Brynne Tillman

Brynne Tillman is a successful sales professional, sales trainer and coach spanning over 3 decades who has unlocked the power of LinkedIn for Sales and Business Development Professionals.

Over the last years, Brynne has been teaching Leveraging LinkedIn for Business Development, has authored a comprehensive workbook and guide, LinkedIn for Business Development.

She focuses on transforming the way professionals grow their business through LinkedIn and social selling.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Brynne’s success

Connecting with Linkedin prospects

Result if you follow the steps in Brynne’s session

Generate leads and increase conversion

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So on LinkedIn, some of you may have noticed in the last five months or so, LinkedIn had a complete overhaul of their interface. So what we used to know is advanced search has changed a little bit.

So finding people on LinkedIn now on the free version really begins with creating search strings. So identifying the keywords and titles of the people that you’re looking to connect with really your buyers.

So that’s the end, like, so it might be like VP of sales, or VP of Marketing, right. And so and then you can create full strings that might be VP or director or manager in one category, and sales or marketing.

So I won’t get into the weeds on this, but developing the search strings. And if you want to, if people are interested, I have a blog post on that they can connect with me and I can share how to do that.

But the key to success in finding the right people now is absolutely being able to create those search strings in a way that offers up a list of the right people that you want to connect with.

Now, the magic is, once you put in that search, it’s identifying second degree connections. So it’s finding folks that are one degree away that our friends of friends essentially, inside of LinkedIn, and so that’s really a key element to this being a little bit of a warmer connection. And then if you were to go out and cold call.

Alright, so these, you’re jumping on LinkedIn, you’re going to the advanced search and you’re putting in these search strings. Can you give me an example of one specific one for, say, VPS?

Yeah, so I love it. Let’s say, you want to, let’s say you work with higher level people in sales and marketing. So you would have a search string, the first one would be VP or SVP or director, any of the title, the high level titles, and they would be in parentheses. And then there would be a connector with an end.

Because if we just searched those, it would be the VP of operations, as VP of it, right? Like, it wouldn’t be sales and marketing. So now we have this big bucket, let’s look at like those parentheses is a big bucket.

So LinkedIn, went out to the world and put in every VP, every SVP into this big bucket. And then you have another big bucket here of all the sales and all the marketing people.

And then by connecting them with an end, they have to have something from this bucket, and something from this bucket to come up. They have to be in the sales and marketing bucket. But they also have to be in the VP or director bucket.

And then that will provide you a list of a targeted title that you’re looking to connect with. Now the key at LinkedIn, so I mean that that’s great in and of itself, the key is the relationship. Being able to click second degree will allow you to identify who in your network knows these people.

So we can leverage those relationships for warm introductions. And or we can connect with them with something meaningful, like a meaningful piece of content, and refer to the fact that we have shared connections. But either way, it’s warmer than going to a third and beyond.

Alright, guys. So that’s almost, that’s why we’re going to the second step there.

But that foundational first step of finding the right people is really about well, you know, let’s get these search parameters really narrowed down so we can find our hottest prospects, and we can target them first and then move on.

The second third step is going to be so much more easier to get them closer to a sale, because you’ve identified them as the most likely buyers.

Absolutely. And remember, the key with all, you can add filters, you can have like location filters, the real key is that second degree relationship filter. That’s what LinkedIn provides us that there is that. There is no other substitute in the world.

When you look at it, we’re really asking LinkedIn to search all of our connections’, connections, and give us a list of the people we want to talk to. And what you know who they belong to. I call them the Rolodex, right.

But so in the old fashioned way, you’re too young properly, but your parents probably had a Rolodex, right, which was like the big thing with all the business cards. So now, what we’re doing is searching everyone’s Rolodex, and then pull out the business cards of everybody. That’s a VPN in sales, right?

And then LinkedIn serves us that list and tells us whose Rolodex it came from. So now I get to find out all of my potential buyers in one list. And I’m really able to identify who can help me gain access to those people.