We are so excited to have Wayne Breitbarth back to Experience Inbound to lead us in his workshop, How to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation and Business Success!
Wayne has been featured in Forbes, Inc., Wired, and American Express Open Forum and seen on NBC and Fox Business. Now he's bringing his collaborative and engaging strategy session to Milwaukee and Green Bay for Experience Inbound.
Get a sneak-peek into his workshop (and pick up a few quick LinkedIn tips) by watching or reading our recent interview below.
Tell us a little about your background. What are you doing right now with LinkedIn and how many iterations of your book The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success are there now?
I was one of those early guys who saw something in LinkedIn; I even had hair then. I knew it was more than a social media platform, that it was really just this beautiful database of people. The first edition of my book came out in 2011, and now we're in our fourth edition. In the beginning, we weren't sure how to define success or what was the best practice. I was trying lots of stuff and listening to what others were trying.
LinkedIn has been around for 15 years, and there are best practices. We don't guess anymore. So that's what I'm going to bring to this event. I will bring what works and give "aha moments" to the audience whether they're in charge of marketing, sales or own the company.
There's so much to talk about with LinkedIn, especially across all the different divisions of people in a workspace. With our limited time I believe your workshop will discuss using LinkedIn for lead generation and business success and really getting into the specifics.
What else can attendees expect to take away from your workshop?
At the highest level, what they're going to take away is "what's the noise, and what's the results?" Sometimes, people get distracted by the noise, and it causes them to forget their strategy. So we're going to talk a lot about defining strategy. In fact, that will be one of the first steps in the workshop. Then we can share, and maybe I can help add to those strategies.
From a format standpoint, how do you see your workshop running?
So I'm building some exercises where attendees can build on ideas that I share and either take them back to the office fully baked and take them back to the office and get them implemented right away. Or they will be halfway baked to the point where you can finish them up when you have a little more time to write and then implement.
My goal is that you'll go home with a toolkit, and walk away with not only my input but the input of other people in the room. There's going to be tons of synergy in that room. It's going to be very high-energy and very active.
When most people think of LinkedIn, they think of the sales side of things. Do you think this workshop will be a good fit for someone who's not traditionally a sales person, but maybe in more of a marketing role?
I believe the marketing department can drive a whole bunch of the content, the training, and the direction when it comes to LinkedIn.
I just got off a call this morning with a company in Czechoslovakia, and we did a profile tune-up. We did their company page, and now we're going to do their whole sales and marketing team tomorrow. But what we were able to do is put the marketing folks in a different light. They're now partnering with the sales team, and they're going to help the sales team get their profiles and profile content to be better.
I think the markers going to this workshop will learn to become trainers and leaders and be able to go back to the office and really head up an initiative. They're going to be armed with several worksheets in PDF format that they can take back and do it!
What's one quick LinkedIn strategy that brings big results for lead gen currently in this day and age of post-COVID?
So this is a good strategy, and it relates to the corporate side of LinkedIn and then the personal salesperson side. And this is a brand new strategy for me. But it works great.
When a manager of a page looks at a post and sees likes and comments, check who exactly is engaging and look into their profiles and make lists. Who here looks like they could work for us? Who could buy from us? Who could be a vendor or a partner?
Then look at those lists, decide who to talk to, and have someone on your team reach out to them. Company pages can't talk to people, but team members can go in and make the right connections.
There are a lot of simple best practices, but it also comes down to consistency. An excellent first step is just being in the tool regularly, right?
Yeah, basically saying to yourself, "Once a month, I do this, and once a week I do this." During the workshop, my plan is to have an ongoing list of the cadences and activities that we like and what the frequency should be next to them. So by the time we get done, we take a picture of that whiteboard, and it'll be the cadence you need to follow because we all just agreed that stuff should be on our list.
With LinkedIn, in general, the platform has changed so much. Is there anything new this year that you're excited to talk about?
It has been amazing how many feature changes there have been since COVID. They come almost weekly, it seems like. I will tell you about one that came out a few weeks ago.
The issue is: We don't like to spend a lot of time in our feed because there's a lot of crap. Right?
So for a long time, people have been saying why can't LinkedIn be like YouTube, where I subscribe to the people I want? I can follow on LinkedIn, but that still doesn't mean I will see all their stuff.
HOT TiP: You probably have seen it, but you didn't know what was going on. There is now a bell in the top corner of people's profiles. When you push the bell, all their future posts will be in your notification tab without fail.
And yet, in typical LinkedIn fashion, this bell shows up on people's profiles with no email, no notification from them saying, "here's what you've been asking for!"
So if you can get clients to click the bell, they will always be notified of your account's activity.
Wayne’s workshop will teach attendees how to:
- Find prospects and evaluate the next best steps that lead to sales
- Drive traffic to your business development professional's LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn company page, and website
- Discover insider information about your prospects to help you evaluate and prioritize them as a qualified lead
- Perform a step by step process for using Linkedin to generate high priority referral prospects
- Spark engagement on individual and company posts and updates
- Build a LinkedIn company page that will attract maximum attention
For a full description of the workshop How to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation and Business Success click here!
We hope to see you at this year's Experience Inbound in either Milwaukee or Green Bay! Get your tickets today!
