Cut Through The Noise, and Generate Clients on LinkedIn with Ryan Caswell

0:02Who's ready to rock fire nation JLD here and welcome to entrepreneurs on fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Creator Science. Today, we'll be breaking down how to cut through the noise and generate clients with LinkedIn. To drop these value bombs, I brought Ryan Caswell into EO Fire Studios. Ryan is the founder of B2Bleads.com, a company that helps businesses find new clients through LinkedIn. And today, we'll be talking about starting a lead generation company, what that looks like. We'll talk about why LinkedIn is an amazing solution potentially for you, Fire Nation, the four pillars that make a successful outbound campaign on LinkedIn, and so much more.

0:46And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ryan and our sponsors. As business owners, it's part of our job to stay ahead of the curve. And with AI stealing the show these days, it's time to study up. But where do you even start? Start with HubSpot. HubSpot's AI power tools, including their content assistant and chat spot are changing the way you create content and communicate and serve your customers. Take HubSpot's content assistant as an example. It helps you brainstorm, create and share content in no time. And you can do it all right inside their super easy to use CRM platform.

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1:57Start your membership today and receive$200 off, visit mylifeforce.com to get started now. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com. Ryan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? And yeah, I'll kick things off by sharing something I think most people probably disagree with, or at least it's not the common sentiment around what it takes to be successful. And I think it hurts a lot of people to getting started. And that's around, people always say, follow your passion. And whilst I agree it's important to have passion around what you do, it's not the only kind of component to equal success.

2:48I mean, if your passion is to sit around and watch TV and potato chips, it's really not going to take you very far. So I think there's this important component that's missing from this statement of follow your passion. And it's really, you know, solve a problem, something that you're passionate about solving and that you're good at as well. And if you can find somewhere where all those three intersect, then you found your niche, you found your sweet spot, you found your point of difference. And that's when things really start to take off. You're preaching to the choir, brother. I always do say, listen, it's an ingredients kind of list.

3:21Yes, passion, excitement, enthusiasm, that's part of the ingredients, but not the only one. You need skills, knowledge, expertise, value. You need to be solving a real problem. You need to combine those ingredients into your zone of fire. That's where you're going to succeed. And Fire Nation, we're talking about some exciting things today. We're going to talk about cutting through the noise and generating clients with LinkedIn. And Ryan, you used to be an engineer, but you decided to start a lead generation company. Tell us more. There's actually a few steps in between that probably don't really make much more sense than what that sounds like.

4:04But yeah, I used to be an engineer, mining engineer of all things. So if you've ever seen that scene in the first Zoolander where he pops out of the cave or completely head to toe black, that was me every day. So I'd be going underground, working in the dark. I wouldn't see the sun sometimes for a week. But yeah, it wasn't something I was tremendously passionate about. It was interesting work. But I was always just more passionate about building things, automation, the online space. And I just always had this passion, like probably a lot of people listening, to do my own thing. And my wife was working in the mines as well.

4:42and she ended up losing her role and I quit to pursue coding and web development and just something different. But with cashed up from the mines and not really sure what to do, we ended up moving to Brazil of all things. And long story short, we bought a farm out in the middle of the mountains in the forest and we set up this bed and breakfast out there and this was kind of my first taste of trying to start a business. And this is where it sort of leads into how I ended up getting into lead generation. Though it's still a few steps away yet. But this business did not work. And it was my first lesson in how important it was to have a strategy to acquire clients.

5:35And coming back to my first point, not just do something you're passionate about. so this was great it was this beautiful like little shack out in the mountains but it was a very niche thing that really only a few people in the world really appreciated um and i needed to focus on a market solving a market problem a market need and that wasn't it and eventually that sent me bankrupt more or less came back to australia had a family even more bankrupt had a house, mortgage. And so I was trying to find ways to make money on the side and lots of different attempts at drop shipping, online businesses, lots of failed attempts.

6:17And it kept coming back to this one simple problem was having a reliable way to acquire or essentially buy clients, whether that's through time and a process or whether that's through paid marketing. And because that was my biggest problem. I figured it would be other people's problems too. So if I could solve that reliably, then I knew I'd be able to sell reliably. And that's more or less how I got into it. There's a few more steps in between, but that's the, I guess, the meat and bones of it. I love that you shared that story because Fire Nation, there's no straight line to success. And like, if you're kind of scratching your head and being like, wait, they worked in the mines, this is Perth, Australia.

6:57Everybody works in the mines there. It's very normal. and then he went to Brazil and then he came back and now he's doing what we're going to be talking about here today with the lead generation company. It's really important to understand the journey is with those false starts and with those struggles. But every single time, Ryan can look back and say, well, that was an experience that allowed me that when I finally realized what I actually could and wanted to do that could be a success, why that would be the right step forward, why this could be a good strategy, why this is really scratching a meaningful niche or itch in the marketplace.

7:37And I always love saying, Fire Nation, you need to create the number one solution to a real problem in this world. That's what people are looking for, the number one solution to their real problems. And for you, Ryan, you became this huge believer in LinkedIn outbound. So talk to us about what the secret is here and why it's better than other alternatives that you've experienced. I'll preface by saying I don't necessarily think it's better. I think it depends on your business and where you're at and what you have available. So I'm all about numbers and I'm all about doubling down on what's working best and what's providing that best return on investment.

8:21It's why we're so specialized in LinkedIn, because for us, it provides the best return in terms of cost and effort input for our clients and us. So that's really where we've doubled down. Now, when I started off, I was doing a lot of different platforms like Facebook marketing, SEO, and a whole bunch of different things. and I kept having the same issue in that a lot of these strategies didn't work for small businesses one-man bands and you needed a lot more economy of scale I guess is the best way to say it before they're actually effective so if you take a you know a company with 500 people in it you can have someone working full time on email marketing that might provide a one percent increase in the company revenue and that pays their wage 10 times over however that same strategy providing one percent increase in a one-man band means you're actually losing money so it was really important to find something that I could use to help myself but also use to help smaller businesses to generate leads And that's where LinkedIn was really powerful.

9:38It's like comparing, like if you're a small restaurant owner, you probably couldn't afford to put a billboard up in the middle of the city center to promote your restaurant. But what you can do is you can get some samples of your product. You can go out, hit the streets and start handing those out. And you can start diverting some people that would have gone to one of the bigger players to come to you. And this is where it's really effective is on LinkedIn, you can essentially find your people, reach out, start conversations, and start pulling people towards your company. And then using Outbound, you start to build your client base.

10:11And then once you've got your client base, your audience, you can focus on inbound and then referrals and word of mouth. So high level, that's really where I see LinkedIn being a very powerful strategy. Fire Nation, this is powerful because Ryan went step by step through this process to see what was working, what wasn't working, what was actually converting, what was the strategies and the tactics that are going to make a meaningful impact in a person's business. And he actually created four pillars that make a successful outbound campaign on LinkedIn, which we're going to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

10:54Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship. One of Scott's recent episodes was with none other than Jack Canfield, where they discuss adapting to life's twists and turns. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. When Kate and I bought our home in Puerto Rico, one of the major selling points was the pool. With that Puerto Rico heat, nothing beats an afternoon dip in our own backyard.

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13:18Better energy, more focus, and deeper sleep are all within reach. Start your membership today and receive$200 off. Visit mylifeforce.com to get started. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com. All right, Ryan, these four pillars. Fire Nation is really wanting these. I mentioned them in the intro. I talked about them right before the break. You have these four pillars that make a successful outbound campaign on LinkedIn. We can follow this process. What is that process? The first thing is, is you really need to have the people on LinkedIn. And this is what makes LinkedIn such a powerful platform is the ability to find your target market.

14:01So that's really the key thing is you need your audience to be on LinkedIn and they need to be active enough on the platform so that when you reach out and you connect with them and try to get a message in front of them, they're actually going to see it. So that might seem obvious, but it's why it's such a powerful platform in the B2B space because a lot of professionals are on it and using it. Now, the next thing is, is you got to get your profile and your presence on the platform, the way in which you drive buying behavior up to scratch. So how you present yourself on the platform does a lot of the heavy lifting.

14:38And you can reach out to someone to start a conversation and not have to say much because they'll look at your profile and it's going to be very obvious that you're credible in the space and they're going to want to talk to you. So the first thing is people, they're on the platform and they can actually see your message. Then it's your profile and presence on the platform, the way in which you can drive buying behavior. The next is prospecting. How do you start conversations with people? Do you have a passive approach? Is it more conversational and networking based? Is it direct? There's no right or wrong answer here.

15:13It really depends on your business, your product, your offer. And once again, the way we drive that buying behavior, which I'll come back to because that's really the core component here. And the last one is process. So this is where it's really important. I think a lot of people struggle because obviously the more personalized and the more one-to-one and the more connected you are to each and every single person, the better the return per prospect is going to be, but not necessarily the return per effort and per time. And so getting this right is really a balance of inputs and outputs. If you just send a mass message out to everyone that's really generic, it's not going to get you much success because no one's going to resonate with it.

16:00But by the same token, if you go to the other end of the extreme and you find people and you go door knocking on every single one of their doors and trying to start conversations and your products only has a customer lifetime value of a few hundred dollars, then the return is not going to be there either. And finding this middle ground between how much input should you do to get the maximum output. It's really trying to find that 80-20 principle. What's that 20 % of the effort that's going to drive 80 % of the results. And rather than focusing on doing more and getting diminishing returns, it's taking that system that gives you the best result, and then creating more of those systems, duplicating that system.

16:43So those are the four pillars. If there's time I could dive more into that, how to drive that buying behavior, but I'll put it back to you because I don't want to, I'm conscious I don't want to go on and on. Well, I do want to talk more about that buying behavior. So let's go down that road and let's give maybe an example of something that you've done or maybe one of your clients has done so that we can really understand what this looks like IRL in real life. We'll get into that how to drive the buying behavior component now because this is where people struggle because they listen to people online.

17:13They say, hey, you need to do this. You need to be more, you know, you need to be more friendly or you need to be more direct. It really depends what you have to work with. And I say there's kind of four key ways to drive buying behavior. So the first thing that's not part of the key ways is the obvious market need. There needs to be some need in the market for what you're putting out there, the problem that you're solving. So that should be granted or given. And the way we can build trust around that market need is there's four key things and it depends where you are in your business. So if you're a brand new business, you probably don't have a huge amount of credibility, but there are ways that you can build credibility through like your past experience working with big brands, case studies are obviously good if you've done talks how do you build credibility around your expertise in the space so the next thing is niching and we hear this all the time like can you go niche to cement this idea of being an expert in the space the other is branding and likability you know how much are you putting yourself out there do people like you will people buy from you even if you're not good at what you do people can still buy from you if they like you and they trust you and they see you consistently.

18:25And the last way we can build trust around a market need is a strong offer. What outcome can you guarantee and what time frame, essentially? And even without much experience, if the offer makes sense and it's hard to say no to, then people will buy from you. So you don't need all four of these, but depending on where your business is at, the type of service you provide, you need to work and try and get all four up as much as possible, but you need at least one to be working to build that trust around that market needs that people will buy. In terms of what it actually looks like for a client, I think the most important thing is having a way, and this is for everything in business, is having a way to track what works and what doesn't.

19:12A lot of people will just throw things at a wall and see what sticks, and that's fine so long as you have an accurate way to measure what variables have made it stick. And so doing a lot of split testing is really helpful on what types of messages will work for clients. So an example of one is with one client, we had a very direct message and then very soft message. And the soft message got lots of connections and started lots of conversations, but they ended up going nowhere. And the direct messaging had less connections and less engagements, but the people who did engage progressed very quickly and having that data to support that really helped to move things along so the last thing i'll say so it's not too high level and people have something to go away with is in your messaging try your best to get people to connect and engage with you based on the value you provide because you need to identify that bottleneck early in the piece if people don't want to connect with you based on the value you can provide as a service then you've identified a bottleneck early and you need to learn how to get your market message value proposition right in order to do it.

20:21People don't care how they receive their mail so long as there's something valuable inside. I love how you walked us through that real example. And Fire Nation, I hope you can kind of picture like what it would look like for you to utilize these four pillars in your business, in your life, specifically on LinkedIn. I want you to take the microphone here for a second, Ryan, and give us the mic drop. What is the one thing of everything we talked about here today that you really want to make sure our listeners get from this conversation? Just get started. Reach out to someone. Start a conversation.

20:56Don't be afraid to do it. So my background being an engineer was I hated sales and marketing. I had a real bad taste in my mouth. And because I had such a bad attitude towards it, it stopped me from putting myself out there, from doing cold calling, from doing door knocking. So, the best advice I think to give to anyone is just do something, see what works and what doesn't and use that classic feedback loop. Do more of what works and do less of what doesn't and the more you can track and measure and be consistent on what you do, the better the data will be and the more it's going to guide you on what to do.

21:36that's really I think the most critical thing is get started and create your own feedback loops because the world is full of great advice often completely paradoxical advice where the the two opposite ends are true and it's about finding that balance for you and so having a way to do something measure the outcome with your own feedback loop is going to be so critical so just get started, start measuring and you can't go wrong. Ryan, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, let us know how. Give us a call to action. I recommend checking me out on YouTube. So YouTube, Ryan Caswell, or head to the website b2bleeds.com.

22:24If you can't tell from the domain name, we specialize in business to business leads. Love that. And Fire Nation, you're the average. of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with RC and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Ryan in the search bar. The show notes page will pop right up. And Ryan, thank you for sharing your knowledge, your value, your truth with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks so much, John. Great to be a part of it. Hey, Fire Nation.

22:58A huge thank you to our sponsors and Ryan for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation. Successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals. That is why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step by step. So visit thefreedomjournal.com. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business startups, and entrepreneurship.

23:34One of Scott's recent episodes was with none other than Jack Canfield, where they discuss adapting to life's twists and turns. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. Want to live better, longer? We all do. And that's why LifeForce is making proactive and personalized healthcare easier than ever. Start your membership today and receive$200 off. Visit mylifeforce.com to get started now. That's my, L-I-F-E-F-O-R-C-E.com.