The LinkedIn Money Playbook Nobody's Actually Teaching You: Amelia Sordell

24:07Amelia Sordell:But also, I hate the word, kind of back on that, I hate the word authenticity because what does authentic mean, right? But actually what it means is, if I am you and you are me and my ideal audience is a mirror, you can't completely outsource that because how can you expect someone who's never been through the same situation as you to be able to know what you would find interesting? So you absolutely have to have a role in building your founder brand. And if you can't have that role, then don't build one. It's pretty simple because you do, as you said, end up damaging it because people on the outside go, oh that's not what steve sounds like why is steve talking about ai he works in accounting like do you know what i mean like you would think it was strange um but equally if you're a founder and you're busy you know and founders in my sweet spot are you know if you're running a 20 25 million you know 35 million pound business you probably have a team of like what at least 60 maybe 70 people it's going to be very hard for you to spend a long time building a personal brand so you do have to outsource it but there are ways in which you can keep that authenticity and most of our kind of mechanisms around interviewing the founder and asking very specific questions designed around the very specific people that are trying to reach your point around candidates and clients to then transcribe and go out there and kind of create content.

25:18So we we run a sales agency so a lot of what we do is outbound and I imagine at this point in your life you're very heavy like a lot of people come knocking with opportunities and they go I already I'm ready to work with you I know that probably in a past life you did do outbound. I cut my teeth in sales. Exactly. You picked up the phone. 100 calls a day, baby. There you go. Three and a half hours of the phone. When you're working with founders, obviously there's this fine line of like you should definitely be driving inbound inquiries. You have to be. We always talk about it as the net. So we're doing phone.

25:52We're doing LinkedIn. We're posting on LinkedIn. We're doing direct mail. We're doing all of these things to keep the net as wide as possible to capture everybody. when you work with founders what's your thought process or do you have any advice on like how you would utilize outbound when you've got this growing personal brand well i think there's like

26:10Amelia Sordell:there's three kinds of um lead really isn't there there's cold there's warm and there's inbound like and i i hate it when people say a warm lead is an inbound lead like they're completely different like a warm lead is someone who kind of knows about you and is maybe like been in your peripheral an inbound is like that's high intent and you need to get on the phone with them with the next 24 like 20 minutes to get that converted. And that's very, very different. If you're a founder building a personal brand, you need a mechanism to capture all. And so outbound, we've never done outbound interesting until very, very recently.

26:39Amelia Sordell:And that is mainly because we have had such a huge amount of inbound that we just haven't been able to service all of it, which is a great position to be in, right? And now we sell that as an education and as a strategy to other founders because a lot of businesses who've got to the size of the business that we work with have worked out the outbound bit or they're working with a company like you guys to get that outbound bit right and that's where they've got to where they've got to but most businesses haven't even got five percent inbound because they don't know how to create that organic demand so it's like a creation and capture right so there's those three kind of buckets of inbound warm and cold um there's probably like just a very basic kind of mechanism you can cover to make sure they're kind of capturing all of them so if you're a founder posting content what normally will happen is someone will look at your profile and go oh that's quite interesting and then move on and then because they've looked at your profile or they've engaged in your content they think you then come back in their feed the next time that you post and the more you post and the more they see and engage with your content the more they're going to see of you right so it's kind of like retargeting ads if you like the more they see the more they see so it's keeping yourself top of mind and that's really really important it's why that consistency and volume piece is so important But if you want to convert those warm leads, you need a way to get that person into your CRM.

27:55Amelia Sordell:And there's kind of two ways that we do this with our clients to kind of come to us and build strategies for. It's number one, you have a salesperson log into your LinkedIn, your Instagram, your whatever it is, and you DM them as you. So say someone has kind of looked at your profile or they've like you can see they've liked a piece of content, whatever, and they fit your ICP. We would DM you and say, hey, Amelia, like I was doing on the way here, actually on the train when I was paused. at a station when there was a trespasser on the train. I was going through all the people who've looked at my profile recently and I do the headline, hey, name, I saw you check me out, like eyes.

28:28Amelia Sordell:And then I just simply just say, I saw you looked at my profile, there's anything I can help you with. And the response rate on that's huge because people either go, no, I was just curious or actually, yeah, there is. Or no, like, I don't really know who you are, but like, I keep seeing you in my feed, but either way I get a response and that creates a conversation. And then your sales team can take that information and kind of run with it. Because as soon as they've replied, Like that is basically get that in the CRM immediately and see what you can do with it. The second thing is the inbound stuff.

28:54Amelia Sordell:So if you get a DM from someone saying, seeing what you're doing, really interested to chat, that needs to be taken immediately. What I normally say is like, would love to come for a conversation with you. What's your email address? I don't say what the process is. I don't do anything. We just take that information immediately. One of the team gets back to that person or I will get back to that person if it's of a certain kind of level. and the last one which is the bit that no one does which is what you guys have built an entire business on right is the outbound piece so why if you're building a personal brand with the most amazing content going out there talking about this incredible business are you not doing outbound because what happens is someone sees the connection request from you or the message from you they go and check out your profile and they're like oh actually this person does talk about some interesting stuff and maybe they could help me and then they go look at your company to see whether your company's legitimate and then they go onto your website so you need to have those three pieces of the pie working like together in order to as you say cast the net as wide as humanly possible and the net that I can cast as a founder is so much further than my sales team because I have like it or not the credibility of having CEO in front of my title and having a verifiable like amount of money I've generated from my business right so you have to take this really seriously if you're a founder is trying to grow because you are probably the biggest asset that your sales team can use to win new business.

30:13One of the dark arts, should we call it, in the space is something called engagement pods. I'd love for you to tell people maybe that don't know what an engagement pod is, maybe a bit about why people use them and perhaps the cons.

30:28Amelia Sordell:So I was talking about this literally yesterday. I got an email two weeks ago from a really famous entrepreneur, you know, all over LinkedIn. everyone knows who this person is saying do you want to be part of an engagement pod and I wrote back I was like because I've always been very anti-divant I'll get into that in a second but this story is quite interesting um and I wrote back and I was like let me just see like who else is in this because I'm quite I'm quite fascinated by this whole engagement pod thing and um I said who else is in it and they were like well you have to say yes before we tell you and I was just like you know what like fuck off I'm not I'm not having this conversation I was like thanks but no thanks basically why what is an engagement pod it's basically either a paid or free group of people who have kind of this contract whether it's actually a contract signed or whether it's a mutual agreement that you're going to engage in other the other person's content within that group so that could be let's say we the three of us could join a whatsapp group and we all mutually decide that in order to boost our content where as soon as someone posts you put the link in that whatsapp chat and then we will have to engage in that person's content pretty simple and on the face of it sounds like a really good idea because if you're trying to grow your personal brand how great would that be to have two of my friends engaging with my content really early because we all know the first 60 minutes of posting I think is the most important for an algorithm to go ah that's a great piece of content so let's push it out to more people more people see it more people like it etc etc etc makes sense the issue with this engagement pod thing for me as a founder is I don't give a shit about how much engagement I get I really don't and I say that with absolute truth I don't care whether my post gets a thousand likes two likes I care whether the people that liked my content are going to buy my stuff period like it makes no difference to me whether there is a thousand people liking it or not and the danger that you have if you're a founder in an engagement pod and there are loads of them is you build a personal brand that looks really great but doesn't make any money and for me it's like paying people to be your friends right it's like we all grew up with that kid who maybe had like a bit of a cash and like would go and buy everyone sorry am i opening some dark wood um grew up with a bit of cash and like would pay for everyone's like you know sweets at the tuck shop and like maybe when we're a bit older would like pay for everyone's drink at the bar and like no one really liked that person but sort of like rinsed them a little bit because you knew they were a little bit desperate for friends and they'd like pay for it is that is that nudge still still yeah we'll talk after but we all know that kid right and that is what an engagement pod is as far as I'm concerned is like you're essentially paying people whether it's with cash or whether it's with engagement to be your friend and it's very difficult to know whether your content is working if you are falsifying that information um and the reason why people join these engagement pods is understand that they don't want to post something and get no likes right no one wants to be like here's my soul and everyone's like it's a bit awkward like it's soul destroying but you know what building a personal brand and building a business is soul destroying right but I would rather feel embarrassed when I first start out and as I said, be really wealthy, then be embarrassed, which you will be anyway, and not have anything to show for it.

33:29Amelia Sordell:So you got it. You can't shortcut that messy middle. You can't shortcut that bit where no one really gives a shit about what you have to say. Just like you can't shortcut that bit when you first start your business when no one wants to buy what you're selling because they don't know who you are yet. Why would they buy from you? They don't trust you. So you can't shortcut it. But the problem is most founders want to because they don't want to look stupid in front of their friends. So should you join an engagement pod? Depends on what you want. If you want followers, go for it. If you want actual leads, probably not.

33:55Oh, God. I'm so tired. I've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time. How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile, and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call, and it calls them, and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai, and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time. No other better connection, right? Wow. Nooks.ai. Me and Jack spoke at an event a few years ago and one of the other speakers was a female kind of sales entrepreneur who was talking about post on LinkedIn, kind of selfie heavy content and then following up with voice notes afterwards.

34:42And we've got a friend who looks like a football hooligan and he put his hand up and he said, do you think this would work for me? And everyone laughed. and it felt like there was like a kind of an unwritten thing there of like pretty privilege i'm pretty yeah but i get a result from it 100 but then i imagine being attractive female founder who's doing this there's probably some cons on the other end as well i'd love for you to give like

35:05Amelia Sordell:maybe i think i'm a female founder thank you um yeah look like the reality is pretty privilege is a thing right and it's not just on social media you can look at all the statistics of like how much people get paid how much they get hired how like all of that thing if someone's perceived as being more attractive, they get better opportunities. The thing about that statement is you can make yourself more attractive. Like it's not, and I don't mean physically necessarily. I mean like wash your hair, iron your clothes, like, you know, or damn. Do you know what I mean? Like if you look like you've got your shit together, people think that you do and people want to do business with people who's got their shit together, right?

35:38Amelia Sordell:So there's this, but there's also that. I think it depends on the person. You know, that's obviously worked really well for her because she's probably in a really male-heavy environment. She looks different. she sounds different so she automatically gets more attention and actually that's what we're trying to get here so that's one way of doing it but the other way of doing it might be for your friend you put his hand up who looks like he would say rugby player or something football hooligan sounds like a legend um he might have a different approach which is he does the same mechanism but but leans into that do you know what i mean like that could be part of his personal brand is that he's sharing selfies but looks like a football hooligan do you know what i mean and it's just because someone's doing something and it's working for them doesn't mean you're going to be able to do the same thing and it worked for you you just have to find the thing that gets the most attention you know there's um there's someone that i love following and their entire personal brand is built around just showing their morning routine like that's it they don't have any other content other than like the the 5 a.m to 9 a.m that's all they post and i find it really interesting because they're like they get so much done i probably also get so much done but i just don't what do they sell um they're selling like uh they've got like a bunch of yoga studios and stuff like that So it works really well for their target audience.

36:48Amelia Sordell:So for your friend, like what is his target audience? Maybe his target audience are football hooligans, in which case, why don't you take selfies for all the games that you're having? Do you know what I mean? So just because it works for her doesn't mean it works for him. And I think this is the issue that we have with strategies and frameworks and why I try and lean into the thing that's replicatable is that the way that someone else does it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. For example, there's, you know, Justin Wells, she's a phenomenal guy on LinkedIn and has built an amazing person around like a 10 million pound business or 10 million dollar business off the back of himself right he doesn't got any team members he only posts like screenshots of tweets and that works for him there's loads of people who've tried to do the same and it looks terrible right so you just got to work out what works for you and part of that is trial and error you know i've built nearly 400 000 followers now off the back of posting 80 percent of annoying what works and 20 percent just trialing shit and being unafraid for it to flop right so i think you've got to find what works it's the same with the business you always have a little experimentation fund right if you want to grow your business you've always got to run these little experiments like maybe it's a new ad maybe it's a new revenue stream maybe it's a new style of selling like just to see whether or not there's a pocket of growth you can create and it's the same with with content and it's the same with your network too you might you might meet someone at an event and be like don't really want to be friends with that person but maybe they're going to open some doors to you and then you find out six months later actually they're an absolute legend so you know it's it you can apply that 80 20 rule to pretty much everything i like this conversation we have a a lot of personal branding conversations, but it feels like you lean more into the money rather than attention.

38:17I know that that has to happen, but like you get it. Whereas some people - I want to be rich. Good.

38:22Amelia Sordell:I want to look at a business class flight to the Maldives and be like, yeah, easy book. Like that is my aspiration in life, you know? So yeah, and I'm okay in saying that. And I think that makes people uncomfortable, especially in the UK. I'm a woman and I'm like, I want to be rich. People are like, what, wait, what? You can't say that. Absolutely I can. Well, I'm not going to sit here and post content for hours and reply to all these comments and you know dm people if i wasn't getting something at the other end like i'm not here to make loads of friends i'm here to make well yes i want to make friends and make money but no i don't care about i don't care about followers and stuff like that i care about the people following me you're gonna pay me yeah but but the so you're confident with it but i know a lot of people like money beliefs like it feels like you have very limited or you've had some and you've overcome them i have i have a friend who partner runs yoga retreats and he said could you give her some advice because she's thinking about charging this amount but she's told her mum and her nan and they said it's too expensive yeah and you can imagine why i said it i've always felt like don't fucking ask your mum and nan because they're not your icp anyway for people that have those money beliefs what in the in the early days we used to charge 250 pounds a day five years ago and that would be me and zach darling now it's x thousand per month retainer minimum commitment how how does somebody have the confidence to say i'm now gonna up my my fees i'm gonna i'm gonna change my price model because there's more demand there's more value when it comes to those money beliefs it's interesting it's a two-sided conversation because on one hand we're talking about confidence and on the other hand we're talking about money and i think people you like thoughts are very powerful things if you tell yourself you can't charge that amount you'll never charge more like you are now stuck in that because confidence doesn't come excuse me confidence doesn't come from having confidence like it comes from doing something and it not going terribly wrong right and actually even if it does go terribly wrong you know you've done it and didn't die so you might try and do it again and it's through that for the lack of a better wanky word it's doing those reps that actually builds the confidence you know you have the evidence to show that it's okay excuse me you have the evidence to show that it's okay and so you therefore have the confidence so having the confidence to ask for more money just ask for it that's how you get more money and it's also how you get the confidence to ask for more money right so it's it's the you don't learn how to do something by thinking about it you learn how to do something by doing it so I think that's the first thing which isn't just related to money it's related to all things when it comes to money when I first started like you I would charge 750 pounds a month right and we would it's just me and that was a retainer and we were doing like creating content for clients for that it was like 20 posts month which is now I look back and I'm like I was like why did I not ask anyone like who I was actually working for like minimum wage basically like half of what I was earning you know or less than um in my previous role but as you kind of grow and you get better and you get quicker you realize actually the value that you add to someone is significantly more than what they're paying and you know again you need to make sure that what you're being paid is at least you know half of as valuable as it is to the person who's paying it because why would they pay you to do it otherwise?

41:25Amelia Sordell:You know, value and money are two different things. Pay is what you get paid. Value is what's perceived, right? And what you've got to find is the sweet spot between how far can you push that pay versus how much value are you adding to the other party? And that's, you know, true for employers and employees as well as for customers and clients. So how do you get the confidence around money beliefs and stuff? Like just increase your prices on a yearly basis and see what happens. um i used to increase my prices on a yearly basis and then i started increasing them on a bi-annual basis and we basically just pushed it as far as we could until people started going whoa that's really expensive and we hit like a five grand ceiling so from 750 pounds a month to five grand for the same amount of work in an 18 month period basically um so that's where that scale comes from and then once you work out that five grand bit you're then like right how can i how can i systemize what i'm doing so that i can get other people to do what i'm doing so that we can then instead of having me just charging five grand a month we have 10 people charging five grand a month.

42:20Amelia Sordell:It's a process. There's no like one and done here is how you can ask for more money, just ask for a bit more money. Although one thing I would say that might be really useful as a practical takeaway from someone who's maybe doing under a million a year, one way you can increase your fees immediately, especially if you're in a service-based business, is just add a kind of ad hoc kind of housekeeping fee. So we added a 10 % housekeeping fee onto all of our contracts going out because we were doing things kind of outside of the scope, but it would be things like maybe doing an extra approval a month or um you know jumping on a quick call that was outside of the scopes like help clients with everything we were already doing this work we weren't getting paid for it and therefore it was eating into our margin so i was just like right this is what we're doing we're charging 10 on top of your your fee for these things and all the clients were like yeah okay fine some of them didn't like the way it was communicated and that's because i wasn't in charge of the communication and i didn't do a good enough job of like getting across what the comms should be and i'll take full accountability for that but no one left everyone's like okay fine, fair enough.

43:14Amelia Sordell:So we immediately increased our margin by 10 % on every single client. We had the same thing in its advice I give business owners all the day. We were like doing the first month of work to get ready for a campaign, but saying, no, but you don't need to pay until we start doing the dialing and the outreach and going, why don't we just charge an onboarding fee? Absolutely. And then all of a sudden, nobody blinked. And then that onboarding fee has gone up and up and up because of the more value that goes in. And I think like, that's, these are the ways that people can make money. You strike me, Amelia, as like, you've always had this mentality of like I don't give a shit I'm just gonna post it has that always been the case or was there like a what was the turning point there isn't a turning point like there's like those questions are always so funny and whenever you see people on stage they're like I remember in 1953 when this thing happened I'm like no you don't you're that's just your rehearsed answer that sounds really good and you've had like fresh training on how to answer it like it's just a process like the more you mess up and it is the mess ups right it's never the milestones that teach you the lessons it's always the things that go really wrong they're like ah okay I won't do that again I'll try not to um so now I haven't always been this confident I haven't always I used to care deeply about what people think I still have people pleasing issues you know I am not the best manager because I care too much about what my team think of me as a person and I know that sounds if an employee listening to this or maybe an ex-employee of mine I apologize I'm just being kind of frank I really want people to like me and so I won't give them the candid feedback that they need on their performance to get or I haven't in the past shall we say to get them to where I need them to be and I learned that like the hard way I've been burnt a lot by situations where people were kind of felt felt like we were friends and I'm like but actually I'm your employer and so like they of course they don't win in that situation because they have a different perspective of what I think their their their job function is um so no I haven't always been like this but But I think through building a business, which is, by the way, the steepest learning development curve you'll ever take in your life.

45:12Amelia Sordell:Like if you want to become a decent person, like just start a side hustle. It will break you and remold you. It's like it's like the SAS. But yeah, just going through it and making mistakes and kind of learning and optimizing and growing. And, you know, it's like such a wanky answer, but it's like just learning marginally how to be slightly better every day and how to be slightly more confident in something. or realize that actually maybe that's why those people left and that's why your team didn't perform as well. Like it's not a them problem, it's a you problem. Like all of those tiny little lessons compound into who you are today and you will grow from where you are today.

45:48Amelia Sordell:Like who you are now is not gonna be who you are in 18 months time. And isn't that a great thing? Like I hate this whole thing. Like I've had friends being like, you've changed. I'm like, yeah, thank God, why haven't you? Like if we were all staying in the same place, like what's the point? We may as well just die because you're dead if you're not growing, right? where do you think ai fits into your world i love ai like chat gpt is my best colleague like literally we've got claude and chat gpt and we use them different things so i always say that claude claude is like my chat gpt is like my mate and i'll be like hi buddy how's going like you know i really want to just like work this out with you basically and i've got gpts for everything luxury travel agent like admin assistant email responder like all kinds of different things and then claude is the one that just like does stuff for you like you know a great example would be you know a report I might need a report doing on a very specific thing I just chuck all the stuff in there and like bing it's like the best reports ever been written so I use AI probably more than I use any other type of tech in my entire business however where does it fit in your personal brand it fits in all the bits that can't be done by you and the bit that has to be done by you is the content and what I mean by that is it has to be your stories it has to be your thoughts it has to be your lived experience you cannot build a personal brand on saying things that anyone else can say so you've got to be rooted in your lived experience we might all have the same opinion on certain things but we would have had a different lived experience that brought us to that conclusion that is the bit that you have to share and ai doesn't know that about you so trying to build a you could build the best agent in the world but it can't do that so you've got to sit there and you've got to be willing to put in the work to be able to build a brand that actually creates you revenue and the biggest kind of time sort of obstacle i sorry the biggest obstacle i get with clients is always like how long is this going to take me i'm like well how long did you take winning new business and they'd be like all week and i'm like there you go like you can't shortcut this bit um and absolutely we've got it down to 60 minutes a week and that process works really really well because it's fucking systemized you know um but you know you've got to input you can't just outsource this to ai or someone else because it will sound like everyone else because the great thing about ai is it's democratized information and access to information and shortcutted content creation right but everyone has access to that which means that you all sound the fucking same um and that then creates the kind of antithesis of why we're trying to build a personal brand right if anyone else can use it then why would you so i think there's a balance there to be had someone will be listening to this who goes all right so i'm using claude why don't i just put claude onto amelia's linkedin profile and say look at all her posts in the last 12 months, tell me what she's doing, what's working, and then write 12 months worth of posts for me.

48:27Amelia Sordell:Oh, you'd get some success doing that because you're just following my path. The thing is, you can follow my playbook or you can follow anyone else's playbook and you can build following, right? But it's not your personal brand, is it? You've just copied someone else. And, you know, we've seen businesses do that relatively successfully. You know, there's plenty of examples where a business has copied another business's business idea and got some level of success, but you're never going to be the original. And I think it's actually a little bit lazy. like absolutely learn from what other people are doing and learn how to storytell and learn that maybe doing this with your LinkedIn is going to get you better result than that.

48:58Amelia Sordell:But also know that our audience might be different. Our process might be different and our stories might be different. And therefore you could do exactly the same thing that I'm doing, but your audience is going to respond in a different way because we're not trying to do the same things with the same people. So yeah, learn the proven methods, but apply your own stuff to it. I think is the most important thing to take away. Amelia, I think this conversation has been brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us. We always get the guests to leave one question for the audience. So if someone's listened to the full episode, what's one question that you could get them to ask themselves today?

49:28Amelia Sordell:I think the one question that I always come back to with all kinds of stuff is if you knew everything was going to work out, what would you be doing right now? That's it. Powerful. Powerful. I like it. If people want to work with you, people want to find you, what's the best way to do it? Clout.com. we work with founders who are doing 250 to 50 million pounds a year in revenue to build their personal brands but more importantly get their team to do it for them so yeah come and work with us we'd love to work with you love to work with you guys I've got loads of stuff to talk to you about thank you so so much thanks for having me