LinkedIn Strategy for Agencies and B2B Professional Services

Sunir Shah:
Welcome back to another Agency Connect. We have Judi Hays here, who has written the book on LinkedIn strategy, and I'm very excited to have you. I'm Sunir Shah, and I'm all about getting digital under control so your agency gets under control, and Judi has figured it out after many years of consulting. Tell us all about your book and yourself, Judi. You're one of the experts.

Judi Hays:
Oh my gosh, don't put me on a pedestal. I appreciate this opportunity, and we met online, so one of these days we'll meet IRL, as we say.

It's funny, working with a platform like LinkedIn. I started out in marketing, then I got into digital, then social, and then I honed in on LinkedIn, because it really is the definitive B2B platform. The challenge is helping others embrace the platform, because so many people know they need to use it but don't know what to do. You may see a couple of players on LinkedIn who are really crushing it, and then there are the others who say, "Oh yeah, I need to be on LinkedIn," and you look at their profile and they've got a picture from 20 years ago.

So I put my methodology into a book. It's hopefully a quick read, and it's built on three principles that all work together. Imagine a stool with three legs. It needs all three to function, otherwise you're going to fall backwards. The first one is Elevate, and Elevate is dressing up for the party. I want to elevate your brand, your presence, and your experience, so when you look at how you're presenting yourself, that's the first component.

The second component is Expand. Now that you're dressed for the party, you're going to have people you invite to it. How do you find those people, and how do you network with them? Have you looked at your existing network? There are so many great things in your existing network. I'd say the majority of my clients have closed a deal just by engaging with their existing network.

The third part is Engage. Back to the virtual event: Engage is the food that's served. You've got the people there, you're all dressed up, and now you have the food and the wine. The engagement part is where people loosen up, talk, have fun, and get to know each other. That's the part not everyone is comfortable doing on LinkedIn, but those three parts really make the experience beneficial.

What I do with the companies I work with, and I work exclusively in the B2B space, mainly for professional service companies selling a high-ticket, high-trust service, at least five or six figures, is this. It could be a technology like a transportation management system, or a physical security surveillance system, or something that fits a CPA platform. We use LinkedIn not to sell. We use it to find our ideal prospects, because it's a robust database if you know how to do Boolean strings and things like that. You can make that platform sing. Then we look for signals to engage with those prospects. So we've elevated because we've dressed up, we're expanding by bringing them into our network, and then we engage with them. Is that more than you ever wanted to know about LinkedIn?

Sunir Shah:
I want to know more. There's so much I want to know. First, where's the book? You have two copies behind you. Flog your book.

Judi Hays:
Well, it's kind of a funny story. I just got my delivery of these, because of supply chain issues. The book came out in November, and it's on Amazon, in Kindle or in a nice handy paperback. It's about 200 pages, and I actually marked up my own book. It's called Elevate, Expand, Engage.

Here's the funny thing, and this blows people's minds. When I'm working on someone's LinkedIn profile, they want to talk about themselves: I'm wonderful, and I did this, and I went here, and I've got all these degrees. And I say, you know what you're talking about? Me. I don't want to talk about myself. I want to hear about you. When I meet someone for the first time and they say, "Hey Judi, what do you do?" I say, I could talk about myself all day, but I'm more interested in you.

Sunir Shah:
Exactly. Before we get into the LinkedIn stuff, I want to talk about you. Before you wrote a book, you were a consultant, and I think you're still doing inbound pipeline management consulting.

Judi Hays:
I've always been in marketing. I started out a hundred years ago, before you were even born, at an agency called Rapp & Collins in New York City. It's a direct response agency, and I learned direct response marketing, which was the stepchild, or the great-grandchild, of today's digital target marketing. So I've always been in marketing. I've just worked in a lot of different verticals and on a lot of different sides: client side, agency side, vendor side. I've tried them all, and I wound up realizing I'm genetically unemployable, so I work for myself. The bosses I'm accountable to, besides my two dogs, are my clients.

What I was saying to you earlier is that I don't bill hourly. This is the trap agencies fall into. You start by selling time for money, and if you're smart, you stop, because if you sell time for money, the better and smarter you get, the less you make. If I charge you $100 an hour and it now takes me 30 minutes, I only bill you $50. But if I sell you an outcome, and I'll produce this product for $100 and it takes me 10 minutes, I still get $100. I do track time, though. I use an app, because I want to know whether I'm profitable and whether I'm allocating enough resources to a particular client, or whether a client is taking more resources than expected. As Drucker said, you can't manage what you don't measure. So I think it's important to have that data, but I don't bill on it. I do use it when I'm writing a proposal and scoping the work, because it helps me understand where a project is going to go.

Sunir Shah:
The issue I've seen over my career is that agencies trade time for money again. I started in licensed software, where we weren't selling time, we were selling outcomes. We built systems, then maintained them for three years, and of course it became a ten-year client, because we kept extending, and that's how every normal industry works. Then at FreshBooks I saw everyone on subscriptions lose all of that and trade time again, even though we kept talking about value-based pricing. Digital subscriptions have made so many agencies give up their control over what they make and the outcomes, and they end up back on the hamster treadmill. So there are many solutions that give people leverage. You've written a book, you narrowed down your services, you focused on LinkedIn, and you have a pipeline. What would you say is your leverage for getting the most outcome versus time?

Judi Hays:
First of all, I'm very clear on who my target market is. For technology and for anything else, it's not everybody. It has to be very specific. If I'm having an initial conversation and I ask a couple of questions and it's not the right fit, I can do a few things. I can refer them to somebody else in my network. I can overprice it, which is a nice way of doing it. Or I can just tell the client it's really not a fit. I think it's scary for people to narrow down, to say a niche. A lot of apps try to do too much and wind up doing a little bit of nothing. So the first thing is being really specific about who your audience is.

In my case, I work with professional service companies, generally with revenue up to $10 million. I do have clients with more than that, and I train their teams. The ones I give white-glove LinkedIn campaign management to average about $5 million in revenue, and they sell a high-ticket professional service. That way, we understand their acquisition costs and the cost of the leads I'm bringing in, and what those metrics are, and how long it takes: six months, eight months, twelve months, eighteen months. But when the deals close, they're multi-million-dollar lifetime deals. It's about being in it for the long game, understanding who your target is, and being willing to walk away from something that isn't a fit.

I don't know if a software company can do something like that, because you're selling, in a sense, a commodity. So you want to position it to the people who are buying: how is this different, how will it make my life better, and what's my desired end state? And I'll tell you what: somebody could make a lot of money if they figured out a CRM that plays nicely with LinkedIn, because I don't know any that do. HubSpot doesn't, Salesforce doesn't, Less Annoying CRM doesn't, Pipedrive doesn't. Nothing comes out of LinkedIn easily. You can get things in, but it's very hard to get them out, because they turned off the API. They're very protective about that. It's one of the places where working with companies, there's such an inefficiency in tracking the progress through sales development: when you first become aware of a lead, you vet that lead, you put them into a nurturing system, not annoying emails but a nurturing approach on LinkedIn, and then, at the point where they have a problem and you have a solution, you have a conversation.

Sunir Shah:
Do you have an actual relationship with LinkedIn, or are you just living on their platform?

Judi Hays:
It's a tool to me. LinkedIn is my main technology, and it's a rented platform. I have a couple of tools that work, and there's an analytics tool I use. You have to be really careful about LinkedIn's terms of service, because they will suspend you in a moment, and none of us can afford to get suspended. It's a serious thing when you get put in LinkedIn jail. We just had a talk about that this morning in a mastermind group I'm in. It's not a fun thing, and people do get put in jail, even good people.

The other stack I use is a content management tool, mainly to help my clients have visibility, and we plan a content calendar. Another tool I use is for recording meetings or preparing content. Canva is one I mentioned to you, and I love it. It's easy to share, and we can create branded guidelines. So it's not so much automation, because with LinkedIn it's harder to automate. You have to tread lightly. I use monday.com, but I've got to tell you, every client has a different communication tool, and it drives me bonkers. We use Basecamp, we're on Asana, we're on Slack, we're on Trello. I use Google Sheets and Google Docs all the time, but now all my clients are moving over to Microsoft.

Sunir Shah:
Part of your job as a digital agency is to bring the crazy, chaotic digital universe under control and deliver a result for a client. LinkedIn is chaos, because they keep fighting the ability to get it under control, and you've done it. How do you manage a client project so you're not burning time? Are you posting manually, do you have people running it manually, or do you have any automations?

Judi Hays:
I pulled back on the content. One client was posting three times a day, and when I looked at the metrics, I said, you're suppressing your reach. The algorithm was actually working in reverse and pushing it back. So with a new client, we post once a week on their main profile and once a week on the company page, and then we start to look for opportunities for engagement. A majority of it is done manually, for tagging and for adding things. You can't upload a document through a third-party tool, and you can't upload native video. LinkedIn has made it really hard, and if you're running things through a third party, LinkedIn can tell, and sometimes you can see the short code there. The algorithm looks at that and suppresses it. So I'm looking for very unique, one-on-one engagement.

The best thing I can do on LinkedIn is run a poll. You've seen polls on LinkedIn, and they're so annoying because there are so many of them. I approach it totally differently. I do an exercise with a client to figure out their pain: what are the really deep problems they solve? Then we come up with really good questions and run polls based on them. We create content based on the results of the poll, and then we use that insight to go back out and share it with our target audience. That's all manual, very manual, but I use tools along the way to create the different pieces of that engagement. Given LinkedIn's parameters, I haven't found a way to automate it without it coming across as "they're just pushing this stuff out," with no engagement.

Sunir Shah:
It feels like LinkedIn has forced everyone into an artisanal bakery. You're making a wedding cake every time. You know how to make a cake, but you have to make it special every single time. You have processes in the back of the kitchen and tools like Canva, the fondant icing machine, but you still have to spend the time.

Judi Hays:
I have frameworks. I don't use scripts, but I have what I would call prompts. And I don't scrape data, because you can get in trouble with scraping data, meaning you could scrape the wrong thing. How many times have you gotten something in your inbox that says, "Oh, I see you're in custom bakery, and we'd like to refer people," and you think, where do you see that on my profile? When you use bots that scrape, it can damage your brand so easily, because on LinkedIn your face is attached to your outreach. It's not as anonymous as on some other platforms, where you can have pseudo-personalities. On LinkedIn, it's you. It should be you.

I'm going to say this to the guys listening: there are a lot of fake profiles on LinkedIn with really beautiful women as the profile picture, who reach out to different people. If you look at their experience and some of the common telltale signs, they're fake profiles. Why do they do it? Once you're connected, you get access to my network and to the things on my profile, if I haven't shut down my settings. It can lead to identity theft and all kinds of things. So be careful of pretty faces. It's not always what you think. There's a tool called TinEye, or you can use Google's reverse image search. Do that, and you'll be surprised what comes up. If a really beautiful face approaches you, wants to connect, and says something flattering, run the search and see how many beautiful faces come up.

Sunir Shah:
Catfishing aside, LinkedIn is so valuable but so antagonistic to data scraping. We know they turned off the API, and we know they lost the lawsuit, but it doesn't make a difference. They're very useful, and nobody wants to upset them if they can avoid it. Is there a comparable platform that's a much better ecosystem for you to turn into a repeatable process? You mentioned other platforms.

Judi Hays:
I spend some time on Instagram, personally, because that's where I live: my dogs and what to eat. That has been another challenging app, because you have to do it on your phone, and I'm not a good two-finger texter. I've noticed there are some tools now that make that engagement a little more streamlined. But let me just throw this out there. Yes, LinkedIn is great: use LinkedIn to find your ideal targets. Then work really hard to get them offline. Make that your end game. Let's get off LinkedIn, like we are here, and have a conversation. At that point, you can use some of the automated tools. You can have a really cool newsletter strategy, and a really great website that you've optimized, and there's a lot of value there. You can have live events, YouTube, whatever.

Once you get people off LinkedIn and onto your owned media versus rented media, you're in a better place. Social media is really rented, no matter how you look at it. Owned media is your email list, your website, anything you own and control. Your podcast is owned media. Then there's earned media, where it's amplified through press and other media, and then there's paid media. My goal is really to get people off LinkedIn.

Sunir Shah:
Are you also managing the rest of the funnel, so they get off LinkedIn and onto the site? What do you use for that?

Judi Hays:
Every client has different preferences, and it depends on the size and the budget. We've used HubSpot, we've used Mailchimp. If I can recommend, I'll go with the tools I think fit the size of their outreach and what they want to get out of it. LinkedIn is my gateway drug. I get in through LinkedIn, and then I help them see the value of their full suite of marketing outreach. I break it down into four areas: owned media, social media, earned media, and paid media, and those are the channels we work.

One thing I do a lot with clients is look at trade shows and see where they can present or speak. I create speaker sheets for them, and then we pitch and say, hey, we can put together a panel for this show, and we've had really good results. I've also done that with editorial calendars for certain publications, saying my client is an expert in this particular subject matter and would like to write a guest column. I look for these opportunities because it's kind of like billboard advertising: you see it everywhere. I want prospects to see my clients everywhere, on social, in trade publications, in the different lanes they play in. You can think of me as the real estate agent who stages your property, so you get more money and more views.

Sunir Shah:
One of the things you're doing reminds me of when I went into consulting. I'm a partnership person, so everyone knew me from partnerships, and I went in talking about partnership strategy because that's what they needed. But whenever I sold myself as a fractional partnership person, the projects would end pretty quickly, because partnerships isn't a priority. You're talking about LinkedIn strategy, and everyone wants LinkedIn. But I imagine there's a lot more work to be done around building out the rest of the pipeline. What I found is that the valuable part of the engagement was when I asked, "So who's your customer?" and they said, "We don't know." Then I could run my user research and analytics tracking, interview everyone on their staff, and get them aligned to the project, and I just kept doing that over and over again.

Judi Hays:
The thing you said about target markets is what I either hear as "everybody is our target," or "we're not really sure," or "we have too many targets, but they're really fragmented." A lot of people get stuck at that point. It's really understanding who you're talking to, because then my question is: where do they hang out? There are certain industries where that matters. I have a client that's a very large CPA firm that sells a service to smaller mid-market CPA firms, and I was astonished at how many CPA firms are just not active on LinkedIn. Email they respond to, but LinkedIn not so much. They're getting better, though. We've just been through this whole paradigm shift of doing things virtually, and it's been good. The last two years have been my two best years in my company.

Sunir Shah:
So you get them on the story of LinkedIn. That's your position. You're the person for LinkedIn. You are the expert. But what I found is that the real work that keeps clients around for a long time is all the back-end stuff. What kind of pipeline work are you doing at the back end, and how much of the rest of it do you implement?

Judi Hays:
It's interesting, because the project we're launching next week involves some very specific research. Going back to the client, my first question is: who do you want to target first? They have three cohorts, or three groupings of prospects, and they're very different, so the messaging and the outreach are different. If we're building a pipeline, we think about where the quick win is, and who we can get to for a quick win. That's generally your existing network. There's about a 20 percent job change every year in anyone's network. LinkedIn put that stat out recently. If you look at who you're already connected with, you already have the trust factor, whether or not you know them well, depending on how large your network is. If you have that credibility, you say, Sunir, oh my gosh, I didn't know you were doing this, let's catch up. Then we start talking, and I start thinking, I've got to introduce you to so-and-so. That's the first part of the pipeline.

The second part, once we've identified the three target audiences for this example, is that we start searching. We do very detailed Boolean searches with inclusions and exclusions, and we use Sales Navigator for that, which is a paid version of LinkedIn. I would recommend Sales Navigator to anyone who's serious about LinkedIn. It's really robust if you know how to use it. It has some bells and whistles that have to do with how you find people. When we find people, we look for signals, and again this is all manual and very time-consuming, because we have to look at people's profiles. You can't automate that. I can't have a bot scan profiles, because what is it looking for? Is it looking for that pretty face? Is it looking at their activity? Once we identify that, we look for signals to engage with that particular prospect. So it's a lot of one-on-one. It's frustrating to some people, who say, "Can't you just get me 100 calls?" Well, no, because I don't think any of those will close. But I can get you five or six calls, and probably one or two will close.

Sunir Shah:
For a client like a professional service firm doing a six-figure sale, are you writing the outbound for them and sending it, or are you making them do it?

Judi Hays:
We do it together. I'll formulate something, because I'm a really good editor, and I know what converts. The book took me two years, so we can talk about how long it takes to write, but I'm a good editor. You have to be agile on LinkedIn. So I'll do a sample test: let me send this to five, six, ten, fifteen people, and let's see what bites and whether it's working. Then we expand it. It's not the same script. It's customized to the person receiving it, based on something a human finds on their profile, but we have a process that will work them through.

If we have a podcast, that's an easy message: "Hey Sunir, I saw you're doing such-and-such, and I'd love to have you on my show." You're going to get probably a 40 to 50 percent conversion on that, if you're targeted right. Or say I'm a company with a lot of insights, because I talk to all your competitors: "I'd love to give you an executive briefing. Are you interested?" "Oh my gosh, yes, let's chat." As long as you don't deceive people and then go into your sales pitch, that works. You don't have to sell by selling. You can sell by educating. Help me be a better buyer of your service. Teach me what it is, and how I find the right tech stack.

Sunir Shah:
That's what I'm getting at, because the audience here is SaaS companies that want to understand how to work with companies like yours. You said part of it is getting people off LinkedIn onto your own media and then into a separate communications flow. Are you managing that as well?

Judi Hays:
Each client seems to have a different CRM, and I'm not always given visibility into all of their CRMs. That's for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it's out of scope, and sometimes it's because it's a mess and they're not keeping track of it or updating it. That's why I use Google Sheets, or monday.com, where I set up nice flow boards so we get the visibility we need: we're communicating with a hundred people, how many are responsive, how many of that batch are ready for the ask? At some point you have to ask for a call or some kind of engagement, but it's not "Let's hop on a call." I hate that. It's more like, "I've got some intel about the industry. Are you interested in hearing it?" Or, "I'm writing a book and would love to interview you. You're an expert." I think stroking an ego goes a long way, as long as you're sincere. Don't do a bait and switch.

I had somebody reach out to me, and I knew he used automation because my first name is lowercase, a j, and that's my telltale. You can't get around that if you're automating. So I called him on it, and he said, oh yeah, whatever. I said, all right, I'll connect with you, but you've got to promise me you're not going to pitch me. No pitch slapping. He said, oh no, no, no. A couple of weeks went by, and then I got a message from his admin, or somebody, saying, "Hi, this is Sally," and she was writing to me from his account. Number one mistake, red flag. It was about something that had nothing to do with me, and it obviously didn't look at my profile, and it had all these links. Spam. So I wrote back with a screenshot of where he said no spam and no sales pitching, and I circled it and said, you just broke my trust. That's what happens. People are looking for the quick fix, and you really are in danger of damaging your brand by doing that. You have to slow down to speed up.

Sunir Shah:
The point of this exercise is to show people who don't understand how agencies operate what you're doing. If a software company wants to partner with you, when do you actually need a software partner?

Judi Hays:
We just did this yesterday. We had to get remote access, because LinkedIn can detect multiple IPs from different locations. Technically, you shouldn't be all over the place, and you shouldn't have multiple people logging in. So we had to set up a centrally located server, and we worked with a couple of tech companies that were fabulous. Not a bot chatting with you, but a real live human, invaluable. If you're a tech company providing a complex service like that, have educated people on your chat. This guy, Jeff, was golden. I said, "Jeff, I love you." He solved the problem and made a $400 sale in the process, because we wound up paying for the software for the year. It took us two hours, and we were calling in from three different countries and four different locations: Germany, Costa Rica, California, New York, and somewhere in the Chicago area. We were all trying to get visibility into one screen on the server to access an account. It was frustrating, but we all left happy, because the cloud service provider and the technologies we used had really good people we could reach who were responsive and knowledgeable. Five stars in my book. The company is Splashtop, and kudos to them.

Sunir Shah:
Will you use them for future clients?

Judi Hays:
Yes, because we need that kind of environment. My team is remote and all over the place, and we can't get flagged every time we log into an account. Everyone is logging in for a different reason: I'm logging in to look at key metrics, somebody may be logging in to process invitations, and somebody may be logging in to share content. But it has to be one central hub, and it has to be highly controlled and secure. The other one was MacStadium. The challenge was that we were on different types of equipment: about two thirds of the team was on Macs and the rest on PCs. So we used MacStadium to set up the Mac interfaces. Every problem seems to be unique. I never have the same problem twice.

Sunir Shah:
So you're a bespoke kind of agency, custom-tailoring an experience for each client. What is your leverage, if you're not trading time for money anymore because you're generating outcomes?

Judi Hays:
I'm generating outcomes, I'm honest with my clients, and I'm really good at setting expectations and clearly communicating what we're doing. I love solving problems. I do jigsaw puzzles because I love solving problems. I wish it was the same problem every time, but it usually isn't. It's usually a lesson learned, and now we know, but the next situation is different. I could have a client with remote locations, and I have to get their team into an account, and that's a whole other situation. With cybersecurity especially, people have to have certain protocols set up. The more I do this kind of work, the more knowledgeable I get.

It's about selling outcomes. I can't guarantee you're going to get a million dollars in revenue, but I can guarantee I will activate a certain number of conversations that get you to that goal, based on your average deal size, the time frame, and what you have to offer. Sometimes it takes me a while to dress you up and get you ready, because maybe you don't have the right content, maybe you have sales content that doesn't appeal to the end user, or maybe you have no content at all. I love clients who have a lot of content, because then I can do things with it. And it's up to you to close. I'll coach you on what not to lead with. Do not lead with your solution, because that's a turn-off. I'll help my clients through the conversation process, but it's ultimately up to them to close the deal. What I try to do is streamline things along the way, so they're having really good conversations with the right people. That's what I deliver.

Sunir Shah:
It's very much relationship marketing and sales. When people care about you and think about you first, and bring you an opportunity for no reason except they like you, then you've won the market. You can't lose.

Judi Hays:
That's the thing. When we're working with third-party tools like LinkedIn, it's a third-party platform. They can make the rules and change the rules at any time, so you have to be careful about building a strategy on another company's framework. For instance, at one point you could get emails out of LinkedIn, no problem. Then, with GDPR and CCPA and all the rest, that changed. They didn't tell anybody, they just shut that feature off, and all of a sudden everyone was asking what happened to those emails. Now people literally have to opt in to allow it to be released.

I still love the platform. I've been on it since 2008, and I built a business on it, and it still works. I don't know of another platform like it. They're about to bring in an audio feature, which looks a lot like Clubhouse, and it's in beta test. I think it's phenomenal, and I can't wait to use it. For my clients, it's going to give them a stage and another opportunity to engage with prospective buyers. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Sunir Shah:
Perfect. So how do people find you? I assume on LinkedIn.

Judi Hays:
Yes. My name is spelled very simply, J-U-D-I H-A-Y-S. When people want to connect with me, do not send a generic invitation, because I won't accept it. Just tell me you heard me here and why we should connect. I love to connect with people. If you'd like a free chapter from my book, it's on my website, judihays.com, J-U-D-I-H-A-Y-S dot com, where you can download a free chapter. The book is also on Amazon. When people reach out through my website and say they want to talk, I say, let's connect on LinkedIn, because I want to look at their presence on LinkedIn, and then we start from there and see where it goes.

Sunir Shah:
Thank you, Judi. For more great insights on partnerships and software, like and subscribe, and we'll see you in the next video.