304: Practical Advice That Will Accelerate Your Business

Melissa Henault [: 00:00:00

Hey, hey, hey, I hope you guys enjoy these what I'm calling podcast shorts for my burnout to all out community. This is just a little peek behind the curtain of the coaching that goes on inside of my programs, we're bringing to you some of the best nuggets and coaching I'm giving within hot seats of all of our different programs, whether it's our LinkedIn Method Academy, our mini mastermind business basics all the way up to our higher level mastermind. If you're hearing some of these questions, and you're like, Man, I wish I could get my burning question answered by Melissa. Hey, guess what, you could be featured on my podcast. If you've got a question that you want answered and you submit it to my team and we pick it, we will bring you here to the podcast for our podcast shorts and do a hot seat with you. Where can you submit your questions? Send them to teamburnout2allout dot co. We'll make sure we drop that in the show notes for our podcast shorts. And I hope that you guys find as much value in these shorts as our clients do inside the program.

Melissa Henault [: 00:01:13

Need some effective tactical advice that actually helps you get results and makes a real difference in your life and business? You've come to the right place. If you're finding yourself here today, it means you're getting ready to gain serious traction in your business, rapidly multiply your income and impact, and you're ready to make it happen while living all out. Guys, I'm Melissa Henault, your trustworthy corporate dropout turned 6 figure business burnout turned happy and healthy CEO of a multimillion dollar online business, and you're listening to the Burnout to All Out podcast. On this show, we're serving up innovative growth strategies, simple implementation methods to put them into practice, and action stimulating inspiration tailored specifically for the modern entrepreneur. Let's dive in.

Guest [: 00:02:12

I'm new to your program, as you know, and here's the thing I've improved my FSI score already following your tips and I'm at a 64, so I'm pretty pleased with that. But I have close to 6,000 connections. Many of those connections are individuals who I connected with before COVID When I had hired a company to do lead generation work for me on LinkedIn, I was doing career coaching. So a lot of them are in the corporate space, but don't fit my current client avatar. I've changed the focus of the work that I'm doing. Mhmm. My question is, should I disconnect from them? And if so, how do I do that? Do I have to be concerned about upsetting LinkedIn in any way if I do that?

Melissa Henault [: 00:03:09

Yeah. Great question. For most of you and even in your scenario, depending on your capacity and how much time you're spending on LinkedIn each day, I would highly suggest instead of trying to clean it out, that right now you're just aggressively growing. Because there is some value to having that volume of a network that the the platform kinda rewards you for. And even though they may not be your ideal client, they may engage in something that they're highly networked with that gives you visibility to your ideal client. So let me give you an example. When I left corporate, my ideal client was a middle aged female in corporate America. And I made a post that was about gone or the or the corporate days of wearing a black suit, traveling from coast to coast.

Melissa Henault [: 00:03:57

I was in a pair of yoga pants and fur boots and, like, a slouchy sweatshirt, and it was, like, one of my first, like, coming out post of, like, leaving corporate America. And although this man was not my ideal client, he was a middle aged white male. He was also the general manager of North America for a Fortune 500 and a good friend of mine. And he commented on my post. And I got on the plane and flew to California. I got off the plane, and there were 280 comments on my post. Now why was that? Because he had over 25,000 people in his network, of which many were middle aged females. And when he engaged in my content, it blasted to everyone who was active in his feed, my content.

Melissa Henault [: 00:04:47

And so we don't wanna disconnect from highly connected humans even if they aren't our ideal client, if they're advocates of us, and they're gonna engage. And as a matter of fact, I would go a further step to say if you know highly networked people, you may wanna go scratch their back and engage on their content on purpose, even though they aren't your ideal client because they may reciprocate and give you mass visibility. That changed my life. That was life changing for me. So just keep that in mind.

Guest [: 00:05:16

Amazing. So do I have to be concerned about a limit of connections on LinkedIn?

Melissa Henault [: 00:05:21

No. What you do wanna be cognizant of is the amount of outward bound request to connect that are just sitting there idle that have not been responded to. And I think that's what Bobby was alluding to a minute ago, is if you have a ton out that haven't been responded to in weeks, months to years, it impacts how LinkedIn deems the quality of your account. Because what they see is you've got a ton of outward bound that no one's responded to. And it's like, are you spamming people? Are you reaching out to people and no one wants to connect with you? So, like, Jackie has a module on this. I can't tell you exactly how to do this, but there is a module on how you can go look at your outward bounds that are unanswered and resend them. And that will help kind of clean up the integrity or health of your account, if that makes sense.

Guest [: 00:06:08

It does. I appreciate that. Thanks. And in terms of reviewing who's in those 6,000, like you were saying, go scratch their back. Is there an efficient way to review connections? Like, I don't know some kind of demographic details possibly.

Melissa Henault [: 00:06:27

Not to my knowledge, but to my knowledge, there isn't. The one thing you can do is export it, I believe, to an Excel spreadsheet.

Guest [: 00:06:33

Okay.

Melissa Henault [: 00:06:34

And then even then, you could probably use some type of AI to sort based on names that are gender specific. But other than that, LinkedIn doesn't have a lot of in house capabilities with sorting that list. It would be nice.

Guest [: 00:06:47

Alright. Thanks so much.

Melissa Henault [: 00:06:49

Yeah. Just to give you reference, we're scrubbing my list right now because it's just time because we run ads on top of organic. So we get a lot of people who opt in, and then they end up not being the right fit for us. And so it's a four month process that we're going through to scrub my list. So I would rather you be focused on growing it than scrubbing it right now. Okay?

Guest [: 00:07:11

Thank you so much.

Melissa Henault [: 00:07:12

You are so welcome. Alright. I've got eight minutes. I'm wondering if we can, like, knock this, if we can give four to pan and four to gin and, like, everybody gets their questions answered. I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to get all the way to share. But just as a reminder, on the Sunday night email of the first of the month, right, Amanda, you guys will get the link and you can book your hot seats for next month. So we're just doing extras right now because your friends didn't show up, and we've got extra time. Alright.

Melissa Henault [: 00:07:38

Let's go to Pan.

Guest [: 00:07:40

Hi. So excited I got this time. Yeah. Okay, Melissa. So, basically, like, our brand is like this. It is a statement of it is bold statement apparel for entrepreneurs, and we have two target audience. So one is entrepreneurs, which help them stand out, and I give them visibility when they feel invisible. And the second is, like you had suggested, I'm looking for to partner with people who do events and who like to give away premium swag to the entrepreneurs.

Guest [: 00:08:06

And it really helps with the networking is what I got a feedback from one of the entrepreneurs. Like, people approach him and say, oh, you're an entrepreneur. I'm an entrepreneur. Oh, nice T shirt. Where did you get it from? Oh, I I attended this event. You know? So Right. So they love to wear it outside the gym. Most of the companies just slap on their logo on a low quality t shirt and call it a day for the swag.

Guest [: 00:08:26

But with these really empowering prints for the t shirt for the entrepreneurs and with the logo, so basically, it improves the ROI on your brand, and and they carry your brand everywhere they wear that tee. So I don't know, like, how to put that across in the content and any ideas because, you know, if I I I map my customer journey and it starts with people who are not aware of the visibility problem or they feel invisible. But nobody wants to, like you said, call it out in public, say, yeah. I feel invisible in the public. I'm never able to voice my opinions among the other entrepreneurs or in business meetings. So how do I, like, really address that and map it out in my content?

Melissa Henault [: 00:09:02

Well, I think that you just did. I think you need to, like, literally go back and listen to what you just said because you just talked about the visibility and the impact of this kind of brand awareness of apparel. One of my good friends runs an apparel company, and she pitched me very similar. And this is why I brought this up to you because she pitched me on the apparel piece and how it can really help grow the brand, grow the visibility, create culture. And so it's storytelling in your content that people buy into. And back to, like, what we've been talking about all day is, like, what's in it for them? Why would they want to invest in this apparel? Well, it's the bottom line. It's the growth of their business because of the visibility and the conversation and the connection that happens. Even this last year, we started creating pins that are brand specific and year specific.

Melissa Henault [: 00:09:51

So we had a Nashville pin for burnout to all out last year, and we had a Austin pin this year. Now people are freaking collecting them. So we'll have a Miami pin, and that gets a whole contest when people come to the live event, like, who has the most pins. So you can gamify. So I think that it's storytelling at its finest, and also consider testimonials. Like, if you're doing your market research and you're working with customers, can you interview them? Can you use their sound bites in your content or convert their sound bites into written form and even carousels to really story tell and brand build. How does that sound?

Guest [: 00:10:29

Yeah. But apart from, like, testimonials, like, a lot of education, the steps people need to buy in, like, all of that, I can like, I don't have a story or my personal connection and everything. I have, like, a limited story, and I've spoken about it, how I overcame my struggles and challenges and how I discovered this brand. But how do you, like, story tell in every educational content? Because then it's, like, sometimes I just put out content. It's education, but it's not connecting the head with the heart, and then they are not really engaging.

Melissa Henault [: 00:10:57

So you just told the story. It doesn't have to be like, the storytelling can be start with imagine. It doesn't have to be the actual story that you're making like, it can be a fictional story of imagine. Like, imagine stepping into a room where your brand is on someone's shirt. Imagine getting a call for a new client because, another client of yours was wearing this apparel, blah blah blah blah. Tell the story, the fictional story. Does that make sense?

Guest [: 00:11:28

Okay. Cool. Yeah. I'll try that. Alright. Awesome.

Melissa Henault [: 00:11:32

Alright. Jen, I know we're at time, my friend. I was gonna try to we've got just a couple more minutes, and I'm trying to get everybody's questions that had their hands raised. I saw you. You were like me.

Guest [: 00:11:45

Just for me, where I'm really struggling is I have been doing so much oh, it's saying my share isn't on. I was gonna show you real quick with my LinkedIn. I'm struggling because I feel like I've I've got so many posts out there with videos, reposting my own static posts, redid my title. I have an about. I have feature. Like, I feel like I've really Uh-huh. Done all the things, and I'm not and I'm commenting like crazy, like, my activity off the hook. My SSI is a 62, which isn't terrible, but I'm not really getting people coming to me.

Guest [: 00:12:24

And so what I am is a high performance coach, operational development kind of coach, where my success is leading teams to kill and shatter goals. And so that's really who I am in a lot of success in that space and a lot to offer as a coach. It's just not resonating. For the life of me cannot figure out where my problem is.

Melissa Henault [: 00:12:50

Yeah. Okay. So it's typically gonna be one of three things in this scenario. If you're consistently posting and you're getting engagement or you're not getting engagement? A little bit. Like, I get

Guest [: 00:13:00

a lot of likes, and then sometimes I get commentary or whatever, but not always.

Melissa Henault [: 00:13:05

Okay. So if you're consistently posting and you're following the LinkedIn checklist with engaging prior to posting

Guest [: 00:13:11

Yep.

Melissa Henault [: 00:13:12

Let's do a root cause analysis. What I like to do is start at the very top. If you're consistently posting and you're engaging, but you're not getting engagement back, the first question is, is it the right audience?

Guest [: 00:13:25

K.

Melissa Henault [: 00:13:26

K? So what I want you to do is look at your network. Do a little look at your network. Even if you have to export it to Excel and sort by industry, that would be really interesting to see. Like, is it the right network? The other question is, is it an active network? How much have you been strategically growing your network? And is it a live active network of at least 500 new people since you joined the academy that are your ideal client? So that's question number one. Is it the right network? Question number two that can be that can help look at visibility is going to your analytics and looking at the top five professions

Guest [: 00:14:04

that

Melissa Henault [: 00:14:05

are viewing your content. And if you go look in the top five professions that are viewing your content are not your ideal client, you have your answer. You don't have the right audience looking at your content. So some of you guys have heard the story, but three years into me building this business, four years into building this business, just two years ago, just about, when we looked at the top professions looking at my profile, who remembers? Who knows what was the top profession?

Guest [: 00:14:31

Medical. Yeah.

Melissa Henault [: 00:14:32

Pharmacists and doctors. We were like, what the fuck? And so I had to take the word doctor off of my name. And so it's just gonna be it's just information. Just go look. What are the top five professions that are looking at your profile? And if they're not on target, then we need to go back to the network again. If they're on target, the next question is, is the content actually resonating? If we have the right network and we have the right people looking at it, the content isn't compelling enough. K. And the other thing is, are you occasionally creating a call to action? Are you creating the funnel for conversation? Are you creating do you have a sales strategy? So those are the things I would look at kind of in trial, like, in chronological order.

Melissa Henault [: 00:15:17

That was a great question. I think a lot of people benefited from that question.