The power of LinkedIn part 1
Picture this: You’ve got an eight-month old baby on your hands, you’ve just taken on a dauntingly huge mortgage. Your partner isn’t working and you just got back from annual leave to be told you don’t have a job anymore.
How would you feel? What would you do?
Coming from a sales and customer service background, I did what I knew: I pounded the phones — calling friends, previous colleagues and even recruiters to try and get in front of hiring managers.
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After four weeks of this, I had only landed one interview (which was a disaster) and if I thought I was desperate and panicked before – this was a whole new level of hell. I’d never felt so useless in my life! I didn’t feel like I was worthy of being a parent, a husband or even as a person.
Just when I was at the end of the road, with the last of our “rainy day funds” all wiped out, I got a message from a recruiter on LinkedIn offering me an interview.
Up until this point I hadn’t paid much attention to LinkedIn at all. I thought it was just another social media tool, and I was busy enough on Facebook. The last thing I needed was more distractions.
I went to the interview and didn’t get the job — but it got me really curious.
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Here I was, cold calling for hours every day. Spending up to four hours a day chopping and changing my resumes and cover letters — and this thing I had left to just sit there had given me an interview with a company that was relevant!
As I often tend to do, I dropped everything and started to consume as much content on LinkedIn as possible.
I must have read every single post or article out there – most nights falling asleep with my iPad browser pointed at another blog post.
As I consumed the content, I started to change my profile and build my networks. And as my LinkedIn networks grew, so did the offers for interviews.
By the end of the month, I had optimised my LinkedIn account to the point where I was getting three emails or calls from recruiters a week!
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I couldn’t be happier: Or so I thought.
Amongst the offers for interviews, I got one connection request from a small business owner. She owned and operated a small mortgage brokering firm, and was looking for some outside help growing her business (how she even found me, I have no clue as my entire profile was based on being a “Business Analyst”, not a consultant or freelancer).
At first, I thought she was offering me a job. But long story short, she became my first “proper” consulting client.
Can you imagine how confused I was? Here I was, trying to use LinkedIn to find a job and I get approached out of the blue by a business owner who wanted to give me the equivalent of a month’s pay for something I found super easy to do.
Just like the one offer to interview sparked my interest in LinkedIn as a job seeking tool, this one consulting offer showed me first hand that LinkedIn is not just a social network for job seekers and recruiters, but a viable lead generation platform for B2B companies!
In fact; for me, it is THE Lead Generation platform!
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Since that first consulting job, I’ve used LinkedIn to grow my Lead Generation and Marketing Agency from the ground up.
At my company, Growth Labz, we use a variety of methods and tools to help our clients get high-value clients and grow their business. For the clients who are primarily B2B focused, LinkedIn is our “go-to” way of generating quality leads.
In my own business, it’s a system that’s proven the test of time, and to this day, we get 60- 70 per cent of our new, non-referral leads from LinkedIn.
For part two of this article on how to gain connections on LinkedIn, check out Business Review Australia on Friday!