80% Failure Rate
If you're like a lot people, you've made New Year's resolution. Well, it's the first week of February, and I'm sorry to report but chances are about 80% of you have failed already. 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by the second week of February. So the odds are against you, but don't feel about it because there's a myth out there.
A lot of people think it takes 21 days to form a new habit, but that's not necessarily true. Studies have shown that, on average, it takes more than two months to get new behavior to become automatic. That means 66 days is usually what it takes, and that can vary depending on person to person. You can start some things in as little as 18 days. Sometimes it takes 254, but 66 is the average.
Double Down On The The Data
One of commitments I made this year was to make a commitment to my data. What do I mean by that? Well, I've got all kinds of data all over the place, especially when it comes to contacts. Today we're going talk about what you can do with your LinkedIn connections. One of the things that I realized is that I had lots of connections. I mean, I've got 4,500 connections on LinkedIn and 3,000 on Facebook. I've got all of these connections; I've got my address book on my phone and I've got my QuickBooks and I've got podcast guests and all these things. It's all over the place, but none of it is being utilized properly. So one of the things I decided to do was to start to get this stuff all organized. That was my New Year's resolution and I have not failed. At the end, I'm going to give you a formula that's been working.
Here's what I've done: I've started using a program called Nimble. You may have read a past blog or heard a past podcast on that. It's part of my new perfect sales strategy. If you get a perfect sales strategy or perfect LinkedIn strategy, you'll find that that's one of the pieces of software that I've been using. You can also check out Nimble by going to brianloves.info/nimble.
Organize & Thrive
I said I wanted to get my data into some kind of container, and I'd been using Nimble. So over this past weekend what I did was I spent a little time and went back to all of the podcast guests that I've had for the first couple hundred episodes. I've had lots of guest experts in the 438 episodes so far, and I wanted to make sure that I had all their data correct. Do I have their email address? Do I have their LinkedIn profile? If they have a Twitter account or Facebook account, do I have that? I know I can get all of that information in one place using Nimble.
I went back and updated about one hundred podcast guests. It took me almost an entire day to get all that data squared away.
Why was I so motivated? Well, since I've been doing Nimble for myself, I've started using it with some of my coaching clients. One of my clients came back to me last week and said, “You know what, by doing what you've shown me, I ended up getting over $30,000 in prospective business; in other words, clients that said, “Hey, thanks for contacting me again. You know what? This is old. I need an update.”
Now, I'm not one of those people who blows bogus numbers out of the water. I'm happy if you make $3.00 on $1.00, but that just blew me away, and I'd like to do that also. And you can do it as well.
Let's take a look at LinkedIn and see what you can do with that data to start getting business out of it. Here are the three basic things that you can do.
Ignore This…
What do most people do with LinkedIn connections? They ignore them. Most people never even log in to LinkedIn. I don't care how many connections you have, but most people don't and the reason is because they don't know what to do with it, and on average the most people spend on LinkedIn is about four or five minutes a week, as opposed to Facebook which is like 20 minutes a day. That's because they're not utilizing the data and they don't know what to do. So they ignore it. Also, let's face it: a lot of the connections that come in are trying to sell you something, and, to be frank, you don't want to do that either. You don't want to become one of those people that connects with somebody and just sells.
There are a couple of other things that you can do with this LinkedIn data that's going to help you.
Leverage Relationships
Number two is, why not repurpose it? Why not leverage it? So, I've taken this data and I've pulled it into my CRM. I've made sure I've got their email address; a lot of the time you can find that on LinkedIn. I've made sure that I had their LinkedIn profile saved in there. I've grabbed the picture from LinkedIn. Any information I can get, I've got it in the CRM.
From there, I now have the ability to send emails. I can also make connections inside of LinkedIn and just say, “Hey, we haven't spoken in awhile.” The bottom line is, I'm taking that info and I'm putting it into one place and saying, these are the connections that are relevant. These are my actual clients. I went into QuickBooks, and I said, these are the people that I worked with last year. I made sure to add them all in there, and I verified that the LinkedIn information was correct. Now I can actually utilize all of this data. I can make those connections become alive again.
It's something that I like to visualize as the flame that can relight the match. Just imagine a wooden match. All it takes is a spark, and it bursts into a flame, and then slowly burns the wood. You just ignite it and the match lights.
But when you blow out the flame, there's still some match left. It takes a flame to reignite the match, but it still becomes a match that you can light other things with. So, it is really easy when you first get a connection to strike it, but then it falls away. It's still a useful tool. It just takes a little more energy to get that match to be that useful tool again. It takes another flame and you keep using it over and over. So when you repurpose that information, it's like reigniting the flame.
Make Good Connections
The last thing that you can do with that information is share it. Make good connections for other people. Somebody emailed me and asked, “Can you speak on this day?” I said, “No, I can't.” But I was able to use my connections to introduce somebody who may be able to speak that day. I created a joint message inside of LinkedIn, and that's one of the things that makes LinkedIn so powerful. When you send somebody a direct message, if you say hi or anything like that, it automatically sends them an email saying, “Hey, you've got a new message from somebody.” It makes people have to log back in to LinkedIn to read the message, and chances are at that point they're going to look at your profile and see what's new. So it really helps to force people to pay attention, to keep you top of mind.
So again, here are the three things you can do with your LinkedIn connections:
- You can ignore them.
- You can repurpose them.
- You can share them.
The 10-10-10 Success Formula
Finally, I'm going to give you my success formula that I call it the 10, 10, 10. It's fast, it's easy, and repeatable. So, here's all you need to do.
- Plan on 10 minutes a day. Do it for 66 days, and it becomes a habit. Spend 10 minutes a day working on LinkedIn or grabbing that data and putting it into a CRM.
- Focus on only 10 contacts at a time. Make sure their data is up to date and that it's usable for you and not just sitting out there on some island.
- Create 10 words. Send them a message. Do it in email, or better yet, do it as a LinkedIn message. Here are the ten words you have to use. All you've got to say is, “I just wanted to say hi. How can I help you?” What that does is it starts a conversation, via a powerful reconnection message that could relight that match.
Hopefully you can see that LinkedIn is a very, very powerful tool when you take the time to maximize the data and utilize it. Otherwise, you're just gonna end up like the other 80% who give up and think it's just another annoyance in your business day.
Final Thoughts
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/
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