Mark White

Mark White is the founder of Linked Training. Following more than a decade in International Sales & Marketing roles, Mark has dedicated the last five years exclusively to LinkedIn. Using that experience, he works as an independent training and consultant, helping companies across Europe to successfully incorporate LinkedIn into their own sales & marketing activities.

Expert session

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

Using LinkedIn connections explained for targeting new clients

Result if you follow the steps in Mark’s session

More powerful and targeted clients and relationships through LinkedIn

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

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

Small businesses, I don’t know about the ones who you know, listening in, but for me, it was always a case of, you’re generally poor on time, you’re often poor on money. And in many cases, it’s just you.

So if you’re either at the start or if, let’s face it, your freelance consultant then ongoing so you need to be wearing so many hats all at once that how do you make the best use of your time? If we can actually go in and we can target what we want to do with LinkedIn, then I think we can actually make great use and very be, very time efficient on it.

The issue of, I find time and time again is that, I don’t know, we get all excited. I can’t remember who told me about it, but it was the old SOS, shiny object syndrome.

So I see LinkedIn, I hear all this good stuff about it. And I gotta say, yeah, I’m gonna spend all my time on LinkedIn. But we don’t actually stop and think, hold on, what do I want to do?

And for me, that’s always the first block. You got this great tool. But stop. Now, what do you want to achieve? You can’t go in and do everything.

If I go in there, and I know damn, well, I’m going to find something on the homepage. I like, I’m going to click on it. I’m going to spend half an hour on the web. I’m going to come back to LinkedIn and I won’t remember what I wanted to do in the first place.

So if we can forget that going with a plan, then the profile needs to be put in place because that’s point one of the plan, present yourself in the right way. Then, if it’s marketing or if it’s sales, who don’t want to talk to, well, great, I need to listen. I need to research I need to find and then I need to engage.

And so there’s all these things together, but if you can plan it, then it becomes such a sort of a targeted specific tool, then, you know, just delivers on every level really, for me.

You mentioned consultants and a few different, you know, types of small businesses that are out there. If you could pick, you know, a handful of industries or businesses that people have to be on LinkedIn, like they need to be using, they can benefit the most from this platform, what would they be?

Gosh, I think you can get benefit at all levels, if I’m honest. It’s just different levels. So the ones who make both best use, gosh, to be honest, I’d say it across the board. I think the ones where, for example, the relationship side.

So the for example, the targeted referrals that we can get by tapping into a client’s connections, and then through the client, getting an introduction to those works really well with the relationship based sort of profession.

So I look at finance, I look at legal. For me, those are ones where your expertise is not difficult to prove. But it really comes from the fact that you’ve worked with people. They’ve loved what you’ve done. And they tell people about it. And they always tell me, they get lots of their business through LinkedIn, and sorry, through word of mouth. Well, for me, it’s merely tapping into that through LinkedIn.

So when they’re talking to a client, if they can go into that client, they can go down to the connection section. They can then search through that clients connections and bring up because obviously, you can be very specific in your search even their people that they know with a similar situation, similar problems now.

And I always think it should be going through the client, because I want to deepen that. We can now ask them, could you introduce me? Could you refer me? So we’re encouraging but very targeted word of mouth, not just if you know anyone who might be interested, can you let them know about me?

So for me, the financial and the legal really has a huge power. But if we take right the other end of the scale, I was at a trade show a couple of weeks ago, and a lady came up and she asked me, oh, this LinkedIn thing, how can it help me? I said, what do you do?

Apparently, she was making a new brand of socks. Well, b2b, I think works well on LinkedIn, b2c, a little bit less.
So I said, well, you could put this out there, you might be able to find clients. But for me, if I was going to put it out, I would suggest that you look at your supply chain here, or you’re downstream.

In other words, start to look at other people who are on there who are selling this stuff. Have you got manufacturing where we’re just starting? Well, great. You can find manufacturers on here.

So for me, it depends on where your pain points are, if I can put it like that, and then adapting and finding the right people and just leveraging that on the way going through but I think the face to face the personal stuff really works well. Some of the others may be a little less normal, but equally powerful options on LinkedIn.