Grow Without Hiring

[00:00:00] Ken: Everybody wants to be LinkedIn famous, and if you're sitting there right now and you're saying, Ken, don't even care about LinkedIn. Not a thing that's on my to-do list. But if I offered you the ability to be LinkedIn famous, you also wouldn't say no, but few people actually use LinkedIn to generate significant business.
[00:00:21] Ken: I've worked with people that have six figure audiences. And also people that have less than 5,000 connections.
[00:00:28] Ken: And I actually only had 2000 and change connections not that long ago myself, but this conversation is not about being LinkedIn famous or even really saying that you need to post to LinkedIn. It's instead. An unusual case for the platform and why it might be more significant to your business than you realize, or perhaps I'm also just going to make a case for why it should be
[00:00:58] Ken: because everybody wants [00:01:00] to grow their business, grow their audience obsess over content, post reactions.
[00:01:08] Ken: Few people are actually using a place like LinkedIn in a disciplined way to have that significant impact on your business.
[00:01:18] Ken: I also want you to understand though, that this conversation is not one of likes aren't cash because there are a lot of steps before even worrying about cash or revenue. I remember years ago when I started this business and I created this thing called the Remote Solopreneur, and part of what I wrote was building a scalable personal brand in order to be that element of growing without hiring.
[00:01:43] Ken: so while at one point, I definitely need to have a conversation about why LinkedIn is the best place to grow that founder led brand, or building a scalable personal brand. We won't even talk about that today. But that absolutely is one of the foundations, [00:02:00] as I kind of wrote a mini manifesto about why and how we can grow without hiring.
[00:02:06] Ken: But as an aside, just before we get into this discussion, it's why solopreneurs and CEOs alike invest into becoming known as the go-to authority in their market.
[00:02:17] Ken: so we'll put that aside for a minute and instead focus tactically on why LinkedIn is a place that you should be spending more focus on, more attention to and relative to the things that I'm gonna talk about today, that almost everyone still is sleeping on.
[00:02:37] Ken: And I will tell you this, the only reason I'm actually willing to have this conversation is because I see LinkedIn as the place that has the best, what I call go to market 2.0 signals available today. So let's actually start precisely there. The first thing that I want to highlight for you when it comes to [00:03:00] this ability to make sales easier to grow without hiring is related to signals.
[00:03:06] Ken: The reason why you don't get traction with an outreach message, whether it was on LinkedIn or whether it was a cold email, the reason why someone doesn't actually care about a post you created. A landing page or any number of other marketing efforts is because you're not using signals to understand how that makes whatever marketing efforts you're doing much more relevant.
[00:03:32] Ken: Now, over the last, I don't know, five or 10 years, but especially during the digital age, we had the ability to use signals and to use data to market in a way that we never have before. I'm not gonna go through the whole history. Of that. But think about these two small companies that didn't exist decades ago called Google, which obviously now has a parent company as well, or this other thing that wasn't called it then.
[00:03:56] Ken: But meta that are built precisely on [00:04:00] data and in a lot of ways are built on signals. But the signals that more people like you and I used when it came to trying to generate B2B business.
[00:04:10] Ken: We're much more focused on things that began to happen in the market that were easy to understand. I call these things, and the first bucket, again, we're focusing on here, are signals, but I call these the go to market 1.0 signals identity or status change signals is one example. Hiring for a new role. M and a or funding round, and we would see messages and we'd see plays like, congrats on your latest round of fundraising, or, I see that you're hiring for this role, this entire bucket, which I'm not gonna go through in detail today because it's something that I go through in much more depth with my actual clients.
[00:04:48] Ken: Are plays now that immediately make you irrelevant or make you look like every other option on the market. And it's not that they aren't useful at all, it's that [00:05:00] used alone. You just get grouped into buckets of, I've heard this thing before.
[00:05:05] Ken: So the signals that you're not paying attention to and the signals obviously go beyond a platform like LinkedIn, but I'm making again, this unusual case for it
[00:05:15] Ken: is that it is the platform. That has the highest number of signals that you can get, period, when it comes to selling in B2B. If you're someone who's looking to sell Snicker bars, probably not the platform that you care about, but if you are a consultant, a founder, you have professional services, you have coaching services, it is the playground. That has people liking posts and content, either of you or potential competitors or related industries. It has people following company pages.
[00:05:49] Ken: It has people saying, I want this thing, and it is a beautiful indicator of what I would say with fits in this predictive fit signal, which is part of [00:06:00] go to market 2.0 signals of. Prior conversion pattern matching for a client that would look like a great client. I call this the lighthouse client, and again, for the sake of simplicity, we'll define it today as replicating your best client of all time.
[00:06:15] Ken: You can use things like lookalike audiences there, but for a lot of people that are consultants and founders, unless you're selling to major corporations, you don't even have to get that sophisticated and use tools like that. Or build out plays like that.
[00:06:30] Ken: There's just not another spot that will show you all of these details. Who people are following shared connections, shared business connections, right, that they're following a competitor and every single day a potential client, a prospect, is broadcasting their entire. Brains and their intent and what actually interests them, just not another place that it's gonna give you that same level of access and visibility.
[00:06:59] Ken: [00:07:00] We won't even get into the super technical things you could do with all of those signals, but just from a pure platform standpoint, it's not just about posting. It's not just about connecting. It's about being able to identify these 2.0. Go to market signals and acting on them to make sales easy. Had a conversation yesterday with someone who's gonna join up and they said to me, oh my gosh, you hit me at the exact right time.
[00:07:29] Ken: That wasn't a mistake, it wasn't an accident. It's called signals. I have lots of different signals that I use and I don't even get super crazy with them. And if I am a person who's doing a seven figure business. As a solopreneur. Imagine if you take some of these signals and you put them into a full agency, and the people that are doing that have grown rapidly.
[00:07:51] Ken: I know a bunch of different people and agencies that I've either worked with directly or that I've just watched, and they've gone from zero to 5 [00:08:00] million almost overnight, which takes some companies forever. Some never even get to that point. A lot of people get stuck below $2 million a year. And it's because they're looking at these signals and they're acting on these signals as opposed to just saying, here's a message, here's an outreach, here's a post that has nothing behind it and doesn't make it more relevant now than before.
[00:08:23] Ken: But remember, the difference here is not just saying I'm using a signal like someone was a guest on a podcast or someone joined a Slack or industry group. Those are go to market 1.0 signals that are just overly tired. So that is our first bucket. The next thing though, and I'm gonna make it easy, I try to work hard by the way, to keep these things in your brain.
[00:08:44] Ken: If you haven't noticed, we either use metaphors, sometimes we use alliteration. The next one I wanna look at is social proof. When someone comes to a website, and I know websites, because I built the first websites, I had a multimillion dollar website that landed me large [00:09:00] clients. But when they come to that website, it is a little vacuum.
[00:09:04] Ken: It is a place that you created, and even if you've done a great job of building out case studies and you have testimonials, it's all within your little museum. Think about that word, museum. You have curated it. You've crafted it, you've tidied it up. It looks perfect, right?
[00:09:23] Ken: That's not what people want. That's not what people want to understand when it comes to your business. They wanna understand the real stuff and talk about this later in the sales process as well, but I don't want to digress. They want to feel like they are in your factory and seeing the thing being made.
[00:09:38] Ken: What you don't get on websites today is the instant social proof. You have on a place like LinkedIn and people say, oh yeah, it's a network. I get it. There's lots of different ways to social proof, but when someone hits your profile, they are gonna look at you and they are gonna judge you. Again, this is not about being LinkedIn famous, but they are gonna say, this person has [00:10:00] 20 connections, or this person has 20,000 followers.
[00:10:03] Ken: Is this a little bit of high school popularity? To some extent, I've actually had to work extremely hard to get to the 30,000 plus followers, the first 10,000 after being around 2000 for, I don't know, 15, 16, 17 years was easier. And the next 10,000 and the next 10,000 have been a lot harder. And there are fluctuations on the platform that I've talked about in other conversations.
[00:10:27] Ken: And actually, the funny thing about this. Particular conversation is I'm having this conversation to advocate for LinkedIn during one of the times. We'll set up to this for a second that the reach is lower than ever. That the ability to have 30,000 followers almost means nothing relative to distribution of content, but it does not negate the social proofing that you get when you hit my profile and see.
[00:10:53] Ken: That I have that kind of audience or someone who has a half a million followers or whatever the number [00:11:00] is. Does it mean that someone that has a thousand or 2000 that they're irrelevant? No. I had that and I had a $5 million a year business, but the social proofing there.
[00:11:09] Ken: The social proofing of all of the testimonials that are sitting right. In my first entry on my profile of pretty much every large well-known top voice of LinkedIn, and I do have testimonials in the actual testimonial area, but I've done a cool thing where I'm using social proofing across the entire profile as opposed to just down in the bottom, which most people don't scroll to.
[00:11:31] Ken: The social proofing also comes in people who are engaging with your content. It also comes in. Anything else that you featured? If you had some things that were featured that indicate people have worked with you and have nice things to say, but here's the difference of that versus your website. It's not the museum.
[00:11:50] Ken: It is the factory. You can't control the testimonials that were left. You can't control the people interacting. It's the real stuff. [00:12:00] It is the country club. Or the dance club that's either empty or has a cool, as the kids say today, vibe. It's got energy, it's got life.
[00:12:09] Ken: And I know some of you are working through this and you're like, I don't have that yet, Ken. Okay. Keep working on it because I didn't have it either, even when I invested as an agency owner into making that a thing. But this is why again, your founder brand, even if you just want it for purely authority, content, and for thought leadership, this is something that you can't recreate in other places.
[00:12:31] Ken: And it is different again, and I've been on X from the beginning. I was on YouTube from the beginning. I was on Instagram when no one knew what it was, back when it was actually a different kind of app. It's just not the same. All of those are not the same as what you have. On LinkedIn, and in some ways, yes, it is sort of like a Facebook for the business world, and actually now people are saying more and more it feels like Facebook with the kind of content that's on there.
[00:12:54] Ken: And I've also driven some of that forward to make business more relatable and more personable, you might [00:13:00] say. I'm adding more social proof to it, so you can't recreate that. And there are some tools that try to do that on websites. It's just, again, not the party. Not the club, it is the museum. And people are being told, shh, please don't talk too loudly.
[00:13:16] Ken: It's your thing that you've put in someone's ears to walk them through the museum versus them choosing their own adventure. So we have signals, the best place in the world for go to market 2.0 signals. We have social proofing. We have the ability for people to explore. We have the ability for people to see instantly credibility that's extended to you from either people interacting with your network or from the kinds of things that you've placed on your profile, which I definitely recommend to do this.
[00:13:44] Ken: And I do it differently than a lot of people. So go check out my profile. It's always linked in the show notes.
[00:13:48] Ken: get into this last one, which is about sourcing, and it's about the data that lives in a lot of different places on LinkedIn. If you think about the signal showing you. The [00:14:00] intentions showing you the behaviors, showing you market signals, predictive fit, and all of those things.
[00:14:08] Ken: Then we think about the data behind that. The person interacting with a potential competitor saying that they want to hear more, asking a question is the person that may be a prospect for you because that other person who is so busy with all of their viral reactions doesn't actually have time to engage someone who really needs help.
[00:14:29] Ken: So we have the stuff that shows up in your feed, which are potential leads and prospects Sometimes LinkedIn will show you something that is unexpected and it leads to a situation like I had recently where a viral post showed up in my feed Because of comments, I left a very thoughtful comment that got the number of impressions that sometimes on post today are comparable to that.
[00:14:55] Ken: I then sent that person a connection request with something. That was [00:15:00] hyper relevant to the thing that they talked about, added some social proof, hint, hint into that message, and had some conversation back and forth. At which point that person who didn't know me from the hole in the wall and is not anywhere near my locale, converted relatively quickly into becoming a client.
[00:15:18] Ken: And I have lots of stories like that because I'm not just looking at. The signals, but I'm looking at the sourcing, the data behind that. So we have things like that showing up in the feed. We have very basic LinkedIn search itself, which you actually can get very far with. You can look at who else is following other creators.
[00:15:38] Ken: A little bit of an older play as well. But it works, especially if you add some other filtering to it.
[00:15:44] Ken: You can look at a post that's going viral, see who else is commenting on it, see who's engaging on it. And act on that and say, I'm gonna connect with these people because they look like lighthouse clients, and you could do something even beyond that. I'm not gonna [00:16:00] advocate for it, but you can scrape all that information if there was a hundred comments and 500 reactions.
[00:16:06] Ken: Again, not saying you should do this, but you could easily put that data through a sort of automation and now you have a whole list of potential prospects for sourcing.
[00:16:16] Ken: So we haven't even gotten into the actual data part of what LinkedIn wants you to buy, these are just the linkedin.com parts of the platform. We then can go into actually sales navigator itself, the definitive place of sourcing. You probably are seeing.
[00:16:35] Ken: Those advertisements all over the place, you're probably seeing LinkedIn trying to get you in there, and it does have a little bit of a learning curve, but as an example, why in the world wouldn't I want to do this if I have 10 clients who all have super large audiences who go viral all the time, or who are super well known. Why wouldn't I connect with all of the second degree connections of people who look like what I call my lighthouse clients, [00:17:00] especially if I have a testimonial, a k, a social proof for them on file and begin to try to engage 'em and say, Hey, I see you follow this person. I helped them do this transformation or got this specific outcome.
[00:17:14] Ken: Perhaps I can help you do the same. And then have a link to their testimonial. I personally don't have to run that at scale, but it doesn't mean that I couldn't because I'm using the sourcing. I'm using the data portion of LinkedIn the way that actually will generate interest and conversations because I have a signal behind it, which is that they are a predictive fit for my business.
[00:17:39] Ken: Now, here's something that I wanna just call out. Because when I did a session about this yesterday with my client base, people were a little bit excited and a little bit scared at the same time and said, oh my gosh, how do I get this built into my business? How do I begin to think about go to market 2.0?
[00:17:58] Ken: Do I have to [00:18:00] automate this all? Do I have to change the tooling that I'm using? And I answered it very simply, which is the answer is no to almost all of that. Most of what I described here, you can do with a standard LinkedIn account. I definitely recommend at least premium not getting paid, not an affiliate for LinkedIn, obviously, you can manually scan your followers, you can go through.
[00:18:24] Ken: Posts that are showing up in your feed that look like they're going viral or that LinkedIn is suggested to you. You can use the LinkedIn search, you can add the social proofing there. You don't need to automate anything. In fact, you shouldn't. You should be very careful about automation on LinkedIn because it's a quick way to lose your account.
[00:18:40] Ken: There are safer things to do, but in general, my philosophy that you've heard me talk about before is document template. Automate. You've gotta get this working manually first. Before you'd think about doing something else, but when you start having a posting style or a posting topic, a pillar that works, you go to town on that.[00:19:00]
[00:19:00] Ken: I learned early on that $5 million a year meant a lot more to people than saying I was a seven figure entrepreneur. Signal resonance, had more people interested in talking to me, knowing that I built to that scale the most important part on. This unusual case for LinkedIn is thinking about our signals, our social proof, and our sourcing, and building this in as a discipline to your business.
[00:19:22] Ken: If you're saying right now I'm not on LinkedIn at all, okay, this might be a little bit over your head, but now you understand a way to use it, that actually would generate business. If you're saying, no, I'm actually a person who's posting, or I've tried to post and I didn't get any traction and I didn't get any business.
[00:19:38] Ken: It's because you're not using these things, it's because you've thought about it the wrong way. There are a lot of people that tell you just to post the LinkedIn and you should post the LinkedIn. I love those people because some of them are also my clients, but if you're posting without this, then you are gonna be posting into a void.
[00:19:54] Ken: You're not expanding your network. You're not building more prospects. Who are your lighthouse [00:20:00] clients that are seeing your stuff, whether it's through. The algorithm, which is more of a challenge or talking about getting in front of them, like I've been advocating today through more proactive go to market.
[00:20:11] Ken: So if you want to grow without hiring, and B, just like some of the largest name CEOs in the world who have personal brands, who have founder led brands, do not think that the founder of Spanx. Adds a ton of value to the brand, to the business. A ton of attention. I can go through a lot of examples. Some of them are not as popular as I used to use, but you still know today who the head of Apple is.
[00:20:36] Ken: you know the people behind these brands, and it does. Extend a certain perception of the brand previously, in certain cases more positive than it is today, but you know who they are and that informs your consideration of said brand. If I asked you who is running Dell today, you probably don't know
[00:20:55] Ken: if I asked you who is heading up Lululemon? You also may not [00:21:00] know.
[00:21:00] Ken: So the founder led brand, the personal brand is important. If I offered you the ability to be LinkedIn famous, you'd probably take me up on it. But even the people who are quote unquote LinkedIn famous are not doing this mostly because they're in love with their large audiences and their viral posts.
[00:21:16] Ken: They're not able to actually look at the signals. Their social proofing is only the audience size, and they absolutely do not do anything with the data. With sourcing . they're too busy getting reactions. They're too busy doing a volume-based business. They just wanna sell the next person as opposed to actually generating the five and six figure deals that my clients generate.
[00:21:40] Ken: And that is the separation of the kind of business that you have and why. I often say to people, stop trying to follow the strategies that you hear about places like LinkedIn for people who have businesses different than yours. So if you wanna grow without hiring and you want to embrace using LinkedIn in a way that actually generates [00:22:00] significant material impact for your business, please get focused on signals, understand social proofing, and use it for sourcing of the data that operates against these different signals.
[00:22:11] Ken: I promise you that's gonna make your sales conversations. A lot easier. You're gonna actually start to get traction in your marketing, and it's ultimately gonna lead to allow you to grow without hiring. So that's where we're gonna end it today. Always enjoy these conversations. If you've got a nugget, please do consider leaving a rating or review.
[00:22:28] Ken: Also always happy to hear from you. You can use the links in the show notes, and I keep the show notes very tight for you to get onto either my weekly briefing where I go into this stuff in a deeper detail or allows you to get a time to chat with me or send me that direct note.
[00:22:46] Ken: So I as always, really appreciate your time and attention means the world to me and I look forward to our next conversation where we talk more about how to grow without hiring.