222 – The Subtle Art of Having Conversations on LinkedIn

Karen Yankovich 0:00
You’re listening to the good girls get rich podcast episode 222. Welcome to the good girls get rich podcast with your host, Karen Yankovich.

Intro 0:10
This is where we embrace how good you are girl, stop being the best kept secret in town, learn how to use simple LinkedIn and social media strategies and make the big bucks.

Karen Yankovich 0:23
Hello, and welcome. I’m your host, Karen Yankovich. And this is episode 222 of the good girls get rich podcast. And if you’ve been listening for the past few weeks, you know, this is part three of a three part series that I did talking about the simple three part framework that’s behind all of the strategy that I work on all of the strategy in our choosing program, all of the strategy that I work on with my private clients. And it’s not something that we that’s front facing, right, like the front facing strategy is a little bit different. But behind it is this three part framework credibility, which we dove deep into in Episode 220 connection, which we dove deep into last week in Episode 221. And this, we’re going to be talking about conversation, because at the end of the day, I’m not looking for you to just have a big network, I want you to actually get on the phone with these people. Right. So having, you know, the credibility is going to help with the connection, because people will want to connect with people that have that seem like they’re worthy of their time, right. And that’s on us to create that credibility. And then of course, we need to start to build out our network. But it’s more than just having, you know, a lot of people in your network, it’s more than just having a lot of eyes on your content. It’s more than just who can see how many people saw on my posts, right? To me the wealth in your business comes from the conversations, and this is the most important piece of this framework. And this is often mindset work, right? This is why this conversation piece is why we incorporate mindset into everything we do in our she’s linked up program, because you know, especially as women, we’re really good at our to do lists, right? We can post we can create our content calendar. And you know, maybe there’s a part of us that things that we post, we can go sit on the beach, and then let the business come to us. Right? Like we can do all the things, all the things on our to do list, checking off all the things on your to do list accomplishing things. But the money is in the actual conversations that and that’s why the mindset piece is so important. Because it’s you know, I’m not looking for you to just be connecting with people is that next step, that step that says, Hey, are you open to having a quick 15 minute conversation about this? That little phrase, right, there is the difference between people that are making, you know, seven figures and people that maybe not even making six figures? Is that piece right there. The willingness to actually have conversation with people about the work you’re doing? And remember, the work that I do is not about the low ticket products that you have. I don’t I’m not I mean, it’s just not my expertise, right. My expertise is what are the things that you have? What are the highest value services that you offer? And I’m pretty sure that for the most part, everybody that’s ever engaged with you on that higher ticket service you had a conversation with, before they’ve done the very few people buy a 5000 or 10,000 or $25,000, you know, coaching package or consulting package or, you know, whatever it is that you offer, without having a conversation first, right? So I get that this could be a little wiggy, even though like you might be thinking, it’s, you know, I can do this, I can do this. But when it comes to it, I’m just I’m telling you I’m not. It’s this is the part where I’ve got to like push a little bit and say, How many people did you actually have calls with this week? Right? I’ve got you here. I promise you this works. And this is not just for extroverts. Because remember all you introverts and we’re gonna do a whole episode on this coming up. But you’ve done the work already. They already know you don’t have to go and say, Hey, and I’m a big deal, because they’ve already seen your profile. Right? They’ve already seen your profile, they’ve already agreed to connect with you. Now it’s just a matter of, you know, converting that to a phone call. Right. And I know you’ve heard me say this before, but I don’t honestly even care about the algorithm. I don’t honestly care how many people see your posts, those posts are important. But they’re there to support this piece. They’re there to support this piece. So people know a little bit more about you that you’re staying top of mind with them. You know, I don’t care if one if 25 people or 25,000 people saw your posts. What I care about is how many of these calls you have on your calendar and the algorithm. The regardless of what LinkedIn does with the algorithm. It doesn’t affect this piece, right? We have no procrastination excuses to do this. Because there’s no algorithm there’s nothing in our way but ourselves. Okay, we are our own procrastination tool in this. So I’m here to help you get over that. So the first thing I want you to think about when you think about the connect the conversation pieces in this is that I want you to shift your mindset a little bit around building your LinkedIn network, because I believe that every one that you are connecting with is worthy of one of these conversations. Right. So it’s not like Twitter where you want to have a million Twitter followers, right? I want every connection you make. In your mind, your goal is to drive that to a conversation. And that does, it doesn’t always happen, right? It’s not like we connect with 50 people and 50 people say, yes, let’s get on the phone. I’m not saying it’s gonna happen. But the mindset is, every connection on LinkedIn should lead to a conversation. If not, why are you connecting with them? What are you doing with people on LinkedIn, that you’re not looking to get on the phone with them. Now, let me just say this, I’m talking about who you outbound connect to, I’m not talking about who connects to you. Right, as your visibility grows, more and more people are gonna want to connect with you. Right. So you know, when somebody wants to connect with you, it could be that they just saw your posts, they heard your podcast, they, they saw you somewhere, they just want to be connected to you, if they drive that if they know what they’re doing. Or if they listen to my podcast, and they, you know, they reach out to you and say, Hey, are you up for a quick call, then it’s up to you to decide if you want to do that. But I’m talking about who you connect with. Right on that connecting piece we talked about last week, when you are building these connections, every single person you connect with, I want you to actually have in your mind that it’s gonna that your goal is to get on the phone with them. Alright, so that’s a little bit of shifting your mindset here. Okay, every week, you’re sending out, let’s say, five connection requests every week. The goal is, every one of those your work is to send out a thanks for kind of accepting my connection request, and then maybe commenting on a post that they did or something that you see that’s happening in their industry or whatever. And not with like, Bs, fake interest. I’m talking about real interest, right? real, authentic interest. And then, you know, say legitimately say, Hey, are you open to a quick call? Because I think there’s opportunities for us to collaborate. And I’d love to explore that. When you get on those calls, these conversations, when you get on these calls, the calls then are not, here’s what I do, give me your credit card. There. Here’s what I do. Who do you know? Okay, so these conversations are just genuine networking calls. And by the way, you’re doing the same for them, right? You’re doing the same for them. So you’re looking to see who you can connect them with? Or is there somebody that you, you know, somebody that you can send their way, whatever it is, maybe you can just send them a resource that you have, right? So thinking about, you’re thinking about your mindset on everybody that you do an outbound connection request to. And the second thing I want you to think about when it comes to the conversations piece of his framework is don’t overlook reconnecting, right? Unless you started your LinkedIn network today, there’s probably dozens, if not hundreds, maybe 1000s of people you’re already connected to. And I gotta tell you, this is the part that so many people push back and say, Oh, no, no, I know everybody on my network. If there was somebody in my network, I would I’ve already I would have already done that. I’m telling you, that’s not true. Because one of the things that we force people to do for us, one of the things I force people to do in our she’s linked up program is go back and look at that network. And so often, they’re like, Wow, I didn’t know Mary change jobs. This is really interesting. I want to reach out to her about that. So don’t overlook the reconnecting, when it comes to conversation. This should be able to at least, if not triple, but least double if not triple the number of calls you have on your calendar. And these are people that you don’t listen, we I know that there’s probably a lot of people in your network that you don’t know, right? I know, like, I’ve got 1000s of people that I’ve connected to on LinkedIn, I don’t know all those people. But even if, if I’m going through my network, and I see somebody that I’m already connected to, that is doing something I think is really interesting. And I want to have a conversation with them, then maybe my message to them is, you know, hey, Mary, while we’ve been connected on LinkedIn for a couple years, I’m not actually sure how we originally connected but I don’t think we’ve ever really had a conversation. But I see that you’re doing this, this and this. That’s really interesting to me. I’d love to hear more about that. Are you up for a quick call, right? So even if it’s somebody that you’re connected to on LinkedIn, but you have no idea who they are, while you’re connected to them, the fact that you’re already connected, it still makes this a reconnection. And it gives you the ability to kind of approach it in a more warm fashion, then I don’t know you you don’t know me, I just came across your thing. We’re not connected anywhere. But let’s talk right? That doesn’t really work as well. But this reconnection piece is where it can happen. Sometimes it’s Hey, can you believe that conference, which was five years ago, or wow, I was thinking about you the other day, when I was thinking about that pizza place, we used to go for lunch, and we both worked at AT and T like, Whatever, whatever that conversation starter could be. Start looking through your network and reconnect to have more conversations with people that you’re already connected to. Now, I want to take a second here to tell you guys this is the kind of thing that we help you with and our she’s linked up program, or she’s linked up program is designed to help women learn this exact process, right? How do you show up as an influencer? How do you build your network? How do you get on the phone with people and our goal is for you to be building connections on all levels, and having calls on your calendar at all levels so that you’re routinely connecting and selling your highest ticket opportunities. Okay, that is everything that’s behind everything that we do in our shoes linked up program. My goal is that there’s more wealthy were men of influence in this world. And we created she’s linked up just to do that. So if you want to learn more about our she’s linked up program, just go to Karen yankovich.com/call. And let’s have a call and talk about it. Okay, no obligation. I love talking to our podcast listeners, and learning a little bit about you and your program. And if we think it’s a fit, we’ll tell you what it looks like to be a member of our choosing dot program. But either way, you’ll get a ton of value from these calls. So Karen yankovich.com/call, the link is in the show notes as well. Alright, so change up your mindset, don’t overlook reconnecting. The third part of this. And this is often the hard part. And this is like, I guess there’s a lot of hard parts in this, right? Cuz I also talked about the fact that, you know, it’s easy to do all the busy work, right, and not always as easy to ask for the phone call. But this third piece is when you have these calls. The reality here is, is we don’t really know what we’re going to talk about, or where the calls got going, or why we’re having this conversation. And this takes practice, right? This takes practice, you have to work, you have to continue to work on this, right, like build that muscle. So the conversations, you know, go something like this, like, tell me a little bit about what you’ve been up to, or again, if it’s brand new, you know, somebody that you just connected with, or somebody that you reconnected with that will be different, but you know, it just kind of a little bit of a schmoozing. Intro, establishing rapport. And then, you know, tell me a little bit about what you’re doing and what how I can support you. And then the goal would be for them to ask you that same question. If not, you’re gonna have to insert it in there. Right? And here’s what I’m looking for. Now, if you do your research, right, hopefully, a lot of the times some of the person that you’re talking to is gonna say, Well, wait, maybe me, I want to know more about this. But if the worst case scenario is, is there, like, you know what, let me think about this, because I think there might be people I can refer you to, now you’re getting warm referrals, do you see where this could be so powerful, and there are definitely going to be times where you’re gonna get on the call, and the person is gonna say, What do you want? Like, what do you want? Like, what are we on this call for? That’s not your person, just let them go. Just let it go. Right, just let it go. Because it’s, again, it’s this muscle that you have to build on having these connection conversations, without knowing exactly why you’re on the phone, or where the conversation is gonna go. You know, it’s kind of like when you meet somebody a networking event, you don’t really know them, but you’re both at the networking event, you don’t really know where that conversation is gonna go. And that’s why this can’t really be scripted. Even if you have a, you know, something that you that you offer over and over and over again, you can’t really script these convert these connection conversations. Because we’re not really sure what the person is going to say, they might say, Oh, my gosh, you need to meet my next door neighbor, I bet that, you know, she’s been looking for somebody exactly like you, right? You don’t know when that’s gonna happen, right. So there’s no way to, there’s no way to script this. So you have, the best way to get good at this is just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. And know that it is not easy to have these conversations in the beginning, when you’re not sure why you’re having the conversation or where they’re going. So you’re not alone, if that feels a little scary. But the more you do, the better you get at it. And it’s literally just a conversation. It’s just a conversation. And this is what leads to the biggest wealth opportunities in your business. Because if let’s you know if Mary says, You know what, I really love what I’m hearing here. Can I bring you into my Facebook group? As an expert? Can I interview you on my podcast, let me introduce you to my friend, Sue, because Sue is absolutely looking for something like this. These are where these conversations happen. But you don’t know Mary has a Facebook group going in. And I surely don’t want you to be doing that much research on every person. Before you get on the phone with them, you’re gonna want to do a little bit of research, right? But it’s just about going in and exploring opportunities. Does that make sense? So let me recap this a little bit for the conversation piece of this framework. The first thing we want to do is remember that as we do the connection piece, which we talked about last week, we want to remember that every one of those connections, our goal is to have a call with them is to have a conversation with them. We’re not looking to just build more connections in our LinkedIn network, we’re looking to build more calls on our calendar. That’s where the monetary success comes into your business. Okay, so shift your mindset a little bit and understand that every time you connect with somebody on LinkedIn, when you’re initiating the connection request, you should be you should have a process in place to take that connection to a conversation. Second piece of this is don’t overlook reconnecting the reconnecting piece of this is low hanging fruit. You can start this to day to day. In fact, that’s my homework for you go into your LinkedIn network and find five people to message on a reconnect type outreach. Okay. And then the last piece is remember that even if you look at their profile, like all I really care about is that they look like they look smart, and they look worthy of your time. Beyond that, like, you know, you don’t always know you can always look at their profile and know it’s going to be your best customer. So you’ve got to do this hard part, which is get on these conversations without knowing if they’re going to be valuable, where they’re going or why even talking to these people in the first place, this is the hard part. And by the way, if you do this and call after call after call, it’s a waste of your time, then you’re doing then we’ve got to tweak this. And that’s why we teach this in our she’s linked up program, I am not looking for you to waste a lot of time talking to people that are not valuable. There’s a strategy behind finding these people. And as part of that connection we did last week, so I’m not looking for you to have a lot of calls that are a waste of your time, I certainly don’t want that. And I certainly don’t want that for you. But know that that is going to happen sometimes. Because we just have to do that outreach. And look for this, these calls without knowing 100% where they’re gonna go. Okay. So here we are, we’re wrapping up part three of our three part framework, right? Credibility, connecting and conversation. It’s simple, it sounds too simple, but it is this simple. This is the framework behind everything we do. There’s nuances within all of this, right. And those are the these are the things we teach in our she’s linked up program. But remember, our goal and she’s linked up is to have there be more wealthy women of influence in the world, right. And what that means is we have the best people in this program, I wake up every morning, so grateful for the amazing brilliant women that are in this program. And if you want to hang out with these incredible women that are changing the world, well, you got to start it starts with a call every one of these women that are in our program now the first thing they did was booked this call. So there’s a link in the show notes or go to a Karen yankovich.com/call to grab a spot. So I hope this was really valuable to you. If so, you know, we love your reviews. I hope you’re subscribed to the show so that you don’t miss next week. And of course, I’d love for you to share this episode on social media. Use the hashtag good girls get rich tag me I’m at Karen Yankovich. And I’ll be sure to share your posts with my audience. So we can all get more visibility Right? in the show notes. There’s a link for SpeakPipe you can leave us an audio message there. I love those messages. I personally respond to every single one of them. Tell me what you thought of this episode, tell me what you thought of this framework. Maybe there’s a guest that you’d like to recommend to me maybe there’s a topic you’d love for me to hear or you’d love to hear me talk about. I would love your I love getting SpeakPipe messages. So just go to Karen yankovich.com/ 222 You’ll see the blog for this page, you’ll see the link to speak pipe and all of the resources we talked about here today and know that I’m here continually and continuously to support you a rising tide lifts all boats right I do this show to support you and I hope that you’re getting a lot of value out of it. I would love for you to help me help you by sharing the show with your audience. Take a quick screenshot, share it on social media, and make sure you tag me so that I don’t miss it and I can share it with my audience and then I can help you get more visibility right I am here to kick Psalm 2023 Booty with you. I will see you back here next week with another episode of The Good girls get rich podcast