🤫 LinkedIn Productivity Secrets No One Tells You 👀

LinkedIn is actually a goldmine for entrepreneurs if they know the productivity secrets. Even if LinkedIn has an overly serious feel to it, the platform can be a lead generation machine if you know the secrets of attracting clients. In today’s episode, burnt-out corporate professional turned all-out entrepreneur Melissa Henault shares her secrets of productivity on LinkedIn. She has pivoted the concept of attraction marketing, which is popular on Facebook and Instagram, into LinkedIn. Tune in as Melissa tells us how she built a six-figure business on the platform.

Check out Melissa’s free gift for you: The LinkedIn Productivity Checklist

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Imagine getting such a huge influx of leads that you can barely handle. You don't even know what to do with all of them and the average income level of every one of those leads is $100,000 a year. You know they can afford your program and they’re open to business opportunities and coaching opportunities. They’re looking for high-value and high-ROI programs. Imagine what that could look like in your business because that is what can happen when you leverage LinkedIn properly, specifically when you leverage a mix of social selling and attraction marketing. That's what we're discussing in this episode. Let's jump in and dig into the details.

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I'm super excited because I'm here with Melissa Henault. She's a mom of three, a self-proclaimed burnout corporate professional and an all-out entrepreneur. She's climbed the corporate ladder to the pinnacle of her career where she decided to leave her corporate career to pursue her dreams of being her own boss. How many of you can identify with that?

From there, she runs two thriving businesses. She's a LinkedIn social selling expert who's highly sought after to teach others how to generate viable leads for their business and also a top income earner in her social selling company. I can't wait to dig into all of that. Melissa's passion is to inspire more burnouts to take control once and for all and build out the dream life they deserve living all out like her. Welcome, Melissa. I am so excited to have you here with us.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here. This is going to be fun.

I couldn't be more excited about what you stand for and what you're doing. I feel like far too many entrepreneurs are stuck in what I call that overworked tussler mode. They’re doing all the things and a lot of it they're doing manually. They're doing it themselves. We all start as solopreneurs. You start to burn out. I can identify with that. I remember being in that space.

To have someone who's been there, done that and come through it to talk with us, I'm excited. Before we dig into all things LinkedIn and social selling in general, can you tell us a little bit about your story as an entrepreneur and how you moved into this interesting space of being an expert on LinkedIn social selling and everything that comes with networking?

What you should know about me is that I was a corporate executive in my previous life for a Fortune 500. I had climbed to the top of Mount Everest thinking I was going to be CEO one day. That was my vision. I got to the top of the mountain with two little kids in diapers and realized I climbed the wrong mountain. I didn't know how I was going to continue at that pace for the next twenty years. Either my health was going to suffer, my relationship with my spouse was going to suffer or my nanny was going to raise my kids.

It's not that I didn't want to work and I didn't want to work hard but I needed more control over my schedule. I leaned into an eCommerce business while I was still working full-time and realized that given I was a working professional, not many people who were in the social selling space were using LinkedIn to recruit for their businesses, their high-end coaching or anything. I leaned in and started learning the method of attraction marketing as I learned on Instagram and Facebook but applied it to LinkedIn. I created and coined my method, which allowed me to scale my first eCommerce business to 6 figures in about 1.5 years.

Baby three was born and at that point, I retired from Corporate America and had the entrepreneurial bug. I realized that I was onto something with this attraction marketing and that it wasn't something that I needed to keep for my business. I hired a business coach who was an expert in her field, making millions in coaching herself. I had her after nearly vomiting and handing over all this money. It was the biggest investment I've ever made in my life for my business.

I invested in her and she helped me propel my concept globally to what we call the LinkedIn Method Academy. It’s where I teach people attraction marketing on LinkedIn to generate viable leads for either their high ticket coaching, goods or services or even their business, whether they're network marketers, franchise owners looking for investors or capital investors. You name it but the strategy is still the same. It's been a wild ride and a lot of fun.

There are two things that I love about that. The first thing is you had that moment when you made a large investment. It was so large that it made you want to throw up a little bit. I've been there. I know that. Isn't there something amazing that comes out of the other side of that too that betting on yourself truly unlocks everything? I love that you shared that.

I talk about this with my clients all the time. The transformation is in the transaction. With that level of financial commitment, I was going to do whatever she told me to do.

You were like, “There's no way I can throw that much money in the trash. I'm going to do the thing.” That's the hard part. Learning what to do is easy. Doing it is hard. You got the results to prove it so that's fascinating. It’s the fact that you've taken it into practice, systematized it and help so many other people to do the same thing. The other thing I love about your story is good marketing. Attraction marketing is always good marketing. When you have good marketing, you can use it to sell anything. That can be high-end coaching or network marketing. You name it. Good marketing works everywhere.

You have to know whom you're attracting, provide value and know how to grow your network strategically. That's something we coach inside the academy.

Good marketing is about knowing who you're attracting, providing value, and knowing how to grow your network strategically.

Once you learned attraction marketing, you realized, “I can use this on Facebook or Instagram but why not LinkedIn?” What makes LinkedIn such a unique platform, specifically if you're looking for clients and customers, especially high-end clients and customers? What makes LinkedIn so uniquely special for that purpose?

Let's talk about it. What do you think the average income is for Instagram and Facebook users?

Maybe $35,000 to $40,000 a year, if I had to guess.

It's less than that. It's about $23,000 but you are close. What do you think the average income is for the average LinkedIn user?

$75,000?

It’s higher. It’s $100,000. Number one, their purchasing power is significantly hot. I also want you to think about why people go to different platforms on the user end. When you're not trying to run your business, why do you go to Instagram and Facebook?

For leisure, to have fun, be entertained or waste time.

Why do people go to the number one business-to-business social media platform?

To network or get some business done.

It has been published for the third year in a row that LinkedIn is the number one most trusted social media platform. People trust it more. They're there for professional development, growing a network and looking for personal development as well. Also, they make more money. I have clients who sell very high-ticket coaching programs and high-ticket franchise investments. You're honing in on an ideal market, landscape and demographic when you're playing on the LinkedIn platform. Let me ask you a couple of more questions. What's the number one device people use when they're on Instagram and Facebook?

Probably their smartphone.

You got it. What's the number one device people use on LinkedIn?

I'm guessing it's not a smartphone.

It's a computer. Let's talk about that. What I want to unpack here is the mindset of the user. All these people on LinkedIn, I can guarantee you the majority of them have an Instagram and Facebook account but they're on Instagram and Facebook to get the dopamine hit. It’s to see their friends or catch up on the gossip like everyone else while they're multitasking at a soccer game, in the elevator, at a stoplight or on the toilet. That's a different mindset than when they're sitting at their desk.

There’s more undivided attention on a desktop where they're more focused on business, connecting and personal development. They get in there and stay in there. They're not on the go with a dopamine hit. They're not multitasking watching Netflix. If you have a product or service that revolves around professional development or investing in an opportunity, whether it's capital investment, real estate or financial advisors, you're much more likely to hit your audience at a time when they're open to the discussion.

I could see the mindset that you come in. It’s a big role in how committed you are toward any action you take when you're there.

Let me ask you this and this is good for all of your readers. What happened when Facebook went dark and Instagram? How did that make you feel?

Irritated and annoyed. I quickly jumped to other platforms.

The good thing is you were able to pivot and get on other platforms. A lot of folks who are building heavily on Instagram and Facebook don't know how to pivot. We were operating as normal because we do a lot of business on LinkedIn. It's important to have more than your primary source for attraction marketing and recruitment. It's important to know where your audience is hanging out. The last thing I'll ask you is what do you think the average age of Instagram and Facebook users is?

It’s important to have more than one source for attraction marketing recruitment.

24?

That's right. It’s right around 23 or 24. What do you think the average age is for LinkedIn?

34 maybe?

It's 35. You nailed it. The key is to know who your audience is, where they hang out and what you're trying to monetize. If they're in their mid-30s and above and you're looking for someone with investing capital who's looking for development, investment or professional and personal development options, a lot of people are hyperactive on the platform looking for a different career. If you're a business coach, a mindset coach or a direct salesperson looking for business partners, they're super active over there because of disruption in the past couple of years.

Tons of people learn to work from home. They learn they like it. They want to keep working from home. They don't necessarily want to go back to that corporate office. They're open to ideas.

100%. It's an incredible place. I said that was the last but this will be the last. Do you follow Gary Vaynerchuk?

Of course. Who doesn't follow Gary Vee?

In one of his episodes, he talked about LinkedIn. He talked about how if you're in business and you're not on the platform, you're obsolete. He talked about how you can either be the best at a mature platform like Instagram or Facebook. If you're new and launching a business, good luck or you can be first to a growing platform.

According to Gary Vaynerchuk, if you’re in business but you’re not on LinkedIn, you’re obsolete.

In 2022, LinkedIn has allowed people to apply to go live on the platform. A lot of people don't know how to do it but those who are doing it are getting massive organic views. The algorithms are underrated. If you remember, on Facebook, several years ago, when you made a post someone liked or commented and you saw what everybody else was posting and it wasn't your comment, it was organic. There are so many layers of complexities with the platform and you don't see that on LinkedIn.

The organic reach is bananas. When you go live, it's twelve times more engagement in total. You also get to collect demographic information. You get to get people's email addresses when you host a live event. There are so many cool things about the platform. It's a wide-open what we call a blue ocean of opportunity. Most people in social selling and I use social selling because it's whatever you sell, whether it's a product, a service or a good, if you're online and trying to monetize it, it is underrated, the impact and opportunity on LinkedIn. Not a lot of social sellers are over there because they don't know how to market themselves properly.

We were talking a little bit before we started filming. I would love to let the audience have a little peek into that conversation. When you started teaching people your unique method on LinkedIn and they started having results, can you tell us a little bit about what happened?

It started with the basics of LinkedIn and attraction marketing. In 2022, we found that we were generating so many leads for our clients. They didn't know how to handle it or how to create automation and create ease in their life because they were getting so many leads. We launched a second phase of the program teaching automation, funnels and pre-qualifying clients of a whole backend. That evolved into a full-blown academy. We realized people needed six months intensive to make this bad boy run.

From there, a lot of our clients were getting so many leads and growing effective businesses. They didn't have time anymore to manage the leads that were coming in. They had tried other VA agencies that didn't know our method. Without getting into details, we're very strategic. I have a formulaic way to grow your brand, grow the right audience, attract them to you and pre-qualify them. We decided that we would offer up a VA service within our community and it took off like wildfire.

We got to a point where we had some tip-top income earners that have multimillion-dollar businesses. They were like, “This is awesome. Can you do all of it for us?” We were like, “Okay.” We launched this high-end boutique service where we soup-to-nuts manage the whole thing. We're doing what our clients are asking for. Where there's a gap, we're creating a solution and bringing it back to them.

I love that story because every time I've spoken to an entrepreneur who's being wildly successful, whatever it is their clients are telling them they need, instead of saying, “That's not me. Go find someone else,” they create it. They find the gap and fill the gap. That's exactly what you are doing, which is encouraging. The reason I wanted to make sure the audience learned about this was the biggest complaint I hear about most often is, “I don't have enough people to talk to.” Imagine having so many people to talk to that your number one complaint is, “I can't keep up with all these leads.”

It's a wonderful place to be. We have clients who are like, “I have to stop growing my connections because your verbiage works so well.” We have these whole scripts of what to include in your request to connect. They're like, “Everyone's responding,” and they get into a conversation. I have to pace myself in growing those connections, which is a good place to be. It's a good problem to have.

Imagine having so many leads come in and so much success in signing those leads into customers, clients or whomever you're looking for that you then have the money available to hire an agency to start doing it for you. That is how effective this method works. Without getting into nitty-gritty details, can you tell us a high-level overview of this method you've created? Another thing I've seen time and time again is those who are successful are the ones who find something that works and put structure and systems around it so they can systematize it over and over. That's when things scale, honestly.

Find something that works, then put structure and systems around it. Then, you can systematize it over and over.

We have a seven-step method. I can very succinctly walk you through it. I want you to liken it to building a car, driving a car and putting the car in automatic. In our academy, there are three phases. If you're in the program for 6 months, in the first 2 months, you're building the car. It takes some time to build out your profile in a way that is attracting your ideal clients.

Many of our clients come in with this employee mindset. They've got their resume of their career and their title is their accolades instead of leveraging their title to attract clients by talking about their value proposition. In the first month or two, we get tight on what is your value proposition, who is it you are trying to attract and how can we brand that on your virtual business store landing page.

From there, that's building the car and the engine. Since you've got a good brand representation of yourself, you know whom you want to manifest into your business. We teach you how to drive it. That comes down to strategic network growth. You can have the best content on the planet and the best landing page but if you have the wrong audience, it's falling on deaf ears.

We teach how to strategically grow your network so that your feed starts to get filled with the ideal audience. We then fold in your branding, meaning your branding content. You have to build out your virtual storefront first, which is the landing page or your profile page, then you start strategically growing your network.

The third piece is that you start working through content that attracts your avatar by providing value. We pack that inside the academy and build out what we call 4 or 5 brand pillars to create know, love and trust. When you're continuing to drive, what happens next? You're connecting in the DMs. We talk about strategic verbiage that converts from the DMs to the phone or from the DMs to a Zoom call.

At that point, you need to get into automation because that's putting the car in cruise control. You've got all these leads. You're bringing in all these clients or business partners and you've got to lead and be the CEO. You no longer need to be the technician on the back end. You're a CEO. You want to create some systems on the backend to pre-qualify your leads and automate the pre-qualification discovery calls with potential prospective clients or business partners. You name it.

We teach a method for follow-up. We teach our favorite CRM how to strategically follow up with a method and a formula that has worked for us. To recap, build the car, drive the car and put the car in automatic, which breaks down to building out your profile, growing your targeted audience, attraction marketing through tightening up your brand presence, connecting in the DMs, pre-qualifying your leads, getting into that automation of discovery calls in your calendar and the follow-up formula with the CRM. It is a customer relations management system to track your follow-up.

I know tons of the audience reading are motivated and ambitious. They're ready to go out there and finally start making some money on social media. The number one thing I hear most of the time is, “Give me a system to follow. I'll do it. I need someone to give me the roadmap.” That's exactly what you've done. It’s no shocker that you've grown very quickly to the point that your clients can't even keep up with all their leads. It makes sense.

It’s one thing to hear about the outline of this and it's a different thing to appreciate. Putting it into practice is always the hard part. That's always where the challenge comes in but that's also where the magic happens too. Do you have any last-minute advice or tips for people who are looking to get started on LinkedIn? What is the best way to get started for them?

The best way to get started is to get into the recruitment and business owner mindset. For a lot of people, the only time they've ever been on LinkedIn was when they were looking for a job. If you're coming to this platform to recruit, whatever your end recruitment thing is, you need to be crystal clear on the value add you have. We coach inside of our academy how are you pulling them in based on your headline? How are you pulling them in based on your summary? How are you focusing on what you can do for them versus your accolades?

The best way to get started on LinkedIn is to get into a recruitment and business owner mindset.

The biggest mistake people make is they waste space in their headlines with their accolades. They put a podcaster or keynote speaker. The person you're trying to recruit does not care until they know what you can do for them. Rephrase how you're titling yourself. You can gloat and talk about all the great things you do inside the body of your profile. Don't waste it on your headline. Think about how you can captivate people who want to come to your profile in the first place. Keynote, speaker, author or podcaster is not going to pull them to your page.

The person you're trying to recruit does not care about your accolades until they know what you can do for them.

They’re saying everything that's of interest to you but they want to see what's of interest to them.

I'll give you an example. One of my private clients was a pharmacist. In her headline, she had a keynote speaker, author and podcaster. She wasn't getting any leads when she first started our program. I asked her, “What are you using LinkedIn for?” She said, “I'm looking to find pharmacists who want to coach on pivoting in their careers.”

I said, “When you're in the comment section with several pharmacists with hundreds of comments and your headline says author and keynote speaker, do you think they're wanting to come to check out your page? What if we rephrased it and made your headline something like career pivot coach for a pharmacist?” We changed her headline and overnight, she was getting messages out of the wazoo from pharmacists who wanted to get the heck out of the careers that they were in. When she hadn't been attracting what she wanted, she was too busy gloating about her accomplishments.

I love this piece of advice because it's great for people who are getting started. Also, even if you've been on the platform for a while and you've never thought of using it for your business or it was always the second-string platform you never had time for, it can work for those people too. They can clean things up and start leveraging it and/or be more efficient with it than they were before. I love it. I understand that you have a gift for the audience that can help them to step into leveling up LinkedIn if that's what they know is next on their goal board. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?

One of my favorite resources that my clients love and use inside the program and I give it up for free is an income-producing checklist of activities that you can be doing on LinkedIn daily to nurture, build your brand, build your connections and grow your presence on LinkedIn. You can grab that. People will enjoy using that to get oriented. If you can't get through the whole list in 30 minutes, commit to 1/3 of the list three times a week so that you're getting through the list once a week. When you start getting traction, you'll make time for it.

It'll become motivating. It's like when you've been working out nonstop and you finally start to see some changes in your body, you get addicted and want to do it more. For any of you who have been thinking LinkedIn is next on your list, it's the platform you want to pivot to, especially if your number one objection has been, “I don't have the money now.”

You don't get that objection on LinkedIn.

If you're going to get one, it's going to be something else.

It's usually time.

That’s because they're very busy people. If you've been looking for that easy button where you're like, “I will do all the things. I need a quick hit list of what to do,” that's exactly what Melissa has for you. Be sure to scoop up that gift and take action on it. I can tell you from experience it's the people who zero in on 1 or 2 key things out of an event like this and then take action on them that are the people who get the results. Thank you so much. We so appreciate your time.

Thanks for having me on.

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About Melissa Henault

Melissa Henault is a mom of 3, self proclaimed burn out corporate professional to All Out entrepreneur. She’d climbed the corporate ladder to the pinnacle of her career, when she decided to leave her corporate career to pursue her dreams of being her own boss. From there she now runs 2 thriving businesses. She’s now a LinkedIn social selling expert who’s highly sought after to teach others how to generate viable leads for their business and also a top income earner in her social selling company. Melissa’s passion is to inspire more burnouts to take control one and for all and build out the dream life they deserve, living all out.