prevent deals from falling through the cracks with those reminders, the automated follow ups, and you can just automate just about any repetitive sales task that goes out. So I, I named a bunch of different examples already.

And, uh, like I said, they have an AI powered sales mentor that further, further boosts your performance and provides personalized tips for you and your business. Uh, some of the integrations that Pipedrive has is G Suites, which I love, Slack, Zapier. Those are the ones that we use. Also MailChimp, uh, Constant Contact.

They integrate with just about every app that you can imagine. It is by far one of the top CRM platforms out there. Uh, the other thing that I love about PipeDrive is that it's new. Okay, so it's not this clunky, outdated software like a lot of the other serums out there are decades old and they're really clunky and hard to use.

In fact, like you might have to take like a whole day's training to learn how to use it. PipeDrive is something that you'll learn in a day. 

All right, guys. So this is a very visual portion of the webinar. We're going to be doing a demo of pipe drive. If you go in the show notes, we have a link so that you can watch it as well. So this will all make more sense when you watch it on video. So take a moment right now, put it on pause, go click that link and watch the demo.

 We're going to move on to LinkedIn for business. Are you guys ready to talk about LinkedIn for business? 

[00:27:29] Hala Taha: is the best platform, in my opinion, for entrepreneurs, especially if you have a service based business, okay? So, I'm gonna be honest, like, LinkedIn is not the best if, like, you're selling a very visual product. that's better for Instagram and TikTok. But if you're selling a service based offering, pretty much anything, even if it's doing makeup services, LinkedIn is the place to be.

So, LinkedIn has super educated, highly compensated people. Most people make over 75, 000 a year. Uh, most people are college graduates. LinkedIn is a professional network, so most people have a job. Remember we talked about making sure people can buy your services and can afford it? Most people have a job on LinkedIn and there's so many people that log on to LinkedIn every day and use it as a content platform.

The other thing is that LinkedIn is primed for sales conversations because, people are Wanting to trust the people that they buy from. So they're actually looking up sales reps on LinkedIn and seeing if they have a personal brand, if they look credible, right? If there's somebody that's trustworthy, they're using LinkedIn to do research on potential solutions.

Right? When they're researching a brand, they're going to be looking up sales reps and companies on LinkedIn. So they're literally using LinkedIn in their buying journey. Additionally, LinkedIn is really all about educational kind of thought leadership and has this professional branding to it. So they're actually going on LinkedIn to learn.

about how they can solve their different problems related to their industry or niche. So LinkedIn is just so primed for these sales conversations. They're almost welcomed on LinkedIn where Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, those are very personal platforms, right? So having a sales conversation on that can be spammy or salesy and feel uncomfortable for a lot of people because it's so personal, right?

So LinkedIn is a great place. The other reason why LinkedIn is awesome is because there's 135 million active users on LinkedIn and only 6 percent of those people are content creators. So there's so much opportunity to become a thought leader in your niche on LinkedIn. The other thing I'll say really quick is that 80 percent of users on LinkedIn are above the age of 25.

So these are prime earning years, again going back to who can afford your services. Prime earning years are folks on LinkedIn, So, I want to only talk about this briefly. I have an entire two day LinkedIn masterclass where we talk all about content. But I did want to briefly touch on it because I think it's really important.

So one of the things that you need is a LinkedIn content funnel. Your audience is going to find you through your content. It's the only information they have to make a buying decision. And it's basically the gateway to your funnel. All right. So when you're talking about a LinkedIn content funnel, you want to solve problems.

You want to inspire and transform and you want to be one of one. This is funnel content funnel specifically. We're not talking about sales funnel anymore. Really? We're talking about content funnel. So solves problems is the first way that people find out who you are. So you provide how to content like educational tips, LinkedIn, live webinars, audio events.

promotional, direct offers where you're just talking about your services on LinkedIn. You're going to put out that content that showcases how you solve people's problems. And on LinkedIn, when people take viral actions and engage on your stuff, their following is going to see your stuff. So that's how you get more visible and shared to a wider network, this how to content.

So once people are in your community, you also want to inspire and transform. So, one of the key things with personal branding, who do you trust the most in your life? You trust the most, the people in your life that know personal things about you. The people that you trust with your bank account information, you probably know the street they live on, you probably know the names of their kids.

you share a lot of similar interests, you know, personal things about that person, you know, what hobbies they like, and, you know, personal details about them. People feel like you're a friend when they know personal details about you. So you need to think about what you sell and.

Who you are personally, what are your hobbies, you can be a dynamic person. So you want to share personal stories, quotes, shareable assets that align to all impact statements, which we don't, we won't have a chance to cover that today in terms of what impact statements are, but you want to inspire and transform.

That's how you move them along your funnel and make them realize that you're somebody who's trustworthy, who's credible, who they look up to and who they buy from. Okay, and then the last step of this content. funnel is really your differentiation. What is your one of one? How do you differentiate yourself, differentiate your business and what you sell in the market?

What is your conviction in the market? What are your beliefs? What are you doing differently? that's how you actually become a brand. And that's just a super high level of our LinkedIn content funnel that we promote at Yap Media. The other thing that I want you guys to understand when it comes to creating content on LinkedIn that actually converts sales content on LinkedIn is the fact that LinkedIn is now prioritizing keywords.

Keywords are the future of the algorithm. now the LinkedIn algorithm is shifting towards prioritizing engagement and rather prioritizing relevancy and education.

LinkedIn wants to match experts with people who want content from experts. That is the game now. So what does that mean? You need to have really thought through keywords on your profile. You need to use those same keywords in your posts and LinkedIn will match content to people who are interested in that content based on previous posts they engaged with based on the keywords found in their profile, LinkedIn will basically match content with those people.

So LinkedIn again, is deprioritizing like motivational, inspirational, just like broad content. And they're now prioritizing. More niche educational content from experts that solves problems, which is amazing news for salespeople. The other key trend that I'll just throw out there is that LinkedIn used to punish you for linking out to another website.

We're no longer seeing that. So now you can actually link to a third party website in your caption and you're not going to get de prioritized, okay? So, again, we don't have enough time to go super deep in this because I want to talk about DM sales funnels and influence. But keywords are the future and you need to, again, think about all the keywords related to what you serve.

What are people actually typing to find your services? On LinkedIn, you can think about it like a Google search. LinkedIn is basically a Google search, right? So what are the things that people type in to find what you sell? What kind of keywords are on your target audience profiles? How can you infuse those keywords on your profile and your post?

 So let's talk about the winning DM formula. first thing is to determine your target audience. Hopefully, you already know what your target audience is for your business, but you probably have many different sub communities that you're going to need to find en masse on LinkedIn, Now, this tree kind of, the, the visual kind of breaks apart here. So, if there's a second or third connection, in order to DM them, you need to actually invite them with a personalized note. Get them to accept the invite and then you can send a personalized DM and continue to send DMs and then eventually make the ask, If they're a first connection, you can go straight to the DM and make the ask. One thing I want you guys to know, I just talked to Ryan Serhant today and he said something to me that I was like, Oh, I have to say this in my webinar today. He said, you've got to hook, help, and then make the ask. You got to hook them in, what is the relevancy, what is the common ground, why are you reaching out to them, what is interesting, what is new, what is funny, what is entertaining.

Hook them in, spark curiosity, whatever it is. Hook them in, help them over and over again, help them as much as you can, build that social currency and rapport, help them, help them, help them, then you make the ask. so let's talk about how, again, we're talking about first step here, determine your target audience.

How are we going to determine our target audience? There's two main ways. There's attribute based ways, and there's trigger based ways. This is on LinkedIn specifically, so what is Attribute Based Waste? LinkedIn is this incredible search engine. It is the only social media platform that has these search capabilities where everybody, you can search by their location, their school, their industry, their keywords, free keyword search, which is my favorite way to use Attribute Based.

Company size, uh, industry, annual revenue, if you have sales navigator, job title, like there's so many different ways to find people just based on what they selected on their profiles. so attribute based is how you can find your target audience in mass. So for example, you might want to think about, I want to target everybody who is an event planner at fortune 500 companies because I want to get speaking engagements, right?

Those are easy, actionable things that you can do. You find the fortune 500 companies. You go look who works there who has a free keyword search event planner title in their name, right? And now you can find them based on their attributes, another example is I want to target, uh, social media people to adjo join my LinkedIn masterclass.

Type in social media manager, and let's say I want to DM, I don't want to do invites, first connection, and now I've got my attributes based filter to find my target audience in mass, okay? So there's a million different combinations that you can use based on your requirements for your target audience. So that's attribute based.

Now, the downfall with attribute based is that you don't know if these people are active on LinkedIn. That is the only downfall. You don't know if these people are active on LinkedIn. So it might mean that if you send them a DM or an invite, they're not gonna answer, So what is the workaround for this?

Trigger based. it's the behaviors that people take on LinkedIn, the actions that they take on LinkedIn, and you can actually target people based on their behaviors and their actions. So for example, you can target people who engage with certain topics. So keyword search, search posts on LinkedIn, see who engaged.

With those posts who liked, commented, or shared and reach out to those people because they're taking recent viral action on LinkedIn. You know they're more likely to respond. Engaging on lookalike profiles, competitor posts. So, Gary Vaynerchuk is my competitor. We do very similar things. We talk about very similar things.

So anybody who likes and comments on his posts probably is going to like my content. Probably is going to love my podcast and my services. I would invite them to connect and damn them and try to bring them into my network. this could also be registering for an event and seeing who's attending that event and then damning everybody in that event.

It could be attending an audio event related to what you sell and then damning anybody who showed up. It could be putting out a poll on your LinkedIn where you say, Hey, is anybody interested in learning more about LinkedIn? Yes. No. Anybody who says yes. Retarget them in the DM, with your service. They're telling you what they want, right?

Retargeting your own posts. Put up a sales post about your offer. Anybody who likes the comments, retarget them in the DM. Because they're taking viral action. They're showing you their interest. And, this is your common ground. Hey, I noticed that you engaged on XYZ's post. Hey, I noticed that you voted this way on my poll.

Hey, I noticed that you joined this LinkedIn event. I thought you may be interested in blah, blah, blah, right? So, trigger based. Now, next step in the process is, establishing common ground. So once you have your audience in mind, most likely the way that you found them is going to be their common ground.

So, uh, sales begins with trust, trust begins with shared interest. So, I noticed that you work with Same company as, or we both worked at the same company in the past. I noticed that you engage on XYZ's posts. I noticed that you said you needed LinkedIn help. I noticed that you wrote this blog on XYZ. So the way that you found them is probably going to be the common ground.

Okay? So the next step in the formula is if they're a second or third connection, you're going to send an invite note with your common ground and relevancy point. So what do you need to think about with that? You want to leverage the law of likability. 

So I do a lot of interviews on my podcast. We talk a lot about psychology. Uh, like I said, I'm a sales expert myself. And one thing, if you want to be a good salesperson, is you need people to like you. People buy from people that they like. People say yes to people that they like.

So what makes up the qualities of somebody who we like? People who are similar to us. People who pay us compliments. We like being asked about our own lives, interests, and opinions. We like to talk about ourselves. So people who allow us to talk about ourselves. We like people who share the same identity and are part of the same groups and communities.

We both went to the same school. We're both part of the same industry. We're both women. We're both, you know, in real estate, whatever it is. We like people who ask us for advice, especially if we're not famous or super popular. So like, for example, if somebody asked me for advice, Everybody's asking me for advice, so it's really overwhelming and I'm like please, go to my podcast, go to a webinar, like, I help people en masse now, right?

But if you're just a, a person who's not having a huge brand, when you, when you're asking that person for advice, they really appreciate it because they want to be important, they want to showcase their expertise, they want to help other people, and actually, when you help other people, you like them more.

Subconsciously, you don't want to help somebody who you don't like, right? So asking for advice is a big one. So harness this powerful principle of liking in your invite notes on LinkedIn. So on LinkedIn, you can send a personalized note. to second and third connections. So this might be, I noticed you engage on Gary Vee's content.

I'm a big fan as well. I follow his work. If you like his content, I think you'll like mine too. I'd love to provide value on your feed. You look like somebody who really knows their stuff in the real estate world. Again, giving them a compliment. I'm in this industry too and I'd love to connect. I noticed you recently posted about skydiving for the first time.

What was that experience like? Asking them to talk about themselves. As two strong female leaders in this space, I thought we should connect and support each other. so again, paying them a compliment, two strong female leaders in the space, establishing common ground. I noticed we both went to NYU, happy to connect with a fellow NYU alumni and get to know, and looking forward to get you know, to know you better.

Again, we're hooking them in. Why is it relevant? And next we're going to have to help people. So I'm going to give you one more example here. I noticed you engaged with Heather Monaghan's content. I recently spoke at the ABC convention alongside Heather. She and I talk about similar topics and if you like her content, I think you'll like mine too.

You seem like the type of person who I'd love to have in my network and curious to learn more about you. Now, one thing I want you guys to note is the passive language that I'm using. This is on purpose. If I said, she and I talk about similar topics and if you like her content, you'll like mine too.

You're the type of person that I'd love to have in my network and curious to, if I said that. People will immediately want to prove me wrong. People love to prove other people wrong. It is like human nature. So what are they going to do if I say, I know you'll like mine too. I know I have the best offer for you.

No, you don't. You don't know me. I don't know you. What, what, who, why are you telling me what you know about me? You don't know me. Like, don't tell me what I think. That's why in your, especially in your initial messages, you've got to be like, you seem like, I noticed, I think you, then they're less likely to shoot you down right away.

So next step, they accepted the invite or, you know, they're already first connection. Now it's time to help. Help, help, help, add value, build rapport, build your social currency. Okay, so nobody wants to be sold to initially. You need to build up the credibility and the social currency before you are eligible to make an ask.

So you need to help somebody. Don't be transactional. So you need to offer them value for free. So this is where your lead gen tools come in. This is where your lead magnet comes. This is where your mid funnel activities come through. This is what you're doing in the DMs. You're driving them to your top funnel activity.

You're driving them to your mid funnel activity. Then you're asking them. And usually it's off platform, on a call, on a webinar. Usually you're making the ask off platform. and your goal is to keep the conversation going and going and going. So asking questions, getting feedback, making sure they have a reason to respond.

so your goal is not necessarily to close them on the DMs. Your goal is to keep the conversation going for them to engage in your lead magnet, your mid funnel activities, and then you make the sale typically off platform, especially the higher ticket it is. so for example, here's an example of a DM.

Hey, thanks for connecting. I'm all about helping individuals clarify their personal brand and mission. I've been a personal brand coach for 20 years and I write on the topic based on your profile. This may be interesting to you. I have a ton of accessible content on my newsletter here. This newsletter would go to a splash page where they put their email so I can retarget them on email.

My goal is to help people understand their core values and missions to solidify their brand. Let me know what you think about the newsletter. I'd love to get your feedback. All my best. So what are the things that we're doing in here? We're giving them our top funnel lead gen. We're collecting their email.

We're also asking them for their feedback. Let me know what you think about the, you don't know how powerful it is to just end the conversations with, let me know what you think. I'd love to get your feedback. I do that with every single first message. And typically what that is, especially again, if they're not this popular influencer with a million DMs.

They're really likely to look at it, especially if you establish common ground in the invite and they know that you're in the same niche and you want to help them solve problems. They're probably likely to look at it and literally give you feedback, okay? And then you can keep the conversation going. So again, you want to keep doing that.

And bring them down your funnel, keep helping them, then you make the ask. So, let's talk about making the ask and the art of sales. I see we've got so many questions, uh, or so many comments. Hopefully you guys are enjoying this presentation. Um, so let's talk about making the ask and some of the, the language of sales, the art of sales.

This is a, uh, this is the last part of our presentation. And then if we have time, we'll open it up for a few Q& A. And Aaron and Kate, if you can start to grab some of the questions that you want me to answer. Okay, the art of sales. People want what they can't have. People want what other people do. People want things that only a few people have select access to.

People want to make easy decisions. People want exclusivity. They want to be part of the cool kids, you know, they want exclusivity, they want what other people can't have. They want to be able to make decisions without a lot of thought, without a lot of risk, so then they want to do what other people do, And they only want things that people have a select access to. If it's just available all the time and available for free, what, like, they've got nothing that they can buy from you, right? They want things that only a few people have a select access to. So what is the language that gets people to buy?

Scarcity. Social proof, urgency, okay? So scarcity is really a function of quantity. You want to give a perception of a limited supply. I only have ten seats left, I have a social media agency. Guys, I always have a wait list, first of all. And I can only take on one new client a month because we're a white glove service.

I can only do one new client a month. I already have three people who already want it. And I already have three contracts out. So it's first come, first serve. I just have one. And it doesn't even have to be true! Okay? It doesn't even have to be true. Not to say lie to people, but like, you've got to play the game.

Right? You've got to make it seem scarce because you've got to play on human psychology. Right? So whenever I give a contract for my social agency, what do I say? I got two contracts out. It's first come, first serve. And I can only take one client this month. Right? You want people to act fast. The more you give people time to think about something, the more likely they're going to talk themselves out of it.

Okay. So you want to make it scarce. And then speaking of the talking themselves out of it, urgent function of time, the contract that I sent you, it expires next week. I'm always changing my prices based on demand. Whatever I gave you, it expires next week. So you've got to make your decision. 75 percent off, but it's 24 hours.

You got 24 hours. Black Friday discount ends tomorrow, right? So a deadline to sign, a seasonal discount, limited time only discount, Urgency. Make people make a quick decision, okay? The longer you make people think about something, the more likely they're gonna talk themselves out of it. And think about why they can't do it, why it's too difficult, why they can't afford it, why you're not the right person, okay?

Social proof. This is a function of people. Again, it's just de risking everything. Have you worked with popular brands? Brag about it. Don't be scared. What does humble mean? It means low to the ground. If you want to be an influencer, if you want people to buy from you, you need to be looked up to. You don't want to be the opposite of humble, right?

Brag about who you've worked with. Get your testimonials. Put them on your profile. Put the quotes. Put that on your website. you know, mention results in your conversations in this, remember the part where you're helping, helping, helping before you make the ask? What are the little tidbits of information that you have of how you actually help people?

How can you de risk this for people? How can you show your social proof and prove that you're the best person? Uh, also like guarantees are really good social proof and de risking. Okay? So another thing to keep in mind is you want to focus on results. So speaking outcomes. So you want to focus on the end goal, right?

So one of the things when it comes to sales is that people don't want to do the work, People are afraid of doing the work. It's probably why they haven't solved their own problem to begin with, So you don't want to talk about all the hard work that's needed to get there. You can explain that later on.

You want to talk about the outcome. What are they going to get? What is the dream that they're going to get from whatever you're selling? The other thing that you want to do is, again, people are overwhelmed with the amount of work that things take. Even if they're paying somebody to do something for them, to a lot of the times, it's like, The time it takes to take on this, this new project, right?

you always want to talk about the speed in which people will get results and try to collapse that time in your messaging. So for example, it took me five years to learn the LinkedIn algorithm. I've been running my company for three years and I have, uh, learned everything that I need to know about LinkedIn.

I've mastered the algorithm. It took me five years to learn it. And now you get to learn everything that I learned in five years in just two days. Right? So that's an example of collapsing time so that people don't feel overwhelmed.

 And again, it's your job to give them a great product, to make sure you teach them to do the right thing. But it's also, if you want to help people, you've also got to help them make the decision to work with you. And that means not scaring them with too hard of work. You also want to show high probability of results.

So again, showcasing your stats, your facts, your testimonials, guarantees are awesome. Once you've done whatever you're doing for a long time, I guarantee that you can come up with some guarantees in your business, right? So we guarantee people top 20 of their Apple ranking. I guarantee that all 10x their LinkedIn engagement.

So I guarantee things once I have the data, knowing what I can guarantee without much risk.Value, not price. So focus on value. What are they getting out of it?

What is the deliverables of what you're servicing? What is the outcome? Don't focus on price. Then you're just like, you know, it's just a, uh, a game to the bottom dollar. You know what I'm saying? Don't focus on price. Focus on value and make sure whatever you're selling, this is a whole conversation in itself.

Whatever you're selling has 10 times the value of the price. That's when you have the easiest time selling it when it's just a no brainer. There's nothing better, there's nothing more valuable, almost the price doesn't matter because what you're selling is so good. So focus on your offer development, how you're going to maximize the value and keep the price as low as possible so that When people buy your service, they leave literally being like, Wow, that was worth 10 times more than I paid for it.

That is what I always strive with anything that I sell. That people literally walk away saying, Wow, that was 10 times more. I got 10 times more value than what I paid for. That's how you get referrals. That's how you get repeat customers. It's making sure you actually give them the value. And you, you deliver more value than what you're charging.

 now just a few key things as we close this out of like, all right, let's say you hook them in, you help, you help, you help, you help. You make the ask and suddenly they seem like such a good fit, but they ghosted you all of a sudden, every salesperson has had that happen. You did all the work you got on the discovery call.

You did an amazing pitch. They seemed so into it at the end of the call. Send me that contract. You send them the contract and then ghost town. No response. You don't know what's going on. You just did all that work. So how do we save these, these deals? That's when people start ghosting us. This is one of my favorite ones.

The breakup message or tactical empathy. So why does this work? You're using message softeners. Like I'm afraid it makes you like the other person in power. You always want to make the other person have the power. in these sales conversations, okay? You want them to make them feel like they're in control.

They're making all the decisions, okay? So, I'm afraid makes them in control, okay? I'm sorry makes them in control. You want to end it on a positive note and that helps you have a positive lasting impression and then a unique signature. So, hey, first name. Hey, Mary. I'm afraid you may not see the value in what I'm sharing.

That's totally fine. I'm sure we may connect again in all good time. On a lighter note, in case you'd like some free resources on how to crush your LinkedIn. You can find my free research page here with videos and ebook guides on the topic. Stay amazing. Holla. So what is this doing? First of all, you look like you're busy and like, it's no sweat on your back that you lost this client.

And again, people want what they can't have. People want what's exclusive. So already you're just like, it's totally cool. Like we'll connect in all good time. And I'm an awesome person. So here's some more free stuff. Good luck. Stay amazing. Goodbye. You close the door. So now they're like, I don't want you to close the door.

Keep it open, you know? So what's going to happen here? The person is going to respond back most likely and be like, Oh, I'm so sorry. I've just been so busy. I'd love to see this. Blah, blah, blah. Thank you so much. Let's set up a call. That's usually what's going to happen. They're going to, they're going to apologize themselves.

Because they're gonna feel like a jerk because you're so nice and that you've been helping them this whole time that they're likely gonna respond back, say they're busy, they're sorry, and you'll get, back on track with the deal. Okay? This is also one of my favorite ones. I learned this from, uh, Chris Voss.

And I do this all the time, especially if I sent a contract to somebody and they didn't respond. and so this is a no oriented question. So, a lot of people are used to hearing yes oriented questions, but the no oriented question psychologically makes them feel in control, makes them feel like they trust you more, it has pattern disruption because it's unusual, So an example of this is, are you no longer interested in XYZ? Are you giving up on X? Did you decide to walk away from X? And what works well with this is to keep it really short and sweet. Again, it's this illusion of you're so busy, you don't care. Not that you don't care, but like you've got so many opportunities, you're just double checking, uh, you don't mind if they have to walk away, and like, you know, your services are desirable.

If they walk away, the next person is going to walk in, right? So, I noticed, uh, you know, I haven't heard back from you. Are you no longer interested in leveling up your profile on LinkedIn? Hey, uh, I haven't heard from you're no longer interested in buying this house or whatever you're selling and usually people are gonna say No, I am interested.

No, I'm sorry. No, or they'll tell you why no, I'm sorry It's just a little bit out of our budget. No, I'm sorry It just seems like it's not the right timing for us and then you've got power to handle those objections. So they'll either say, keep the conversation going, and go down the path you want, or they're going to give you you can then try to discuss and figure out how you can make the solution more effective for them.

The no oriented question. All right, so that concludes today's webinar. Before we go, if you guys love my webinars, what is the number one way to help me? It is to actually sign up for all of our sponsors trials and actually use their software. Because again, guys. I don't do anything or sell anything or talk about anything that I don't use.

 Pipedrive is really affordable. It's really scalable. It's basically affordable for everybody, no matter what size your team.

So it's great for small business owners. It's great for freelancers, solopreneurs. Uh, hopefully everybody signed up for the trial and, uh, really appreciated everybody's time today. So,

Thank you guys so much. Talk to you soon. Bye guys.