Picking Your Prospects the Mango Way
When I think of picking prospects, I picture a basket of fresh mangoes. 🥠(My absolutely FAVORITE fruit!)
Ever picked a perfectly ripened mango fresh off the tree?
They're delectable, so juicy, and just the right amount of sweet and sour. It's nothing like buying a box from Costco and waiting days for them to ripen.
If you've watched any of my videos, you'll notice that big mango tree in the background. (Yes, it's real!)
When that tree "goes off" as we call it here on the island, I cannot pick all the mangoes fast enough.
Even then, I'm choosy about the ones I pick from the tree versus the ones I leave to hit the ground for the chickens and bugs to munch on.
It's the perfect metaphor for how we can go about social selling on LinkedIn without wasting our time trying to catch "all the mangoes" but focus on only the biggest, best, juiciest mangoes!
In this episode of Mondays with Mindi, we talk about how to pick your prospects on LinkedIn "the mango way" -- I'll even do a bit of show-and-tell!
Why Going Wide is Not a Good Strategy
LinkedIn is very different from a number of other social channels. I would almost argue that it’s not a social channel in all the traditional ways because it can be used more strategically due to the way it’s intended to be used and how it’s built.
When we think of social media, we often think of trying to grow as BIG a following as we possibly can. If we have more people at the top of the funnel, we’ll have more people come out the bottom.
The account with the most followers WINS on the socials.
This same concept also applies to Facebook and Instagram ads. If you’ve ever run these ads before, you’ll know that you want as BIG of an audience as you can get, so that you get enough eyeballs on your content who will convert to leads for your offer.
You could get more strategic with your ads, but you’re likely to miss out on a lot of the right people who might have opted in. It’s better to show it to more people to get the result you want.
So, it makes sense that many people assume LinkedIn is the very same way. Get connected to as many people as you possibly can who MIGHT fit the profile of your ideal prospect and hope for the best.
Use all 100 of those connection invitations every week. Use as many InMails as you’re allotted in the month.
Then, hope to get enough sales conversations to fill your pipeline from your LinkedIn network.
It’s just that LinkedIn does not work this way in reality. In theory, this may sound like a great approach, but you actually would do better to be very picky about the prospects you pick (yes, pun intended here) because YOU do not have unlimited time to have these conversations with EVERYONE who wants to get some time with you.
Your time needs to be strategically spent with only the most ripe and ready prospects, not those who need a bit more time to ripen on your mango tree.
So, let’s talk about what this actually looks like on LinkedIn when you’re picking the right (or ripe) prospects from your network (or mango tree.)
Getting Picky on LinkedIn is NOT a Bad Thing
A lot of us have been told that we need to put a wide net on all our social media channels and online to start attracting the right people to our businesses.
As experts, we tend to take this advice to heart and attempt the “be everywhere” strategy online without ever really going all-in with LinkedIn because we don’t want to miss people other places.
We also tend to use the same strategy to prospecting across channels, rather than learning how to play the prospecting game well on LinkedIn. It’s easy to assume that “social selling is social selling” no matter where you’re doing it.
It’s logical to understand why we make this assumption because selling principles don’t change, but how they’re implemented in different place DOES change.
For example, when you’re making an offer in an ad on Instagram, you’re speaking one language and likely using a bit of entertainment to “grab attention” from people scrolling the news feed. You need to get them to opt-in to get an email from you, and that’s a pretty tough thing to do in general.
Making that same offer to sell the very same thing on LinkedIn is going to look a lot different because it’s relationship-based (not entertainment-based!) The people you’re interacting with on LinkedIn are already in the mindset to “do business” and naturally much more open to talking shop than someone trying to decompress after a long day by “reeling” (as we call it in the Rosser household when either of us gets pulled into a few minutes of IG reels or TikToks!)
Think about it. You have a prime opportunity to reach out based on your professional relationship to someone who’s on LinkedIn because they want to talk business, and they are NOT expecting you to entertain them.
You can get right to the point without trying to “grab” their attention with the latest Reels fad… have you seen some of them lately?!
Okay, don’t want to get sidetracked on reels -- back to LinkedIn picking of prospects -- you get to interact with ONLY the ones who would be an ideal fit for your business.
You don’t have to HOPE that they find you entertaining.
You get to show up as the best version of your professional self.
You don’t waste your time having conversations with people who don’t have a profile… which means you have ALL the information you need to qualify them as a buyer before they get on your radar.
None of this is possible without a heck ton of work using ads or email campaigns or organic social media strategies.
Do you see the opportunity LinkedIn provides you as an expert? Yeah, it’s pretty obvious.
Only Engage Deeply With Your “Ripe” Prospects
Now think about it, just about every single professional on the planet who wants to “do business” is on LinkedIn right now.
LinkedIn is not just a place for job seekers or pesky salespeople to sell you something.
It’s the place where experts, like us, go to engage with other people we’d like to do business with.
I don’t know about you, but I focus a good deal on my “ripe” prospects when I’m on LinkedIn in my news feed and more importantly in my LinkedIn messages.
If you’ve been doing business for any length of time, you already have a customer avatar. If you’re new, you need to start developing a customer profile.
You’re going to look for people on LinkedIn who fit that customer profile, and you’re going to connect with them to get them into a conversation around doing business. No sales pitches.
But, the goal is to really be able to identify who your “ripe” prospects are on LinkedIn. That’s going to take some experimenting to figure out, but most of the people I work with in my membership and who are my clients “get it” within about 60-90 days (if not sooner!)
Once you start experimenting with getting into conversations with “ripe” prospects, you’ll start being able to reverse engineer what to look for as telltale signs that they’re ready on LinkedIn.
For example, I have a client who is looking for leaders in the cannabis space. They’re currently undergoing a massive transition as an industry going through becoming legalized in the US. Therefore, just about every cannabis leader or medium to large-sized organization is in need of what this leadership consultant (who specializes in working with cannabis leaders in transition) can help them with.
Does he reach out to leaders of small companies? Nope. We tried them as an audience, and they just were not experiencing the problems that the medium and large organizations were facing, didn’t have the budget, and frankly did not have the interest in working with a leadership consultant.
So, we took them out of the prospecting pool and narrowed our focus. This resulted in fewer conversations but a higher conversion rate to sales for the client. See how this works?
Picking Your Prospects the Mango Way
If you want to pick your prospects the mango way, you need to reverse engineer your ideal prospects on LinkedIn. There’s a bit of an art form to this because you need to know a bit about the information you can find on people’s profiles and then map this back to what makes an ideal client for you.
Let’s talk about how to get this process started, whether you’re a seasoned expert who’s worked with hundreds of clients, or you’re just getting started with a new target market and want to know how to get it done on LinkedIn.
#1 - Get Clear on Your Ideal LinkedIn Prospect
My prospects who come from LinkedIn are different than those who come via Facebook or Instagram ads. I treat them differently, because they are more relationship-based than someone who saw me “being clever” on an ad, then decided to download my free resource.
On LinkedIn, it’s important that you understand what your customer avatar looks like. You can go about this in a couple of ways.
If you have an account-based strategy, you might be starting with the types of companies you want to work with and then look for the people inside those companies you need to reach out to.
If you are looking for certain job titles, small business owners, or people on LinkedIn who match your customer profile, you will want to search for them a bit differently.
I teach this in a LOT more depth inside my programs, but just know there’s a way to find ANYONE you’re looking for using LinkedIn. I’ve gotten pretty creative and have learned how to combine clever keywords and boolean phrases to find just about anyone.
#2 - Focus on ONE Type of Prospect
Don’t try to reach out to all the different customer avatars possible. Start with the one who’s going to be most reachable and easy-to-find on LinkedIn.
For examples, if you could go after C-level executives at large, stuffy companies OR you could target marketing agency owners, I would definitely go for the marketing agency owners.
They’re going to be more responsive and easy to reach. Downside is that many of them may not have the same budget, but go for the audience that you feel is the most relevant to your offer, you feel confident selling to, and you know you can service best.
You can always switch audiences later. Pick an audience that you know well. You’ll get results faster.
#3 - Run a LinkedIn Experiment
You’re then going to run a LinkedIn experiment where you target just this one audience using one type of outreach message or sequence.
I’ve talked about this topic of “what to say” in prior livestreams, so feel free to go back through my channel or check out my blog if you want some pointers on messaging.
Realize there’s going to be a lot of trial-and-error at the beginning to figure out what type of message is going to get through to your prospects.
The key here is NOT to pitch or selly-sell in your initial outreach. You need to just “talk shop” and start building a relationship with them before you go any further.
Some ideas for conversation starters: invite them to your podcast, ask them to provide input for a book you’re working on, talk about a mutual community you’re a part of, maybe you’ve gone to the same business event. Think about how you can start up a natural conversation that leads them down a path to get to know you and ask about what you do.]
Let’s recap the getting started process:
Get clear on your ideal LinkedIn prospect
Pick just ONE type of prospect to reach out to first
Run a LinkedIn experiment to see what works
If you’re ready to get started with growing your business on LinkedIn and take the next step to optimize your profile once and for all, so you can start getting new leads or land your next opportunity in 2022, join me inside The LinkedIn Accelerator program which is opening in a few short weeks!
What additional questions do you have about getting more prospects with your LinkedIn profile? Leave them below in the comments or shoot me a private message. I’m happy to answer them👇!
