In this episode of the Social Selling Show, Will Barron and Daniel Disney talk about personal branding and its benefits for B2B sales professionals.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- The Million Pound LinkedIn Message by Daniel Disney
- Sam Dunning’s Business Growth Show
- Send your questions to Will@salesman.org
Transcript
Will Barron:
Welcome to the Social Selling Show with myself Will Baron and the king… I like this name. I might quiz you on where it came from. The King of Social Selling, Daniel Disney. Daniel, how’s it going, sir?
Daniel Disney:
It’s going very well, Will, I’m so excited to be doing this and excited to dig into this new show.
Why Daniel Disney is the King of Social Selling · [00:20]
Will Barron:
Good man. Well, let’s start with this because you are the King of Social Selling. I don’t want to turn this into an interview show. We’re going to get into why personal brand is so important within sales, B2B sales and social selling in a second. But where did the King of Social Selling come from? What moment just clicked and you’re like, “That’s me. That’s my branding from now on.”
Daniel Disney:
I would like to clarify it wasn’t me that came up with it, I think that would be horrendous if I referred to myself as the King of Social Selling. It was actually a group of people that do an amazing podcast In the Bed series basically. And they film these episodes. They’re in their bed and you’re in your bed and you do the episode, do that. Really fun it’s Laura and Enrique. Enrique is from G2 and they basically referred to me as the King of Social Selling, as prep for the episode I said, “Well, why not, I’ll order a crown.”
Will Barron:
Nice.
Daniel Disney:
In the episode I wear it but beyond that it just sits on there. So, not me, but it came from other people.
Defining Personal Branding From a Sales Perspective · [01:17]
Will Barron:
Well, I’m glad I asked now and I’ll check out that show myself. So we’re going to get into personal brand. So let’s get started with this of what… Let’s start with the basics and build up from it and I’ll give you my thoughts. Do you have a definition of what a personal brand is? What the heck is a personal brand within the context of sales?
Daniel Disney:
I was going to say it’s try to keep it as simple as possible. It’s your reputation. It’s how people perceive you. It’s not something you define. It’s something that others define of you. So it’s something everyone has, whether you have a good one or a bad one, we all have one. We have this digital presence, whether you’re active or not active, it still defines your personal brand. So the people that aren’t active on social media, they have a brand it’s just not a good one. And the ones that are active and building it obviously have a more positive one.
“You have a personal brand whether you choose to curate it and create it or not.” – Will Barron · [02:07]
Will Barron:
I’ve never thought about that that’s interesting just off the get-go. I’ve never thought about it like that, you have a personal brand whether you choose to curate it and create it or not. And I always pictured it like this from a more… just very specific to salespeople. Your personal brand is and tell me your thoughts on this, as far as I’m concerned, when someone Googles your name that is your personal brand, whether your LinkedIn profile comes up, whether the court case comes up from you five years ago when you did something stupid when you were younger and hopefully it’s been forgotten. But that’s what I want to get into in this episode of how do we curate that and the benefits of it. But do you agree with that? Do you disagree in the Google age that your personal brand is what comes up on Google?
Daniel Disney:
Absolutely. But it goes beyond just what is Googled it’s when people type in keywords into LinkedIn, if your profile isn’t showing up, if your content isn’t showing up, it’s the conversations people are having, decision-makers are having with each other, “What would you recommend for this?” If your name isn’t being brought up, that is a reflection of the personal brand you have or do not have.
Personal Branding Versus Exceptional Selling skills · [03:01]
Will Barron:
Okay. So I don’t know your thoughts on this. I’d like to ask you the question and this has been a debate on multiple episodes of different podcasts and shows I’ve been on recently. Daniel, again, in the Google age, the internet age that we’re all selling through right now, mid or mid post COVID as vaccines start to roll out. We don’t have the opportunity to necessarily go and knock on doors and speak to people in person, which is more important, the personal brand or discreet on the phone, email selling skills?
Daniel Disney:
It’s probably the worst answer I could give but it’s both. I never understand why-
Will Barron:
No. No. Okay. Let me rephrase that. I would’ve forced the forced issue here. If you could even have an incredible personal brand, tonnes of followers on social media and as I said a positive personal brand, as opposed to a negative one, or you could be incredible on the phone, incredible traditional sales skills. Which one do you think would drive more revenue?
Daniel Disney:
Well, there’s no easy answer to that. I’m going to go with the personal brand, obviously, because it’s worked well for me. And I see it work so well for others, but I’ve also met a lot of people that can’t necessarily pull off the same type of results and they are better on the phone. And the phone is still working. People are still crushing it on the phone with email and things like that. So they’re both valuable. What I can definitely attest to is how powerful a personal brand is. And certainly this year I’ve seen so many more salespeople build and leverage personal brands where we’ve gone into this remote, virtual working environment. And it is more difficult to get older people on the phone and certainly via email. So there is a lot of opportunity, but let’s not push away any of the other options.
Key Benefits of Creating a Powerful Personal Brand · [04:44]
Will Barron:
Of course, the answer is both. I just wanted to get that a bit of debate going because you’re on the same side as this as me. I think moving forward into 2021 personal brand is going to become even more important. And let me give you a… I don’t know if this is an analogy or metaphor or a simile I always get confused between the three of them. But if I ring you up Dan and say, “Hey, Dan, I’ve got some investment advice for you.” I never would do this because I have no idea what I would be investing in. But if I said, “Dan I’ve got some investment advice, you’ve got to take this up, yada, yada, yada,” go full Wolf of Wall Street on you and start pitching you down the phone for penny stocks, whatever it is and I’m an incredible salesperson, I feel like I would get… Because we know each other a little bit as well, I’d probably get 50% of the way there.
Will Barron:
And I would consider myself to have above average sales skills, so that’s sales skills. If you put Warren Buffett’s on the other side of this, who probably has great sales skills as well, but obviously has an incredible brand, especially within the realm of investment. If he rings you up and you don’t re-mortgage your house and put every penny you have on the advice of Warren Buffett, you’d be a crazy person. So that’s how I in my mind differentiate personal brand from sales skills. Once you’ve got that personal brand, you’re building so much trust at distance before you even engage with someone that a lot of the more sales skills I feel anyway become less and less important.
Daniel Disney:
I’ll give you a real example of that really brought to life. If you were a sales director, a VP of sales and your CEO said, “Look, I’ve heard a lot about cool listening software, revenue intelligence. We need to get something like that.” Chances are a lot of VPs and sales leaders out there are going to go, “Well, do you know what, I keep seeing Gong all over social media. And actually Sarah Brazier, she’s an SDR, an account executive. I see her content, they’re doing some really great stuff. I’ll ping her a message. I will get in touch with them.” Even though there are lots of different other platforms out there, there are lots of different options, other great companies, Gong has built up both a huge business brand, but more importantly their investing in their personal brands for their sales reps. And so their name and brand is significantly bigger and will be the go-to for a lot of people, so that’s probably the same thing. All these other companies probably have really good sales people that are great at generating sales, but they’re going against the tide and that’s the challenge.
The Link Between Personal Branding and Succesful Sales People · [06:55]
Will Barron:
And that’s been my experience in medical devices at the last company I worked for was the there’s two organisations that both do endoscopic imaging basically, keyhole surgery, if anyone’s unfamiliar with that term and I would sell the whole camera stack and a lot of the operating theatre. And when you walk into an operating theatre or I don’t think in the US they call it operating theatres, the OR whatever. The cool stuff hanging from the ceiling is what I used to sell. And I’ve worked for two companies, one Japanese company, one German company, and the German company was so much easier to sell for because they were the cool company. And it was similar to what Gong does. This organisation did loads of published research. They would be far more likely to allow me to take a surgeon on basically a trip to Germany and to go and spend some time with these world renowned surgeons that they were affiliated with.
Will Barron:
They’re basically doing influencer marketing before it was influencer marketing with all these different surgeons they’d have on board. And it was so much easier to sell those products because again, I’ve said this when I’ve been interviewed on the Salesman podcasts and stuff before. I never really cold called anyone because it was, “Hey, it’s Will from XYZ company.” And it was, “Hey, come in, come and have a chat with us,” because they wanted to engage. And I feel like Gong does that well from the perspective… We can talk about perhaps individuals but from a corporate perspective, they’re always publishing data. They send me data all the time and we’re talking about it now, we’re doing advertising on their behalf and doing that brand building for them, even though I’ve never actually used the product itself. So how incredible and powerful is that?
Daniel Disney:
And then the beauty of it is, again, it goes beyond the brand like individuals are building huge brands and huge audiences, where a lot of people either don’t know what Gong is or what they actually do but they know the person, they like the person, they’ve received a lot of value from the person and that is a big advantage to salespeople. I hope we’re going to dig in this today, it’s pretty easy and free to obtain. It doesn’t take years. You don’t need any prerequisites. Anyone can do it. Anyone has the opportunity and it just takes a small amount of work.
Personal Branding for Inbound and Outbound Sales Strategies · [09:05]
Will Barron:
Okay. So we’ll get practical in a second. I just want to do one final bit of selling the audience on this. I want everyone who’s listening to be foaming at the mouth to put all the practical elements of this into play in a few minutes time. But Daniel, what are the benefits of this? What are the tangible benefits of building a personal brand?
Daniel Disney:
It impacts both inbound and outbound. Do this right, and you will generate and create an inbound lead generation machine that will bring in inquiries on a consistent basis. But equally you’re going to create outbound opportunities, opportunities to start conversations and to even accelerate the sales process. Because as you were saying when you’re making cold calls and I’ve spent years making cold calls, you spend most of the time introducing who you are, where your from. Chances are they don’t know who you are, they don’t know where you’re from, you’re trying to build that trust and credibility. When you’ve got a personal brand a lot of those calls transform. And instead of, “Hi, I’m Dan from so-and-so. Oh, hi, I’m Dan. ‘Dan, I follow you on LinkedIn, love your content, love that post you did the other day.'” You’ve already taken so many more steps in that sales process. You’re not starting at point blank, so tonnes and tonnes of opportunities.
Building Trust at Distance · [10:19]
Will Barron:
And just to double down on that we call it over at Salesman.org building trust at distance. What you doing is a lot of the hard work is been done for you by essentially robots, by computers, sat in a server room somewhere. They’re working on your behalf as almost a promotional team for you. Clearly you’re killing it on LinkedIn, me, not so much I don’t really put any effort into it. And for context I put zero effort into LinkedIn and I’ve got like 9,000 or something, seven or eight or 9,000… I don’t even know how many thousand, so many thousand followers. And when I post something thousands of people see it.
Will Barron:
Now to introduce yourself to thousands of people, you need a massive trade show and some probably cocaine or Red Bull or something to be able to get round. And you’re not going to make a good impression because you’re pushing your brand onto people as opposed to on LinkedIn, you’re essentially doing inbound marketing, and you’re allowing people to take the content that you’re doing and to put their own thoughts and spin on it without the pressure of someone who stood in front of them to try and sway their opinion on things.
How Scalability Drives Brand Reputation · [11:17]
Will Barron:
So there’s massive benefits in that because it scales. I guess that’s what I’m trying to get at here Daniel of what is the tangible benefits of a scalable brand. I’ll give one as it comes to mind of you become more valuable to an organisation, you will probably have a higher base salary if you have a larger LinkedIn profile audience, because they know coming into the game that you’ve got more chance of getting more deals done. Is that fair? I don’t have any data on that, I don’t have evidence if that’s true. But if I was hiring someone, I’d pay someone more if they’ve got a 100,000 followers on LinkedIn than someone who has 3000.
Daniel Disney:
I haven’t seen it from a hiring perspective, but certainly from a promotional reward basis for employees, I’ve seen a lot of employees grow their personal brands whilst in a business and be rewarded pay rises as their audience grows, given more responsibilities, been promoted. You’re absolutely right. It is a tangible value to a business. Most businesses I see don’t have more than two 3000 followers on LinkedIn. I’ve seen SDRs and AEs and BDRs build up audiences 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 followers plus. These companies have marketing teams desperately trying to win LinkedIn and you’ve got a single SDR just putting out authentic content on a regular basis, building up a bigger audience, a bigger brand, which becomes significantly more valuable.
Daniel Disney:
When you think how much money marketing teams spend on sponsored ads and content creation to get what, two likes per post and 2000 followers. You’ve got an SDR that’s spending five, 10 minutes a day writing a post building these bigger audiences with bigger value. So there was a significant value to it, both from a value to the individual, the leads they’re going to generate for them as a salesperson. You get some salespeople, so many leads coming through that they get dispersed to the team. It becomes a genuine lead source to the sales team. Again, outbound, increasing velocity, the list goes on.
Will Barron:
If you’re generating leads like that you are essentially unsackable and during a time of economic crisis like this, You’re laughing and tell me if you think I’m wrong but if I hire someone, even if they’re terrible sales person but their generating leads for the rest of the team, I might even rename them from salesperson to brand advocate or something like that. Again, your base salary might be way higher because like you might be able to… If you’ve got enough leverage within a marketplace and of course I’m not we’re not talking here to when it happens in months, this might be years. But if you have enough leverage in the marketplace, you got to be able to charge per inbound lead and build your own side hustle on the side of some of this.
Daniel Disney:
I’ve seen some people start to do something like that, not to a full-time extent, but they’ve been able to build something that they are rewarded from it. And as we’ve said Will this is super tangible and super achievable than anyone has the opportunity to do so. Lots of benefits but the key is to obviously know what to do, which is what we’re going to talk about today.
How to Launch and Scale Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn · [14:13]
Will Barron:
Okay. So let’s practical how the heck because I’m sold… You’ve sold me on to this Daniel. I want you to cover LinkedIn and then perhaps I’ll chime in on outside of LinkedIn, of different contents and platforms and whether we need our own personal brand website and stuff like that. But give us the 10,000 foot view of what we need to do on LinkedIn, practically, to just get the ball rolling with some of this.
“If you want to build a brand, you need to get your name, your personal name out there in a good, valuable, respected way.” – Daniel Disney · [15:08]
Daniel Disney:
There’s two things you can start with, easy to do, five, 10 minutes a day, huge, huge, huge impact on your personal brand, create content and engage in content, two simple things. Start sharing and creating your own content on a regular basis. Get your name out there. Two, three times a week up to five days a week, have your content going out there that’s valuable to your audience. And then on the flip side of that start commenting on industry relevant posts two or three times a day so that your name’s getting out there. If you want to build a brand, you need to get your name, your personal name out there in a good, valuable, respected way. So if you’re putting out valuable content and then commenting on other industry relevant posts every day that your prospect, your industry, your audience is logging in, they’re seeing your name dotting up every single day. Do that consistently. You’ll start to build a personal brand and it doesn’t take long. I’ve seen people come from nowhere build brands within weeks.
Will Barron:
You know Sam Dunning I assume you’ve gone back and forth with Sam. So Sam came out of nowhere. I was on his show recently. I’ll link to the show that I was on and I’ll link to an engagement you’ve had with him as well in the show notes of this episode. And Sam came out of nowhere, I’ve now helped him with… I don’t know if he wants me to share, but I’ve helped him behind the scenes with a bunch of stuff with his show. He just sent me a bottle of whiskey to say thank you. I didn’t know he existed like six months ago and now almost every day we’re engaging with different things.
Will Barron:
And to be fair, I’ve not said this to some directly and he’ll probably catch up with this show at some point. But if I ever need SEO marketing services, things like that, of course, I’m going to go to him. Maybe there’s a lag time of you’ve got to put a bit of work up front to earn business on the back of it, which is not unreasonable. Anything other than a cold call and just hounding a phone. You’re going to have a little bit of like time, whether it’s an email, you got to wait for a reply or you’ve got to book that meeting which is going to require a follow-up.
How to Measure the Success of Your Personal Branding Efforts · [16:40]
Will Barron:
So maybe the lag time is slightly longer than some of this, but the benefits are tangible. And that brings me to a question, Daniel, that you’ve probably been asked 500 times as the King of Social Selling, how do we know when this is working? How do we know when we need to change tactics slightly? And how do we know when it’s just not working at all and we need to rethink things?
Daniel Disney:
Yeah. Quick step back to the lag time point just to mention, you said that if and when you were looking for SEO and that’s a good point, you’re not ready right now so it may take you longer. It might take you a few months, weeks, maybe even years. But if you were looking for SEO right now and you’ve just built this relationship with Sam, you’d go now, it’s only because you don’t need it now but there are lots of people that need SEO and Sam’s winning that business because… And all he’s done I think in this year he’s recorded 100 podcast episodes. He just celebrated his 100th episode. He’s just been creating content and putting it out there. Obviously, he chose podcasting as his core point, but he shares those podcasts on LinkedIn. He creates content on LinkedIn organically anyway and you’re right, he came out of nowhere and he’s built this big brand and it’s helping his business.
Daniel Disney:
But he’s building on something that if he keeps doing it, it’s just going to keep going higher and higher. But then going back to the question, which is how do you know if this is working? How do you know if it’s actually delivering results? That’s that’s the point is it delivering results? Are you generating inbound leads? Question number one, yes or no. No. Okay. It could still be starting to work, but those are the results you want. Are you using it or is it impacting your sales conversations? So are the prospects you’re approaching are they aware of you before you speak to them? Are you making an impression before that conversation? Those are the most tangible metrics, behind the scenes of that is your audience growing? How much has your audience grown over a period of time?
Daniel Disney:
How much is the engagement growing on your posts? Are you still getting one or two likes a post or are you now getting 10, 20, 30 likes, are you getting 100 likes. Is the engagement growing are the views growing, has a hundred people seeing it, a thousand people, 10,000 people. All those things show that it is working, but your ultimate metric of success is money in the bank, sales, generated inbound or outbound.
Hubspot’s Definition of The Marketing Flywheel · [18:48]
Will Barron:
Sure. The way I like to think about this, you may be familiar with this. I think it came from the executives at HubSpot originally, but other have people talked about it is they talk about the marketing flywheel. So maybe 10, 15 years ago with HubSpot specifically with the inbound efforts they do, they would just produce so much content flood the market. And because if you Googled, I don’t know something that HubSpot would cover, CRM comparisons, the first page… There would only be say 500 results in Google and I’m butchering these numbers slightly but for the point, well, if HubSpot produce 30 pieces of content, they’re going to be within the top 500 and they’re going to get traffic from that. Now there’s so much content everywhere that it’s very difficult to just mass produce stuff. So what they focus on is what we do focus on over at Salesman.org, which is what they call the marketing flywheel.
Will Barron:
This is you produce one bit of content and the flywheel doesn’t turn because nobody cares because you just some schmuck who’s posted one thing on LinkedIn, but then the second, third, 20th 50th, the flywheel starts to spin then. And it’s big and it’s heavy and it’s laborious to get going but once it’s spinning then you can take a week off and it’s still spinning. Then you can experiment with something else and it’s still spinning. Then you can add a podcast on the side of things or you could start doing mini interviews or whatever, and one fly wheel turns the next fly wheel so your next project goes a little bit quicker as well.
Will Barron:
And that’s how I focus on all of this and going back to Sam for a second, you said a hundred episodes there. That seems like a lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of effort. And Sam is clearly having results on the back of all this now, he’s doing great. But it’s only two episodes a week for a year and I don’t know about you Daniel, but this year it has gone past so fast for me. It doesn’t seem two minutes since January when I was last planning all my goals for the year. So if you did get your head down for a year, you can have real amazing results on the back of all this.
Why you Need to Consistently Publish Value Content on LinkedIn · [20:43]
Daniel Disney:
I’ll give you another example, obviously, Sam put a lot of time into it. Recording a podcast episode as you know it takes time. I’ve seen people and there’s a sales trainer in particular, which springs to mind who had no personal brand, no presence, no audience, nothing, literally a nobody in the industry. And all they did was spend five, 10 minutes a day, Monday to Friday, every day at 8:00 AM. They chose a specific time because it was before their working day. So before they even had to do any work, they wrote a post long form text-based post on LinkedIn, a story, a different story every day, but they were all valuable, insightful, entertaining thought-provoking stuff.
Daniel Disney:
And they did it consistently. And within three to six months, their audience had grown past 10,000. They were building a globally known brand and it didn’t take long they’re way past 30,000 now. One of the most credible people, everyone talks about them from zero and that’s all they ever did. I think they did it for about a year consistently. Every day, 8:00 AM, five, 10 minutes a day, they just wrote a story post. One single activity. They didn’t do the engagement. They didn’t do all the other stuff that you can do. That in itself, that small time commitment helped them build what then launched their own business.
Will Barron:
You’re going to shout them out. You give them a load of credit and it was like, “But I don’t like them so I’m going to cut off the name at the end of the anecdote.”
Daniel Disney:
I don’t like to name people unless they asked to be named. But lots of people know, usually when I say it they do know who it is, but there are lots of people doing similar things. Putting out content like that and building a brand, just wanted to give the impact that you don’t have to spend hours a day. You don’t have to put up tonnes of time to do it. It’s just being consistent and giving value.
Why Finding a Niche is Crucial When Building a Personal Brand · [22:23]
Will Barron:
Perfect. I feel like there’s some shenanigans going on there Daniel. So you can tell me off the air in a second. So before we wrap up here, what can someone do? What’s the next level on from this? Because there’ll be some people listening and their going Dan, King of Social Selling, Will Barron half knows what he’s doing perhaps off LinkedIn, I’ll touch on that in a second. But for anyone who’s perhaps beyond the beginner stage, got a few thousand followers, they’re doing what you’re outlining there. What is the next step for them to get to that intermediate level where perhaps they’re now engaging with an entire marketplace of for me it’d be entire marketplace of surgeons, as opposed to the just trying to engage with urologists who are using this product and, “I want to be in front them right now.”
“It’s not just finding the niche, but it’s then defining it yourself and really putting your footprint on it.” – Daniel Disney · [23:25]
Daniel Disney:
Do you know what the key for me was find a niche. So I built my personal brand in the start in sales. So everything sales that’s my background anyway. And it was only when I focused on the social selling and went into the niche that I then took it to that next step. And when I say it’s not just finding the niche, but it’s then defining it yourself and really putting your footprint on it. Hence the t-shirt, the hashtag, the branding, everything focused around that core subject. And that helped me go from a average growing personal brand to something a bit higher. So whatever your industry is, it doesn’t have to be jus the industry in general. It could be a subject in the industry, it could be a topic. Thinking back to Sarah Brasier at Gong, her big niche was the SDR, her role as an SDR. And she just doubled down on creating content and insight into that world to find something, something particular that you can then start to be defined for and that is how you then take that next step.
Will Barron:
And for context that’s something that I’ve really struggled with over at Salesman.org. And the best example of this is we’re doing a show on social selling, as you wear a hashtag social selling t-shirt and your brand is about social selling. If you were just generic Dan the probably quality and valuable sales trainer, this collaboration might not have come about. Because it’s difficult for me to then pitch a show to you and then get you on board with different things. And it’s something I struggle with over at Salesmen.org because from the very beginning we’ve narrowed down things to B2B sales, higher deal size sales but it’s still too broad. So how we’re going about this is collaborations with people like yourself so that we can remain in that broad umbrella of things, but that is far more difficult, expensive, difficult to get right. And to get that marketing flywheel going is far harder than taking your advice here. I wish you would have told me that six years ago Dan.
Daniel Disney:
Well, you know now Will.
Daniel Explains Why you Should Own Your Name as a Domain For Personal Branding · [25:11]
Will Barron:
Good man. Okay. And just some final thoughts for me before we get to a couple of audience questions, and I’ll just throw this out there and you can tell me whether you agree or disagree. I feel like everybody, if possible, should own the name .com. So I own in fact, no, I don’t even do that. I own willbarron.net because a freelancer designer from Sheffield just below me here in the UK, a couple of hours away owns willbarron.com. I’ll throw that and tell me what you think so you should own your name.com. It should have a website on there even if it just does link your LinkedIn page and maybe a CV or resume or whatever the Americans call it, it should be searchable. You should on LinkedIn be linking to that page so that when you Google the page we won’t dive too far into how Google works.
Will Barron:
Google works on a… basically authority. If you get lots of links to a specific page from pages with high authority, Google goes, “LinkedIn, that’s a good site they must know what they’re talking about,” then you rise up the search engine rankings. So the point what I’m trying to do here is engineer when someone Googles you, it is probably LinkedIn at the top then it’s your own page underneath and then anything else underneath that is perfect. And then I want people to start thinking about not just creating a brand on social media. I want people to start thinking about how they can get little tiny PR wins. For example, I was featured in the local Leeds Bradford newspaper because the local hospital just did a massive deal all new theatres. And I got the hospital PR team to mention me so it was just one line with Will Barron did XYZ.
Will Barron:
And I then clipped that from the newspaper that’s on the site as well and there’s another link. So if you would have Googled me five, six years ago, before I started Salesman.org and all that good stuff, it would have been LinkedIn page, it would have been the company profile page. Again, if you get your company to link to you on a blog post or something, you can create content on their blog even if it’s just one page that’s valuable. And so I want people to engineer that when you get Googled, it comes up with these things.
Will Barron:
One, it looks good. It makes you look like a somebody. And two, if anyone writes anything negative about you’ve got somewhat of an ability, not that that should ever happen, but if it did happen or someone who has the same name as you as done some horrific things and their name pops up, or you’ve got a similar name as a tennis star, or UFC fighter or whatever it is, which is unfortunate because they will come up when people Google your name. I want you to engineer that Google first page results via those three or four simple steps so that you’re in control of things. So Dan, there’s one step beyond LinkedIn perhaps and this maybe if we’ve gone from beginner to intermediate, this might be what we do at a so-called advanced level but what are your thoughts on that plan?
Daniel Disney:
No, I’m with you a million percent Will and I think it is something we should cover more advanced stage. I think that’s a bit further down that an entry level but you’re right. And even for a name as unique as mine danieldisney.com is taken, which frustrates me a lot. So I’m danieldisney.net as well, so no, I totally get it. Everyone should. And here’s a thought for sales leaders and business owners out there, why not provide this for your team? Don’t own it, give it to them, give them the right to do it costs nothing to set up a web page, a URL. Set it up for them because it’s going to help your company.
Daniel Disney:
Get your marketing team to design them a nice little website that looks good and half decent that links them back to their LinkedIn profile, your company, all that wonderful stuff. Set them up with it, it’s going to make them feel amazing, “Wow. My company set me up a website, my own website,” but it’s going to benefit you significantly as well. And then if they leave give it to them, don’t be a horrible person and try and take ownership of it. Make sure it’s theirs. They own it. They can change it. They can edit it. But it’s going to benefit you way more than the tiny cost that it would be. But you’re right Will absolutely everyone should have that.
Will Barron:
It’s 10 quid a year for a domain registration, it’s absolutely nothing, that’s a brilliant idea. That’s almost something a sales manager could do as a Christmas present or something like that. Put your own money in it, spend a couple 100 quid, get your team sorted out. As you said, it’s a nice little thing for them and it shows that you are going above and beyond for your team as well. So we’ll do another episode in the future. I’ve made a note here on advanced personal branding. We’ll class this as the overview of personal branding. And I guess we can cover this topic multiple times and we’ll string them all together. So let’s move on to a couple of audience questions here Daniel, if that’s cool with you, and I don’t think I’m speaking out turn, I’m going to
see Daniel shake his head in a minute be like, “No, no, no, no, no.”
The Benefits of Retaining Past LinkedIn Connections Once Someone Changes Industry · [30:33]
Will Barron:
So if you want to win a copy of Daniel’s excellent book, The Million-Pound LinkedIn Message. If we feature you on the show, if we feature one of your questions, Daniel will very kindly send you a copy. I’m seeing the nodding in agreement here to make sure that I’m not costing him tonnes of money every week with different books being sent out. So we’re on the same wave left for though which is good. I’ll set up a website for this in the future with a form that you can submit your messages, but right now if you just email your social selling questions to wil@salesmen.org. And if we feature you on the show we’ll send you a copy of the book. So today’s questions come from… I’m going to just use first names until I find out what’s appropriate. Because we don’t call people out if they say something that might be disparaging to them or their level of skill. So Leonardo asks, “Would Daniel recommend deleting past LinkedIn connections if someone changes industry or sector?”
Daniel Disney:
It really depends. Generally I’d say no. So an individual person on LinkedIn is an individual person. So whilst they may not be of any value to you or ever going to buy from you, they still have an audience. So that person might have 500 connections, 5,000 connections, 50,000 connections. Chances are they’re going to be people in their audiences that are still valuable to you. So only if on an extreme scenario, can you genuinely say them in their entire audience are of no value to you then okay if you really feel you need to.
Daniel Disney:
But let’s remember you have a 30,000 connection limit, so again, you’d have to really be at your limit to even start considering deleting people. But think beyond the individual, they may never buy from you, but if they click like or write a comment or share your content it’s going to reach their audience. And there is a much higher chance there’s going to be people in their audience that may then become customers of yours, so think of the bigger picture is my advice.
The Relationship Between Dwell Time and Content Engagement on LinkedIn · [31:35]
Will Barron:
I don’t know if there’s data on this, you’re the King of Social Selling so I’m going to ask you, is there any evidence that if you put out a post, it goes to your connections. Is there any evidence that there’s a waiting in the LinkedIn algorithm where a high percentage of connections who see it, who click on it or view it, leads to more sharing on the platform? What I mean by that is, is it better to have 5,000 people who click on everything you do? Or is it better to have 30,000 people who see it or perhaps out of those only 7,000 people click on stuff? I didn’t explain that very well, but hopefully it makes sense.
Daniel Disney:
I think I get what you’re saying Will the algorithm used to encourage early engagement. That’s why LinkedIn Pods grew massively over the last couple of years. Everyone wanted those first few likes and comments because it meant that LinkedIn pushed the content out further and wider. That’s changed and LinkedIn’s algorithm now pushes dwell time. So how long a person actually stays on the post. So the people that are staying longer on the posts then LinkedIn’s pushing it out further and wider. So you want your content to be more engaging.
“People focus so much on, “I’m only going to connect with someone who’s going to buy from me,” too narrow-minded. The bigger picture opens up so many more opportunities.” – Daniel Disney · [33:12]
Daniel Disney:
From an audience perspective, you want to have the most audience and the bigger audiences as possible, but you want it to be relevant or otherwise they’re not going to engage in your content. So make sure you’ve got the right people but I think a lot of people get too bogged down on quality versus quantity. When actually, if they look at it, there’s probably a lot more people… You don’t just connect with decision makers. Don’t just connect people who are going to buy from you, connect with other people within their business. There’s never just one, rarely, one decision maker on their own. Connect with the other influencers decision makers in the business, other people in the team. There are so many insights and benefits than just people focus so much, “I’m only going to connect with someone who’s going to buy from me,” too narrow minded. The bigger picture opens up so many more opportunities.
The Pros and Cons of LinkedIn Engagement Pods [33:19]
Will Barron:
So I knew about the dwell time, I knew about… I knew, is that the right word? I understood about the LinkedIn Pods was that a reaction from LinkedIn to stop someone sending an email in a Slack group, just getting 50 likes then it being fired out. And now it requires someone to actually if they’re looking at dwell time, have it on the screen, probably scroll slightly and then move on and consume all of the content. Was that a reaction from LinkedIn to reduce the impact of LinkedIn Pods, which we’ll cover in another topic I’m sure?
Daniel Disney:
I was going to say we should cover Pods in a separate thing. I don’t think it was LinkedIn trying to squash Pods because pods in themselves didn’t have much benefit anyway, but the small amount of increased engagement they got at the start didn’t suddenly generate lots of opportunities because it was just the same people, the same audiences, real minimal benefit. But I think it’s LinkedIn constantly trying to make it beneficial to the user. So all they’re trying to do is make sure their covering the right metrics and dwell time shows someone’s actually reading the post, they’re engaged and actually consuming it, which is a much better way of measuring quality of content over quantity or people trying to hack that engagement metric so I think it’s the right thing.
Will Barron:
Okay, well, we’ll wrap up with that then Daniel. Anything we’ve missed? Anything you want to throw on the end of the conversation before we wrap things up here?
Start Building Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn · [34:37]
Daniel Disney:
A final bit of advice to everyone who’s watching or listening to this we’re in December, whenever this goes out, just start. Whatever day you’re listening to this, whatever day you’re watching it. Start today, go out there, log into LinkedIn, put your first post out, write a few comments, just start and then build it into your strategy. Every day they have five, 10 minutes, 15 minutes put by and make yourself come onto LinkedIn. Just start doing it consistently. You’ll be surprised what you’ll be able to achieve just from doing that.
Will Barron:
Perfect. Well with that was the king of sales, Daniel Disney. My name is Will Barron and that has just been… I need a better outro for this at some point, everyone listening and Daniel, but that has just been the Social Selling Show.
