EP214 - How to Leverage LinkedIn In 2025
with Sam Rathling & Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts podcast, we're going to help you work at how to leverage LinkedIn in 2025.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast. The only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million and if already there, get to 5 and go fast. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are, welcome to the IT Experts podcast. I am super, super, super, super, super excited today to have a really great friend, a LinkedIn legend, the Queen of LinkedIn, the OG when it comes to LinkedIn expertise, the amazing co-founder of the Social selling suite, Sam Rathling, welcome back to the show.

SAM: Thank you so much for having me back in. It's been a while, right?

IAN: I said I was going to do the intro of a lifetime. So amazing have you back, Sam. We've been connected now for many years, sharing the love for LinkedIn, sharing the love on how it's going on. And I saw a post a little while ago and I said, Sam, you are coming back on the show to help the MSPs and the IT support companies to find out. What's going on with LinkedIn? It's all very well and good, we coach our clients on particular strategies around how to generate new business, but I always think it's great to hear from someone else's point of view because they might have a little bit of golden nugget. I know that there will be golden nuggets. So if you are driving or walking, make sure you've got your notepads ready because there is going to be an absolutely cluster of. Tips, tricks, and things to do on LinkedIn to help 2025 really generate some business from this. So before we get cracking, Sam, as long as you like, who are you?What do you do? Who you help? Why have I got you on this podcast?

SAM: Good to see you again, Ian. So I'm Sam Rathling. I'm a LinkedIn expert and social selling strategist. So what does that mean? It means I help Make social selling simple. So if you're looking to get business or get real results from the LinkedIn platform That's what I do. I've been on the LinkedIn platform since 2005 as a member I've been generating business on LinkedIn since then pretty much when I set up my first business and I've been talking about how to get business from LinkedIn since 2010. So we're talking like almost two decades worth of experience which, when I first started talking about this topic, there were maybe five people in the UK talking about it. And now, of course, there are many, probably 100, 000 plus people globally that are talking about this topic. As you said, I am the OG, female power.

IAN: The OG. The Queen of LinkedIn. Absolutely. And no, and yes, there is people. Everyone else is a long way. You can go and do a course and then train on it. But what Sam knows about this platform is incredible. So thanks very much for that, Sam. And who are you currently working with at the moment? What does the client base look like for you? Cause you've got some pretty good players, haven't you? If you can mention them.

SAM: A couple of small ones MasterCard, FedEx, Activision, Blizzard, Brother, just a few little small companies, just a few tiny companies. And I'm very privileged to work with, those great brands. And majority of those actually came off the back of what I teach about how to get business on LinkedIn. And then I work with a few hundred. Very small businesses, solopreneurs as well. So my client base is quite broad. I obviously operate in the corporate space when it comes to sales navigator and helping sales teams, but I obviously work with small companies as well and the rest of the team do. So yeah it's amazing to be able to help so many people generate so much business.

IAN: I'll tell you what we're going to do straight off the back of this before I let you run away I'm just going to need to book in another session because I know that we're not going to get it all in half an hour right and there is going to be other questions and things coming out of today that I'm going to want to dive deeper to and I'm going to need to be careful so we're going to book another session straight after this so if you're listening to this show and you want a particular tip or trick or you want to know something I do on LinkedIn let me know Drop me a message on LinkedIn and we'll include it in the next show. There you go. How about that? That's how super cool that is. So let's have LinkedIn update. What's working right now on LinkedIn? What's the, every single year, the algorithm, everyone talks about the algorithm, let's talk about the algorithm. What is. the Algorithm And why do people keep talking about it all the time?

SAM: So this is a bit of a bugbear of mine because people like to blame the algorithm for their stuff not working. And ultimately it's never the algorithm, it's the user...

IAN: Okay.

SAM: You know, if you are going, oh, my impressions are down, or, LinkedIn doesn't work, or, I'm not getting anyone looking at my stuff like. It's because your content is dull and boring and nobody cares. Ultimately people are on LinkedIn for one of two reasons, either their own selfish reasons because they want to sell something, or secondly because they're bored. So you have to produce content that is true, right?

IAN: It is absolutely 100 percent

SAM: Just avoiding all the tasks that are on their to do list. So they go on LinkedIn and they get on the board and they're scrolling and your job is to stop the scroll. And if you think that LinkedIn is dead or you think that you can't get impressions on LinkedIn, I did a post literally a few weeks ago about my son. It hit nearly 200, 000 impressions. It had four and a half thousand reactions and his entire careers blown up off the back of it. But if the algorithm was dead or the algorithm was the reason, then nobody would be able to create a post like that.

So it's never to do with the algorithm. So stop blaming the algorithm. It's my first thing. The algorithm is constantly changing and it will continue to change and there will be trends of different things that are hot and not so right now, the hottest thing you could be focused on is video within the LinkedIn platform. And we're recording this at the end of November 2024. So I'm now in a LinkedIn marketing influencer program, and the whole thing is about video and LinkedIn has just introduced something called the immersive video feed. So when you hit a video right now on LinkedIn, in the mobile app, and then you scroll up, you will basically get a feed that is your video that is like Tik TOK or Instagram reels, and that's a new feature for LinkedIn. So whenever a platform, any social media platform introduces something new, they will always, the algorithm will always favour the early adopters. So if you are currently not in front of camera, scared of being in video, don't want to post anything like then you're going to miss on that trend. So the current focus I would say currently would be if you're not doing portrait videos with captions, you need to be bringing that into your strategy certainly for early 2025. There's always this debate about personal versus business posts at the moment, personal posts or stories or human connection type stories will always perform very well. That's still the case despite LinkedIn trying to stamp them out. Ultimately, you've got to remember that behind every profile is a human being and your content needs to connect with that human being, regardless of what you're talking about, whether you're talking about it or security or whatever it is that you're talking about, you've got to connect with your ideal client that is behind that profile. I feel like there's definitely a shift towards that. There, there will always be new things coming out. Just stay in the know, be connected to people that know that stuff. So I'm connected to maybe 600 LinkedIn experts in multiple countries. And I hear about things early because I'm connected to it.

IAN: Yeah.

SAM: I'm not always going to be the first person to hear about like yesterday. Literally, they changed header images. So if you go to your header image, you can now create a slideshow as your header image, and you can have three or four pictures at the top. So that makes your profile more interesting visually, and it can showcase multiple parts of your business that literally happened yesterday. I saw it and then other people were talking about it, but if you're not connected to people that are regularly in the platform and know what the changes are, then you're going to miss out again. So It will always change, the algorithm will always change, but the methodology about how to get business from the platform doesn't.

IAN: And, originally it was a recruitment platform, wasn't it, back in the day it was there to go and get yourself a job and pick up.

SAM: I was in recruitment. That's how I found LinkedIn. I was in recruitment industry for, I think, 12 years, something like that. I found LinkedIn because I went to a networking event in Holland when I was a recruiter and someone said about this new job seeking platform. I thought, oh, go check that out. And it was only when I set up my own business in 2005, I thought, I wonder, I've moved to Ireland, didn't know anybody. I thought, I wonder if I could use LinkedIn to actually get business and find people to connect with an island in court, because I didn't know anybody. I literally went, I went out networking in person.

I thought, I wonder if I can connect with decision makers. And that's really when I started. figuring out how to use it for business development and not just for job seekers.

IAN: Brilliant. So stay ahead of things. I like to think we're ahead of things, but something happened yesterday that I don't even know about. And now you're telling about it, me today, we've got a sales and marketing meeting in half an hour. So guess what we're going to be talking about? How do we connect with more people today? So let's just boil down. Just something you just mentioned that, the platform is the platform, it has features, it has things, it does stuff, and it basically portrays your message, which is great. And that's always going to change whether they want to make it look like Facebook or Instagram or whatever. The trends of social as it's moving on, but what are the fundaments? If you were to boil it down to, I don't know, and I'm sure you've got a number, but I'm going to guess it's somewhere around five, three or five things. What's the fundamental basics, the foundations to making LinkedIn work for business?

SAM: So these are non-negotiables and I did these all through my cancer treatment in the last year, even on my darkest days, I still did these things. So that's how I'm going to Boil these things down. So the first thing is you need to be building your network and connecting with your ideal client every single day. You can max out your connection invitations. You have 150 to 200 invites per week. If you are not maxing out those connections, you are leaving money on the table. So you need to be building your network at scale because that puts the right people into your audience are potential prospects for you. And the recommendation currently is not to send a message when you connect with somebody

IAN: Just straight hit,

SAM: Straight hit, hit connect because people just are expecting to be sold because so many people now are using LinkedIn to pitch and spam and slap pitch people. So when you send a note, the immediate assumption is, oh, they're going to then send me another one, so you're better off to not. Have a note with it, which is great from a time efficiency perspective, which is good, but bang out, but put those connection requests out. You ideally want to be hitting around 50 percent conversion. So if you're not hitting 50 percent conversion, IE, I send a hundred invites. I get 50 people say, yes, I'll connect if you're not hitting 50 percent, it's possibly because your profile is not doing its job. And you might have things in there that maybe aren't appealing enough to your target market or your targeting's off. So one of those two things, but...

IAN: Yeah

SAM: On average you should hit around 50 percent acceptance. So that's one non-negotiable. Second thing, posting at least three times a week, so minimum three times, don't have to post every day. Oversee. If you're in desperate need of clients and you want to scale quicker, then obviously post every day, but a minimum three times a week. And that content can be a combination of different things. But I would say a good guide from 12 posts in a month would be maybe one or two personal posts. The rest would be educational tips. Advice type posts and then a couple of social proof posts. So if you've got a case study about a client that you've helped recently, or you're documenting your journey. So almost like pulling the curtains back on your business a little bit in terms of what you're up to. So if you've got a room full of MSPs coming into the boardroom and you're spending a day together, for example, document that, take photos, share what you're up to, why people come to you for help, et cetera. So a bit of documenting, a bit of. education. And the best way I can describe that is to break it down into kind of big macro topics that are, what are the big things that you could talk about? And then let's say cybersecurity is one, right? That's a big topic that any of the people listening to this could talk about. But underneath that, if you were to brainstorm, for 20-25 minutes on everything you could talk about related to cybersecurity, you'd probably come up with 25 to 50 ideas about things that you could post about related to cybersecurity. So the problem is most people don't stop and think. So think about breaking it down into like tiny little slithers of knowledge and imagine that every post is like a little seed that's nurturing your audience.

So rather than going one big post about cybersecurity on next job, I'm going to talk about, whatever the next thing is. You want to break it down into tiny little chunks. So max out your network, post three times a week. And then the third thing is a lot of people complain about engagement and they say, oh, I'm not getting much engagement on my post. And I'll challenge them and say how much engagement are you giving to other people? Okay. Because if you want engagement and you want an actively engaged audience on your content, and you don't do that for other people, you can forget engagement on your post. So you need to be visible on other people's posts. So you can actually, I like to say, you need to treat your comments like they're a piece of content. If you actually post on a really good piece of commenting on someone else's post, everyone who's already liked and commented on that post. is going to see it. So if you can add value and educate underneath someone else's post, that's just as good as posting a decent piece of content. So get, getting engaging with the newsfeed, if you need to follow certain people, ring the bell on their profile, get notified about their posts, there might be certain people that have got a fairly big following that you can, easily interact with. So that would be another one. And the fourth and final thing I'd say is you've got to have some kind of mechanism to take people off the platform. And this is the pit that a lot of people miss and it will probably come on to one of our next points around. Connecting with someone fine, doing a bit of content and then to engage fine, but what next? And, that's the kind of bit I'm sure we'll talk about as well.

IAN: Yeah. That's a beautiful segue and a really great point there. And that's the fundaments of it. I always, when I'm talking about LinkedIn, I liken it to the fact that it's my network room full of my target market. Am I going to walk in there and sell to people? Am I going to go in and handle other brochures around? Am I going to ignore them? Am I just not going to, what am I going to do? I'm going to go in and say, hey, how you doing, do a bit of chatting, building up some relationships and things. I remember actually winning a client once when someone had put a it's just so funny. He put a post on about, he just had a really bad haircut and I put on a post and it goes, never had to worry about haircuts for 20 years. I don't know what you're moaning about. And he went, Oh, that was funny. And then we just got chatting on the DM.

SAM: Yeah, exactly.

IAN: And then he became a client and it was great. Fantastic. Thank you for that, Sam. Already like loads of nuggets there. So I've got in the structure, middle of funnel magic. You've just touched on it there. So we've got an engaged, absolute target market. Other podcasts are available to talk about all of that. We've got them in place. We've got our content going out there. We've got some random posts going out there, but what we really want to do to get them. Properly engaged. We need to get them on our email list. We need to get them downloading something. We need to get them going to our events. We need to get in a chat with them. We need to take this relationship to the next level. Many times we talk about the dating game. You're not going to walk into a pub. I don't think you will these days, particularly not judged by certain young people's dating performance with the apps is walking and marry someone. You're going to go up this relationship building thing. And that's exactly what we're doing on LinkedIn here, what's your view and what's some of the advice that you'd give about how do we then start to take people off the platform? What are the things that are working right now and how do we do that?

SAM: So there's two things that matter before you can convert somebody to being a customer. The first is the number of touch points that you've had with a potential prospect. So let's say you connect with them. That's one touch point. They see a bit of your content and other touch point, et cetera. You're not going to go from where connected. Do you've seen a post of mine to them becoming a client? And the second thing is the dwell time. So how much time has that person invested with your brand? And obviously the longer they've spent with your brand. So if someone comes to me, they might've read my book. Then I've listened to a few podcasts. They might've been on my YouTube channel. They might have then connected with me on LinkedIn, seeing my content. And then let's say I put an event on and they go, oh yeah, I'll go to that. And then they show up for a workshop and they spend another hour with me by then they've indoctrinated, they've been nurtured through lots and lots of pieces of content and lots of time spent with my brand. And then they book a call and now I can close them. That's the dwell time at that point. But you mentioned they're like building your email list. Like a lot of people don't have, number one, they don't have an email list or if they do, they're not actively building it. And LinkedIn really needs to be seen almost as a traffic source. You've got, as you mentioned, it's a massive database full of people, but you've got to control that data. And at the moment, if you're just doing the stuff on LinkedIn, LinkedIn controls the data. So how do we move them off the platform? And there's many ways you can do that. So the first off your LinkedIn profile. should be seen as like a mini website that can drive people to the next part of your sales process.

So do you have things that people can download from your about section or your featured section? Are you putting on events that people have to subscribe to, give their email address to register for an event? For example I give away things like we'll put them in the show notes, but 44 prospecting tips, a hundred content ideas. the complete way to social selling. These are all available from my profile. From my about section, my featured section and anywhere that I, talk about anything on LinkedIn, I drive people to those downloads because if they download any one of those, just, full transparency, you're going to give me your email address and you will most likely be on my list. And then we use our list to invite people to our events about how to get more business from LinkedIn. And some of those people, usually about 20 percent of people that show up to our events become customers. We put on between myself and my business partner, Chris, we put on six events every month and workshops and webinars to help people with all of the things we're talking about. And naturally some people will come on those and will become customers. That's just how it works, it's a numbers game at the end of the day. Mine and Chris's job in our business is to put 500 emails into our list, fresh people every single month. If we do that, we hit our targets.

IAN: Nice. That's amazing. Did you just subtly pitch on the podcast?

SAM: I'm just saying obviously we're...

IAN: I know, I know you are...

SAM: I'm going to give them to your listeners.

IAN: You are going to give us.

SAM: You're going to go on my email list. By the way, you can unsubscribe. I'm cool with that, I'm going to give you some free stuff, but in exchange, you might want to give me your email address.

IAN: Fantastic. No, I was just taking the piss. And so if people aren't signing up to your email list, do we go back to the same thing as before? Is it's not relevant and it's probably terribly boring language that they're just not compelling enough to click on it? Yeah.

SAM: You've got to have something and we've had some terrible ones, but we, we, when we created. A hundred content ideas suddenly that was like the one and we had eight thousand subscribers on that one like really quickly, because it was something that people really wanted and we talk about in our business We talk about missing actions and ineffective actions. A lot of people talk about pain right and challenges and pain points. But quite often there's something called ineffective actions. So for our clients, the ineffective action for our clients is that they are prospecting and they are doing outreach, but they're getting little or no response. So they're doing something, but they're doing it badly. They're doing it ineffectively. It's not working for them or they're posting content. So it's not that they're not doing it. They are posting content, but they're getting little or no engagement. So the ineffective action is that they're creating content on LinkedIn, but it's not getting them in. So the language you use. In all of your messaging profile, content, lead magnets, whatever it is, needs to address the ineffective actions of your clients. And that's when you create things that people actually want and will want to engage with. And most people's lead magnets are not, again, if you're not hitting a 20 percent download. It's all in the numbers. If you're not getting 20 percent of people that you send it to downloading it, you've got a problem with your lead magnet.

IAN: And again, we must make sure that all of the branding on your profile, which is, your website basically, and the landing page and the event copy or the download copy, it's all got to be the same. It's all got to look that they know that I'm in the right place. I'm still in the right place. I'm still in the right place. And as soon as you use a cheaper or you don't brand the landing page, they're going to go, oh, this doesn't look like it. I'm busy. I'm off. And then the attention's gone, isn't it?

SAM: Yeah, exactly. So I think it's just important to really understand your product, your offer, your audience, and your message. If you can nail those four things and get real clarity around those and then be consistent with that messaging, then that's key to it because most people aren't talking the language of their client. They're trying to, not trying to pitch, but they're trying to come across in a certain way to, but it's not hitting the mark with their clients. And that's a big sticking point for a lot of people we talk to once that's fixed, it's okay, now everything's easier. The content makes more sense. The profile reads better, the downloads that they're getting all the events that they're running, then even things like the name of the event or the name of the thing you're downloading, that makes a difference.

IAN: Yeah, it's so frustrating, isn't it? Because it can be one word round the wrong way. And Stuart, my business partner, he's incredible at he won't admit this, but he is incredible at writing copy and just getting the thing and the hook and not necessarily what's the pain, but what's the thing that they want? As you say, it's that ineffective action. That's really powerful. When we were talking about coming on the show today, Sam, you mentioned that LinkedIn events are really powerful right now, talk to me about LinkedIn events. What are they? Why are they interesting? Cause I've only ever known LinkedIn events to be, hey, I'm holding an event, 150 people would say, yeah, I'm attending. I'm attending. I'm attending. No one turns up. So convert me.

SAM: So the first thing is, name of the event and the targeting for the event needs to be on point, right? So you need to put on it, if you're going to put on an event, it needs to address the ineffective actions or the things that are going to make somebody show up. So that's the first thing. You, a lot of people make the mistake, they put the event up and then they go, oh, let's hope that somebody sees it and says they're going. And then you, as you say, like people go, yeah, I'm interested. And then no one shows up. So how do you make that change? So the first thing is there is a bit of admin involved in getting people to an event. If someone puts their hand up to say, oh, I'm going to attend an event about, you know, cyber, keeping my business safe or cybersecurity or whatever. They've immediately put their hand up recognizing they've got a problem. So everyone that registers to attend is an effective, is effectively a very, is a lead, but they're not a, they're not a really qualified lead, but they've put their hand up to say, I need to do that. So first off, don't ignore the fact that 150 people have said, I want to go to that event because each one of those quite often, not all of them are connected to you. So go through the list and make sure you're connected to all of them. There are opportunities there to engage in direct messages with all of those people.

The second thing is you need to direct message each person to say, thanks for looking forward to seeing at the event. Thanks for registering, but you need to click on this link to actually secure your place. There are only a hundred spots. It's filling up fast, use the scarcity, et cetera. You need to direct message them to actually get them to click on the link. Quite often people might be like, oh, I'm not going to be able to attend now, but always make sure that you're going to make the replay available. So you still want to register even if they can't make it because you're going to get the replay sent out. That way you're capturing. Email addresses of every single person. So back to building your list, we are putting on six events a month currently, and our email list is building as scale because every single person that registers for one of our events is now on our email list. And that's what you're trying to do with events. The next thing that you, most people don't realize is you can invite a thousand people a week to your LinkedIn event. You don't just have to, you don't just have to rely on it hopefully being seen by somebody on the newsfeed. You publish it to the newsfeed, obviously when you create the event, but there's a little button that says invite, share, and invite. And if you've got a network of 10, 000 people, literally in 10 minutes, you can literally go show me all the people in this industry. So if you want to target a particular industry or you want to target a particular country, you can literally go show me all the people in my network who are in this industry, click a button and press the button and you've invited them. So they get that in their notification saying, Ian's invited you to this event. So there are multiple ways for you to showcase it. And once it hits a hundred plus people, LinkedIn starts showing it to other people for free. So it starts, marketing it into people's, when you go into that area and it says like people you might know, and then it says events you might be interested in, but it's taking the profile of based on whoever else has already said they're going to your event. So it's a totally free way of marketing your business. And everyone that registers is now on your email list. You can get the replay out to them. The problem with most people's events though, is that they don't structure their webinar event in a way that moves people from, I'm going to this event too. I want to do business with you. Most people make it very information heavy and not shifting mindset heavy.

So there's a structure in a way to do that. It's all about biopsychology and stuff. Obviously you talk to your clients about that all the time, but it's important that event is again, addressing those ineffective actions. And then, I would normally recommend that you're booking calls off the back of a webinar, so that you can then have those one to one conversations. But by the time somebody has attended your event, they've spent maybe 60 minutes with you, they've possibly consumed some of your content, and by then, by the time you get them one to one, if you do your webinar then they should be ready to engage.

IAN: Absolutely. Love it. And, if I can add a bit of source on top of that as well, if you've got a multi level, if someone's booked up to an event, send them an email campaign that's relating to the event and what you do and how you help, not selling, just information. As Sam said earlier on, it's all about education, and keep them warm so that when they're there we call it talk time on content, you call it the dwell time, which is so important because I think in the book, we, the they ask you answer. I think he was saying that 70 percent of the buying decision is made before they even contact you before they even put their hand up. And that hand up at that event is one touch point that we were talking about. And that's just increasing now, right? Is there's more and more to consume and there's more and more choice and there's more and more attention. There's more and more touch point. What do you think the average touch point is for a smaller FSME businesses right now? Cause it used to be seven, right?

SAM: And then it might be like five to 12. I'd say now it's much, I think when we look at our, all our data, we're looking at three to five hours is the amount of time, which could be. The number of touch points for me is less relevant. It's the time spent. So three to five hours is our average. We've had people that have attended maybe 15 to 20 webinars and still not bought, but then having a scoring system. So we have a score, a nurture scoring system. So we can see in our system, like how many downloads they've downloaded. We can see how many webinars they've attended. We can see all of that. And then they get a nurture score based on how much time they've invested, And, that makes it very easy then for us to go through our list and call through the people that are hottest, if you like, in terms of most likely to convert. So I think it's just about having access to that data and tracking and measuring all of that data so that who are the people that are likely to convert, but three to five hours is about where we're at in terms of, if we take our business, but also the 300 plus clients that also do this with us, we have their data as well. It's not just a finger in the air, that is genuinely at the moment. That is how long it's taking for people to move to sale.

IAN: I think the thing I'm really taking away from this and we're, I've known you for a long time. So therefore I've been listening to you for a long time and I've been learning from you for a long time. But I think, it's the same as I've gone to a marketing agency. They've put a few blogs out and nothing's happened. I don't believe so. I did some LinkedIn posts the other week. I think it was on a Thursday. To a networking event once nothing happened. It's marketing, generating new business in any business is everything that happens around before after the event is building that relationship, isn't it? And it's the more not complicated, because it is really simple as building a relationship, someone who knows, and trust you, and they're going to come, you've got something that they want at a right price that they're going to be happy to pay, and they're going to get value from you're going to do business, right? That's how it's going to work. But just about these events. And I, you know what, 15 minutes ago, I was one of these completely disbeliever on LinkedIn events because of that. But then what you've just explained to me is what we do anyway, so it's like, why don't you doing it on LinkedIn? It's but it's just, sometimes you just need the...

SAM: There you go. I'm, you're bit of a, convert but...

IAN: oh, I'm not, I'm, not a disbeliever...

SAM: I don't know how much longer LinkedIn is going to have that, the ability to invite a thousand people a week. Like they could take that away tomorrow and then, there's different, you've got to find different ways, but ultimately, if you're not leveraging that, and then feeding your entire if I want to get sales leaders from big corporates onto a webinar, I need to connect with them first. And then I need to invite them to my event. I might need to get them to download Something like the 44 prospecting tips, but then my email list is then going to, once they're on my list, they're going to hear about my next sales navigator workshop. So it's literally nurturing through that middle section. As you were talking about, you've got to get them into your ecosystem and then nurture them through to spend more time with you.

IAN: And it's interesting, isn't it? I heard someone say the other day, which was absolutely spot on, LinkedIn, you are renting space, the post will be there for a day or a week or a month or something like that. But you own your email address and your email address is like your house and your mortgage, and it's your investment and you're building that investment. People who say, oh, email marketing is dead. We have picked a blimmin industry, it support businesses, they are the hardest people in the world to email because they lock everything up, cause they think every, all the bad guys are trying to get in all the time. So every, our first email normally goes out and says, just check your spam. We're going to send you an email. And it's, but again, it's, if we know that, what do we do? We make sure we have someone that calls, we connect them through to LinkedIn. Just to let you know, I've sent you an email. Go and check your spam box and go and white label it and all of those sort of things. So it is that email list where, people buy from. And many times you just think that we can put a couple of posts out on LinkedIn chuck it out and just sit there and wait.

SAM: No, that's a hope strategy. I hope somebody messages me because they've seen my post. I hope somebody contacts me because I've put this post out about this. You've got inbound and outbound, right? So you've got inbound leads and that's the kind of what people are relying on. If they're just going, I'm going to put a few posts out. I hope that somebody messages me. Inbound takes a long time to build. You've got to be really focused on building your personal brand. And it's great when someone messages you and said, I've been following you for ages saying, can I please have an appointment? Like they're amazing because they're very high chance they're going to buy because of that they're already 70 percent of the way there, but that's unreliable, inconsistent, not targeted. You're not, you have no control about how many of them you're going to get in a year. What you have got control of is the outbound. How many people am I going to connect with? How many direct messages am I going to send? What, who am I targeting? Why am I targeting them? And that's where you get control of the consistency that you need in terms of the numbers. So if you know how many emails you need, or you know how many meetings you need, or how many leads you need. That's all created by the outbound. And then the inbound is just cherry on top. But if you're currently relying on inbound only and hoping that somebody is going to message you because you did a bit of content, like edit, that's no strategy for LinkedIn.

IAN: No, you need to have that wrapper all the way around it. Brilliant. this has been amazing, Sam, but just before we wrap up, what is the social selling index and why should we care about it?

SAM: So, the social selling index or the SSI score is actually a score of a hundred points and all of you have one so everyone listening to this has a score of a hundred points on how well you're doing with this thing called social selling. You can go to LinkedIn. com forward slash sales forward slash SSI and you can check out your score. Why is it important? At 70 plus you get increased visibility on your posts. So if you're wondering how to get more eyeballs or more engagement or more visibility on your content, that's one way to do that. You get an immediate 25 percent uplift on people. The algorithm responds to people with the highest. Go check that out. We'll pop that in the show notes so you can go have a look at it, but it's based on four things. So your personal brand and how you establish your brand. who you're connecting with and finding the right people, engagement, and building trusted relationships. And if you're doing all four of those things well, your visibility will be strong, your credibility will be strong, and it will turn into opportunity. But you need to, it's just one of those kind of things to keep a check on, check it every week. Look at where you're starting from and then it's one of those instant gratification things that, updates every 24 hours. So you might listen to the podcast, do some things on LinkedIn differently, and then see your SSI score go up. That's a nice thing to check that your metrics are good.

IAN: And you can see that things are working. Then you'll connect, the four things, connecting with the right people, putting the content out there, people are engaging with it and things like that. And it does help, good reminder for everybody on that.

So Sam been an absolute incredible show as I was expecting. What's your top tips for people to walk away from the show? What are the must have, must do things if they want to generate some business on LinkedIn? In 2025, sorry, cause that's what the show is called.

SAM: So just to summarize obviously for 2025, pay attention to video because it's going to be much bigger than it has been up until now. Second thing make sure that you're, you figure out a way to take people off of the platform to your email list and to enter your ecosystem. And those three kinds of behaviors. So making sure you're building your network, posting consistently, as well as engaging as well and don't rely on hope.

IAN: No hoping. This is not a hoping platform. Sam, it's been absolutely brilliant to talk to you. Can you please absolutely bombard everybody now with how I can get in touch with you, what the great offers and the couple of the downloads that we're going to put into the show notes here to help you to leverage LinkedIn and, generate more business.

SAM: Yeah, sure. I have two books. I have LinkedIn bound and linked out bound. They're both up on Amazon. So if you like what you heard, then they would be a good place to start. I'm going to give you three downloads. So 44 prospecting tips. Complete guide to social selling and 100 content ideas that should get you started and obviously you can find me on LinkedIn. So there are only two Sam Rathlings in the world and only one of them's a girl. So I'm pretty easy to find.

IAN: Yes. Oh, what a great result. Your parents did you right.

Sam, wishing you all the best for 2025 and beyond with not only the business, but with everything else that you've got going on there. Loads of love from us. Thank you very much for your help and support with this show. We're going to be doing another show real soon on prospecting outreach and sales navigators. So keep your earbuds out listening for that one. That's going to be hitting you real soon. We will look forward to catching up with you all on that show. Hope you've enjoyed it. It's been great. See you soon. Take care.

OUTRO: Hang on a minute. Just before you go, and if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you are already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP Mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engaging along your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best.