Business Life Hacks by JMarketing Influence Agency

Acquiring Clients and Generating Leads Through LinkedIn

June 24, 2020 JMarketing Agency Episode 12
Business Life Hacks by JMarketing Influence Agency
Acquiring Clients and Generating Leads Through LinkedIn
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

How do you use the various social media platforms to acquire clients and generate more leads? Today, our friend Arthur Tutt has joined us to share his experience with gaining clients through LinkedIn.

Voiceover:

Business owners, Do you want an unfair advantage over your competitors? Do you want to dominate in your area of expertise? You are listening to Business Life Hacks. Learn to influence consumer psychology and shortcut your way to business success with tips, tricks, and hacks from award-winning digital agency, JMarketing.

Dan Lemp:

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Business Life Hacks. Today, we have a special guest with us; my good friend, Arthur Tutt. And today we're talking about using LinkedIn to generate more leads and get clients for your business. So great to have you with us, Arthur.

Arthur Tutt:

Good to see you, Dan.

Dan Lemp:

So Arthur, about two or three years ago, he was looking to learn about Google ads and how to run Google ads. And he didn't really have experience in that. And so I started talking to him about it and we just had an hour-long phone call. And then a couple of months later, he contacts me and he's like,"All right, I have a couple of clients now". And I was like,"Dude, you just started learning two months ago, and now you already have a couple clients?" Then a few months later, he contacted me telling me that he was starting to fire clients because he had too many. And I was like,"Arthur, how are you doing this?" I've never seen anyone go from not knowing marketing to starting to get clients so fast. I was really interested about how you actually did that, Arthur.

Arthur Tutt:

I was remembering back to that moment, because I remember that in a group chat, you posted it up like,"Hey, looking into anybody who wants to learn some digital marketing; happy to exchange some services here." And my memory is I responded back to that kind of being like,"All right, I'm interested, but what is digital marketing?" Exactly. Like, I don't really know, but I'm curious. And so, yeah, it's very much starting from the beginning.

Dan Lemp:

Right. And so what did you actually do to find those clients?

Arthur Tutt:

So before getting clients, the first thing I did is like do research, right? So I think you had recommended a couple of courses to me and I went on to Udemy and different online courses to just like, learn, learn, learn as much as I can here. And then it got to a point of: how do we start getting clients? How do we start getting paid for this? And the first thing I did was: I went to my Facebook cause I was like, I don't really know what to do here, so let's just post something. And I basically posted on Facebook being like,"Hey everyone, I've been learning some digital marketing stuff, looking to get my first few clients here. And I'm still kind of learning, but if you're looking for somebody to take you on like this free work for you, happy to help out." Right. And from that, I had a few people reach out and be like,"Sure, this sounds good." And these were people that I had met through events that I'd been to in the past. And so I guess my first thought is,"Okay, start by reaching out to the network that you have". And that was a good place to start, but obviously that's limited. So from there I started moving on in two main directions. I started going to actually like in person networking groups(business networking groups), but I also started expanding it to LinkedIn. So I think what attracted me about LinkedIn is it's essentially unlimited opportunity there.

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. That's really interesting because you're not bound by existing social connections. You were actually getting clients who you had never met in person before. Is that right?

Arthur Tutt:

Exactly. Like completely cold.

Dan Lemp:

Right. So what did you do to get those clients? Cause I think a lot of people have this experience where you go into your LinkedIn, you look into your messages and it's just a lot of kind of automated responses. I don't really look at most of them. So how did you actually get people looking at that and being interested enough in you, to start paying you for marketing services?

Arthur Tutt:

I think you hit the nail right on the head there when you said a lot of messages are automated. Like I was just looking through my LinkedIn recently and I had some people, you know, they reach out. It's a very cliche message like,"Hey, I noticed that we had some similar interests. I wanted to reach out and connect and it looks like we know some mutual connections," or something like that."Oh, by the way, your job looks really interesting. Here's my Calendly. Why don't you schedule a chat and we'll have a 30 minute chat." And it's just like super automated, super nondescript. It looks very like copy-paste, like just pulled this out of your profile. And it just kind of makes you pause and go,"Who are you? And why would I ever want to talk to you?"

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. Because anybody can just click a button and send a message out to 10,000 people. It doesn't really express any individual interest in that person. So what did you do to overcome that barrier?

Arthur Tutt:

So there was a couple of pieces. So part of it was like the tech side of it, in terms of like the tools that I used. And part of it was the approach that I took. You got any preference, which way we go first?

Dan Lemp:

No, whatever you want.

Arthur Tutt:

In terms of the approach, what I did I feel like is different. Like in general, what a lot of people do say like,"Hey, your job looks interesting. Let's schedule a chat. Here's my calendar, book a time". Right. And you're like,"I don't really know who you are. Right. I don't really know what you want. This is very confusing. I don't want to schedule the call." The thing that I did that was different is: instead of asking for something, I just gave. And so what I would typically do is I was using loom at the time. And so loom for anybody who doesn't know, lets you record your screen, but also has the camera recording yourself too. And so typically what I would do is, so first of all, I would connect with somebody on LinkedIn and then I would find from the profile like what their website was. And so I would go to the website and I'd take a look and I'd be recording this and I'd see like, alright,"Well I noticed that you don't have a Facebook pixel on your website. And just so you know, Facebook pixels get through this and this, you also don't have Google analytics or Google tag manager, and it's useful for this. I was taken a little look at the SEO on your website, and there's some keyword opportunities here. Taking a look at the Facebook ad manager, I can see that either you're not running any ads. Or the ads that you're running, I see like, okay, there's some areas here where we could make it better." And so basically I was just giving them a mini strategy session, but giving them a mini kind of 5 to 10 minutes free gift review of, here's kind of what I see going on for you. And people really responded to that.

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. I remember you saying that people were blown away. Just the simple fact that you were making a video specifically for them, specifically about their website; and giving them advice, which is specific to their company that would actually help them out- giving that value upfront. It was really powerful for you.

Arthur Tutt:

Exactly. Just like a hundred percent tailored to them. And obviously not everybody was like,"Okay, here's my wallet and my credit card, let's sign up and do this". But I had a lot of people respond along the lines of,"Hey, look, we're not looking for this right now, but I really love what you did here. Like, I really love your approach. You really went through". And people would open up and like write paragraphs and paragraphs. I was actually just digging through some of my old messages right now. They write paragraphs back, being like,"Oh yeah. As a business, we were looking at XYZ and we were considering this. We're not looking at doing Google ads right now. But we thought about doing this and this". And just like suddenly the conversation changed instead of being like,"Don't talk to me, I'm not interested"- to being like,"Yeah, here's what's going on in our business. This might not work right now"; but it still opened up the dialogue and the communication.

Josh Strawczynski :

It's so funny because there's so many companies, those guys you were talking about that spam online pitch. They are paid to do that. They are a company which is selling,"Hey, we'll send out your brand name and your offer on your behalf"- which is craziness. When y ou think about it in a social context, you would never ever run up to someone at a party and be like,"Hey, hey buy my products!" You would at least have an opener like,"Hey, y ou're a Patriot's fan, how's it going to go?"- an i ce b reaker. Have you ever read Ogilvie on Advertising?

Arthur Tutt:

Yes. That's where he talks about the rolls Royce. The loudest thing is the electric clock.

Josh Strawczynski :

That is one of the references from it. Very well done. The thing that I'm always reminded of is the social contract, which is the:"For you to pay attention to my advertising, I need to give you something in value"; which is the very definition of marketing, the exchange of value. And I love that what you are doing is giving value. And what were you asking in return? Like, did you have a question that you pose to them or an easy next step?

Arthur Tutt:

So the next step from there was to work on scheduling a call. And again, some people like, I remember I had one guy, he said to me like,"We're not interested in hiring you right now, but I want to have a call with you. Just like I showed my wife the video and she was so impressed. I was just like, I just want to know who you are". Right. So things like that started happening.

Josh Strawczynski :

And it's funny because when people feel like they know you it's that reciprocation thing; they feel like they owe you something. Or at least there's not that barrier to talk to you in the future when they do have a problem.

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. Or if one of their friends has a problem the next day and they're like,"Man, I really wish I had a good Google ads accounts right now." And then they say,"Well, actually I was just talking to this guy, Arthur."

Arthur Tutt:

And that was part of the approach that I was taking too. I wasn't specifically looking only at the short term in terms of like, I need the sale now. I was also setting it up in terms of, okay, I'm putting out good karma, opening up the relationship saying hi. And perhaps down the road, some opportunity will come up.

Dan Lemp:

Yeah. And does this cost any money to do, to actually implement that strategy of outreach?

Arthur Tutt:

So the short answer is, I'm going to say, no, you could do it for free. In fact, I did it mostly for free, but there are some tools that cost a bit of money that you can use to improve the situation. So, okay. So first of all, so there's loom, which I was using. I'm sure there are other video capture softwares out there. Loom has a free version, which works great. If you go pro I think the pros is at 10 bucks a month and it just lets you save a lot more videos. So if you're doing this regularly, it'd be worth having the pro version, but you don't need it. The other tool that I was using was the LinkedIn sales navigator. Now they do offer the first month free with sales navigator. So what I actually did(here's a little secret) was I used that month for free, send it as many requests as I could. And then when I was just so busy at that point, I'm like,"All right, we'll just cancel the sales."

Dan Lemp:

So what does that tool actually do- the LinkedIn sales finder, is it?

Arthur Tutt:

So the sales navigator, basically what it lets you do is: let's say you've got very specific criteria that you're looking for. You're like,"I want accountants that live in Australia also happened to be the CEOs only in companies that are one to 10 people", and whatever."They're a member of some specific group". Like you could put in very specific search criteria and then LinkedIn basically searches through its whole database and pulls out- those are the people. So if your focus is"Okay, I just want to reach out to CEO's". You can look for that, right. If you just want to find people that are solopreneurs, self-employed; like, whatever it is, it lets you find that very specific person.

Josh Strawczynski :

And what did you find was the niche target audience which responded best to what you were offering?

Arthur Tutt:

So my general approach is at the time I was still like starting out in digital marketing. And so I didn't think about going straight to like fortune 500 companies here. So I want to find the small, like solo preneur coaches, accountants; who are those smaller businesses that would be able to like take somebody like me on?

Josh Strawczynski :

Oh, that makes sense. I'm trying to think now from business owners who are listening to this thinking,"Sounds great, but to create a video for every single person I want to send something to, how much time are we talking about to create those videos and to send those messages? And what percentage of people are actually coming back to you as a result? So if we can then use that math to work out a time, cost per conversation.

Arthur Tutt:

It is a really good question because obviously the reason why automation is so attractive, is because it is scalable. You can send off thousands and thousands of them. Right. And so it's true, the approach that I was taking was actually quite time consuming, because I wanted the videos to be about three minutes. But typically I would record it and then I'd look at the time and I was like,"Well, that was 8-10 minutes. Oops." So I probably could have refined it a little bit to be a bit shorter. You could probably come up with a three minute pitch that still breaks the ice and does the intro. I might've gotten a little bit too in depth. Like I guess your question is basically like how much time are you spending for every phone call that you scheduled?

Josh Strawczynski :

Yes, effectively. I was thinking if we could work out how long every message takes to send(maybe we say it's five minutes each), cause you could get really efficient at what percentage responded.

Arthur Tutt:

Yeah. So let's say you spend five minutes reviewing their website, reviewing their social media, coming up with some ideas. You spend another five minutes, the video together; a couple of minutes to send it off. So let's say you can get it down to about 15 minutes, the whole process. So maybe work on sending out 10 of those in a day, three hours maybe. And then I feel like if I sent off 10, I would typically see about seven or eight replies. Like people replying back being like,"Hey, that was really cool. I appreciated that". And then of that, I would say one to two would be interested in scheduling.

Josh Strawczynski :

That is phenomenal because the numbers that most people work on when it comes to say sending out cold emails is well below 1%. And the concept is that we can just learn and share, and we might get 0.2% response, but we can work with that. You're talking about like a 70% response rate. I can't even work out what percentage higher that is.

Arthur Tutt:

It's a lot of percentages higher. 7,000? I'm g onna say 7000%.

Josh Strawczynski :

To set yourself, one of the ways that business owners do this is, they work at the cost per hour of their staff. And so in Australia, each half of their business comes from that might be the average 30-40 Australian dollars an hour for a high sales person. You say it's basically an hour a response. If you could get 30 or$40 for a lead if the person on the phone, who's actually interested, those business people would be so interested. Yeah. Tell us, I mean, you were coming in probably quite cheap cause you standing out, which is fine. What percentage of those were you closer into a'give me some form of money' as the next step?

Arthur Tutt:

I don't have exact numbers on that. In terms of number of people I close versus number of messages that I sent out, I want to say about 1%. So if I sent out a hundred messages, then one person from that.

Josh Strawczynski :

Okay, work that backwards- from once you got them on the phone, what percentage of those phone calls turned into a sale?

Arthur Tutt:

I don't have the numbers off the top of my head right now.

Josh Strawczynski :

Right? Traditionally, most people would say somewhere between one and five and one and three, depending on what you're offering; which I think is where you would probably end up at.

Arthur Tutt:

It was somewhere in that range.

Josh Strawczynski:

Yeah. So I mean, worst-case scenario one and five 40 bucks a lead; talking about$200"advertising costs" per sale. That's unbelievable. Do you feel like there's a cap to this or do you feel like you could just repeat it forever and scale up?

Arthur Tutt:

That's a good question because it does. Again, I think a big part of why i t gets a positive response from people is because it doesn't have so much of that feeling of scalability, but it does feel more personal. I'm sure you could mechanise it somewhat. Maybe automate some of the process. Perhaps some of the video is prerecorded to simplify some of the process. I don't feel it's super easy to scale.

Josh Strawczynski :

But you're not going to run out of leads. If you were to do this every day for five years, there's still going to be more people you can send emails to. That's what I was getting at.

Arthur Tutt:

Oh yeah. Like you're never gonna run out.

Josh Strawczynski :

It's amazing. Now, because you've been doing it for a while, have you started to explore with deep diving into bigger companies? Or see if the same approach works with maybe not fortune 500, but CFOs and established companies, as an example?

Arthur Tutt:

Well, so what's actually been interesting for me recently because I've actually been employed now at the marketing agency and there is an inbound stream of leads. So for the time being actually, that's what's been keeping me focused and busy, but I have been looking into bringing this back again.

Josh Strawczynski :

Oh, right. So you actually stepped away from managing your own stuff to do this for an advertising agency. Was that for experience or was it just consistent knowledge? What made it attractive to you?

Arthur Tutt:

It was an interesting journey, and I feel like I really enjoyed the process of starting up and running my own business. But I also started to realize fairly quickly being a one person show after a while becomes somewhat limited. And I started to see the benefit of actually working with the team, with an agency, somebody who actually knows how to build websites and is a developer and have a graphic designer and have the whole team instead of me trying to do absolutely everything. And that was actually an issue that I had with one of my clients is: one of my clients hired me to run their Google ad campaign. In my opinion, I did a great job running their Google ad campaign. I don't know Dan, you might remember this, but there was issues with their website, with their landing page. And ironically, this was actually like a website development company, so this is what they should be good at. But I was like,"I can make the best Google ads in the world. But if your website can't convert, I can't do anything here". And despite my efforts to try to get them on board to make some changes to the website, couldn't do it.

Josh Strawczynski :

This(to any customers listening) is one of the reasons you hire an agency. Because you're not just hiring ad bots who is just gonna run an ad words campaign for you; you're hiring professional copywriters, developers, technical people, Dan and his whole SEO team. All o f t hose p eople c ome under one umbrella. And if there is a problem, they just fix it. Yeah. Great example, Arthur. So, you enjoying the new role being in a s t ructured c ompany now; having that burden taken off your shoulders?

Arthur Tutt:

I've been loving it. Yeah.

Dan Lemp:

All right. Well, thanks so much for coming on with us. We know you have to get going and talk to one of these fabulous clients of yours. And thanks so much for this information. I think that's going to be really helpful for a lot of business owners out there.

Arthur Tutt:

Yeah, my pleasure. Great. Seeing you again, Dan, Josh, great connecting with you.

Josh Strawczynski:

Looking forward for the next time.

Arthur Tutt:

We'll talk soon.

How to find clients through LinkedIn
How to make your pitch appealing
How to turn the pitch into a sale
How to do cost effective outreach
How to scale cost, time and result of outreach