Alright, welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm Jackson Callum, I'm your show host.
We will be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guests, guest leaders who
are building fantastic visions out there.
Ultimately, I just want to go through some of the things that might help you with your
vision.
If you have a vision that you're pursuing, drop a link in the comments and let us know
what that is.
If you're a business or a brand, if it's a non-profit that you run, be happy to promote
it, be happy to talk to you about it, and if you'd like to apply to be on Vision Pros
to be interviewed about that vision, then by all means, feel free to reach out.
What is up everybody?
Welcome in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm really excited to be here.
As always, I've got an excellent guest on deck.
He's going to be a lot of fun to talk to.
We're talking about something extremely controversial in the market right now.
We're talking about automation.
Some of you are just going to leave right now because you're like, I don't want to talk
about automation.
Listen, that's how we breathe.
We breathe thanks to automation.
We think and we take turns as human beings.
There's so much automation.
We multitask with lots of different things going on around us.
There's certainly a lot of automation tricks and spam and negativity and ethical things
that are being practiced out there.
At the end of the day, automation is simply a fire.
It is simply a resource.
Whether we use it for good or for bad is up to you as an individual and up to me as a
provider as well.
How are we going to utilize this stuff to expand our visions and help people with their
growth?
Without further ado, I'm going to bring my friend Art Hoffman on.
I'm excited to talk to him about what he's doing in the world of automation and how it
can ultimately help visionaries expand their visions and business owners, professionals
expand their lead gen opportunities as well.
Art, welcome to Vision Pros Live.
Appreciate it, man.
Thanks for having me.
Absolutely.
We're going to get started with a question about strangers.
I want to talk to you about this because there's a lot of psychology behind what we
do.
Why is it so scary?
We're talking about automation.
We're talking about LinkedIn.
We'll come back to what your brands are, but I want to talk first about this.
Why is it so scary for people in general to target strangers with their marketing?
Why do you think that is?
It's the fear of the unknown, fear of rejection.
I think it's what we all inherently feel as human beings when it comes to, we don't want
to be told no.
We don't want to be not liked.
We don't want to be ignored.
We want to be seen.
We want to get those likes on our Facebook accounts and all the rest of the images that
we put out there, to use today's terminology, we want to go viral.
We want everybody to see us and we want everybody to recognize us.
Unfortunately, when you're talking to a stranger, you don't know how they're going to react.
We know how our family is going to react.
We know how our friends are going to react.
I think when it comes to people that we don't know and dive it in to say a target demographic
that maybe you think is the right thing, you really just don't know until you get in there.
That's what I think everybody fears.
I think it just comes back to you, it's the fear of rejection.
It's the fear of being told no and nobody wants to have that happen.
I think you're right.
I think it has a lot to do with it.
For most people, and generally speaking, I think that is a great reason why people, and
some people might attempt to take a type of high road where they say, well, I don't target
it, or, one, I don't target people, it's just a word guys.
It's a game of semantics.
We're talking about reaching out.
We're talking about potentially helping people and we're going to go into a question about
that, but I do think that some people feel like, well, I don't help strangers because
I have no relationship with them and therefore, who am I to provide a solution to a complete
stranger?
Well, I don't know.
It depends on your background perhaps and my background of religion.
I am my brother's keeper and that brother expands beyond my basic family.
So with that said, I have my reason, but why do you believe, or why should we be targeting
strangers?
Everybody's a stranger until they're not.
That's as simple as it comes.
Until you introduce yourself to someone, until you put yourself out there, until you say
hi, hello, nice to meet you, what can I do for you?
Everybody's a stranger at that point.
And then they become not a stranger anymore.
And to your point earlier, you know, yeah, you're your brother's keeper.
I get that.
And that is what we were meant to do.
I don't think that we as human beings, being the social people that we are, we're meant
to just sit back and walk past every other human being on this planet and never interact
with them.
That's just not how we're built.
And I think to be helpful in any way, shape, or form, put yourself out there as being of
assistance, being that, you know, that resource to someone may not be now, may not be a year
from now, but at some point in time, they're going to look back and go, Hey, I remember
when art said this or when, when Jackson said that, and he was, he was truly honest
about it.
Now is the right time.
So guess what?
I'm going to reach back out and all of a sudden, again, they're not a stranger anymore.
So we're only strangers until we're done.
That's, that's it.
Well said.
So art Hoffman, AKA Will Rogers, right?
Never met a person I didn't like.
I like to be friendly and make friends as individuals.
I love it, man.
So if you don't know the Will Rogers reference, you know, let me date myself, you know, go
back and look up who Will Rogers was.
Some of your young ins would benefit tremendously from learning about that man.
So in link advisors, your CEO of in link advisors, and you're the co creator of cold
click.
I'd love to know more about that or rather, I'm sorry, the creator of cold click.
Yeah.
Let's talk about it.
If you consider my wife owning half of it as being co creator, why not?
No, it's, it's for all intents and purposes.
I did create the process and we'll start with in link advisors in link advisors was the
marketing company that I created to kind of just encompass what cold click is all about.
So it kind of holds on to cold click and holds on to some other things that we're working
on.
But basically it's, it's a marketing company for using link in for lead generation.
Okay.
And everybody talks about how popular that has become and how saturated it could be and
all these other kinds of things.
And I'll argue with you if, if it is saturated, then meeting somebody in a bar is even more
saturated.
Okay.
And even what?
Meeting somebody in a bar is even more saturated.
Oh, right.
Okay.
Then cold prospecting on something like LinkedIn.
So in link advisors is our company.
That's our marketing entity.
If you will, a cold click is the process that we employ on LinkedIn for lead generation.
We're trying to not cold call because nobody loves doing that, but yet you're still cold
outreaching to people within a target demographic to do nothing more than introduce yourself,
your product, your service, whatever it might be to strike up that conversation.
Right?
You're, you're trying to say, Hey, this target demographic is who I want to get to.
I need to start talking to those people to find out if my product or service is right
for them and if they're interested in my product or service.
So let's figure that out.
And that's what cold click is.
It's using 100% LinkedIn to do that.
And we do it strictly through the direct messaging platform and things like events, webinars,
those types of things on the platform as well.
To just once again, get your idea, your product, your service out there so that you can introduce
yourself to other, to as many people as humanly possible that might be interested in what
you add to it.
Love it.
We're going to circle back to that.
Going down the vision route, your jersey stands out to me, the one behind you, the Hoffman
jersey.
Absolutely.
So you've gone from obviously playing sports at some level, which I'd love to hear about,
love the audience to understand and who your coaches were are certainly hot topics that
I'm excited for people to hear about.
And then, you know, of course, the vision of shifting to the process of, you know, okay,
how did I go from sports to blessing people's lives in the form of, of helping them understand
how to connect with their audience and allows them to grow their businesses.
So let's hear it, man.
You got it.
I'll give you the short and nitty gritty of my very, very blessed life.
So if you actually pan out a little further over here on this far right side of me, that
right there, that was the movie I was in.
And if I can do this correctly, that right there at the blue hat is me.
I was a child actor.
I grew up in Southern California.
My parents lived in San Fernando Valley area and I always begged to be on the camera.
My parents fought against it and they said, hey, you can start modeling.
So I did a bunch of modeling as a kid.
And you could possibly imagine, I was one of those kids in Miller's outpost, for example,
that were in the store.
So you walk in there, you see those posters.
That was me.
Um, yeah, I was also the kid in the underwear ads and JC Penney's, you know, that was me
too.
I tried out for Oscar wiener and I didn't get it.
There you go.
So I was a child actor that for lack of a better way of putting it was, I was successful.
I, my claim to fame was I was Winnie Cooper's boyfriend on the Wonder Years for a couple
of episodes.
Um, that was kind of not the pinnacle of my career, but it was one, it was a point that
people recognize and they understand.
And I think back and I go, okay, so I had this, this childhood where my parents allowed
me to pursue all the dreams and passions and hopes that I wanted to.
Um, I had a successful career in acting.
I started playing football when I got to high school.
Uh, I was successful enough doing that in high school that I decided, Hey, you know
what?
I'm going to be stupid enough to walk on it, Colorado state and try to get playing time.
Right.
511 white kid for lack of a better way of putting it, who was really fast, really smart, had
good hands and ran great routes as a wide receiver.
So yours truly walks on and I got to come in the year that urban Meyer was my freshman
year football coach as a wide receiver.
And they was shadowing him because I came in on a non-athletic scholarship.
I was there with no scholarship at all.
So I was basically a walk on.
I came in in the fall of 1994 and I basically shadowed urban Meyer around the practice field
for lack of a better way of putting it for the better part of that season.
I didn't play.
I wasn't even on the team at that point.
I walked on in the spring and I basically just sucked it all up, right?
Listen to everything as much as you possibly can.
I didn't realize he was going to go on to the things that he did and that our school was
going to go on to.
This was the first year right after they had done pretty decent.
Sonny Lubick was our head coach.
And then that particular season, they won the WAC championship for the first time in
school history.
So that was a big one.
Then spring ball rolls around and I walk on and I'm out there playing.
And again, I'm in shorts that are bigger than me because they were probably built for a
300-pound lineman.
And I felt like the first day I was so nervous that I felt like I dropped every frickin'
ball.
I was running around and I was doing everything, but I felt like I dropped 900 of the 1,000
passes that were thrown to me that day.
And I'm walking off the field.
I'm super dejected and I hear somebody trotting up behind me and it was Coach Myers.
And he comes up and looks down at me and he goes, hey son, you want to play football
here at Colorado State?
And I said, yeah.
And he goes, catch the ball.
He put an explicative in between catch the ball.
But catch the ball.
Okay?
He trots off.
That was the end of the story.
That was all I needed.
I just needed one person to employ me in the right direction and say, hey, just do your
thing.
Long story short, many, many years passed.
I was a special teams player the year one year with another gentleman on our team.
A lot of the guys that I played with ended up going off to play in the NFL, guys you
recognize, Joey Porter and Clark Hagan said the Pittsburgh Steelers, for example, were
probably two of some of the prominent ones.
But then everybody obviously went their separate ways.
So I graduated college where I met my wife at the time and we said, hey, let's move down
to Phoenix, Arizona.
Here we are 25 years later.
Not my wife still.
However, I've got three wonderful kids because of it.
And we get down here and I say, all right, well, I guess I better find something to do
with my time.
And she comes home as a teacher that was doing her student teaching, not getting paid.
And I'm fresh out of college, this is January of 1999 without a job for two weeks.
And she's like, are you going to find a job so we can have money coming through the door?
And I said, yeah, I guess.
So I ended up falling into the financial advisory world, ironically.
So I interviewed at places like Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and UBS and all the rest of
them.
And Morgan Stanley was the first company to offer me a job.
So I took it and spent four years there, ended up being recruited back over to Merrill
Lynch for six years after that.
Then I took my practice independent back in 2009.
Real quick question, Art.
So these financial advisors that exist right now, are they the types of people that would
benefit from LinkedIn automation?
Without it now.
They have.
50% of our clients right now are financial advisors, insurance, relitters, things like
that.
So yeah, without us.
That makes sense.
Sorry to send you three experts.
Okay, go ahead.
Yeah.
So I started my practice independent and 2014-15 year olds around and I'm like, I got to start
bringing in some more clients.
I got to figure out a way to use something.
So I went back to my old cold calling techniques and that's where I built everything is when
I was a financial advisor.
I had a process for everything.
So if you, if I called you and you didn't answer, you went into this file.
If I called you, you answered and said, yes, and look here, said, no, you went there.
I had a whole process for it.
So I started looking around at doing that potentially again.
I realized real quickly with the do not call list, you couldn't get very far.
So somebody pointed me towards LinkedIn and I said, great, let's try it out.
So I got on the LinkedIn and I started applying the same concepts, but using nothing more
than the direct messaging platform.
So as I went through and built this out from 2015 to 2017, I started realizing very quickly
that the targeting and demographic information on LinkedIn is crisis.
And if you have a process around it, you're going to get in front of the right people,
for whatever product or service that you're looking for, the hardest part was following
up.
And I will tell you this, this is a phrase that I came up with years ago, sales fail
when you don't follow up.
So if you're out there selling anything yourself, product, service or whatever, you have to
be the shiny object.
And I tell people that all the time, you've got to be the one to call back to re-engage,
to send them something, email them, call them, whatever the case is.
So I started coming up with that whole system in the background.
That's all part of ColdClick as well is that follow up process.
And ultimately, when you go through and implement these things religiously, to say the least,
you're going to find yourself with a snowball effect of a prospect pipeline that is so full
that you probably couldn't get through it all in a lifetime.
And that's the idea.
So that's where ColdClick came from.
They came from my cold calling techniques and about a year and a half into one of my
buddies in my office came in and he says, what are you doing?
I'm like, I'm just cold clicking.
And he's like, cold clicking, what the heck is that?
And I said, well, I'm not cold calling.
I'm just clicking online.
I'm calling, I'm clicking on LinkedIn.
And he's like, that's pretty cool.
So about a year or so passes and I'm like, hey, let's try and trademark it.
My wife convinced me to try to get it trademarked.
And yes, there we are.
Cold click, it's trademarked, it's mine.
But the idea is still the same.
You have to have a process.
And you have to have a process from beginning to end.
And here's what I also figured out going back to my blessed life.
I've had coaches throughout my entire career, parents, mentors, acting coaches, football
coaches, coaches within my industry for financial advising, teaching me how to run meetings,
how to make cold calls, how to present certain products, you name it, how to be a manager.
All of these things had coaches.
I had coaches towards even the end of my financial advisory stuff.
I still have a coach now.
And the whole purpose of that is that we need that guide.
We need somebody to hold us accountable.
We need somebody to teach us things that we may be missing because of our own blind arrogance,
whatever the case might be.
And that's where cold click comes in as well.
I'm not here to tell you that I reinvented the wheel because I did.
All I did was found a very efficient way to use it and everybody can.
So again, if somebody wants to do this, they can.
They could go create their own system.
They could be sequenced however they wanted to.
It could say whatever messaging they wanted to.
But the problem is everybody does not want to do that.
All they want to do as salespeople in general is talk to people about their product or service
so with the hope that they can close that business and make them a client.
That's all they care about.
They don't want to do everything else that comes before that, which is a process that
if I illustrated before you blow your mind, you'd be like, Oh, you're right.
I've got to buy my target demographic.
I've got to go in and send the messages.
I've got to reply to people that reply to me.
I got to reply to the people that don't reply to me.
I've got to put those people in this.
I mean, the process, it could be endless and it's repetitive.
It'll go on and on and on and on and on as long as you want it to.
So that's the concept behind it.
That's where it came from.
That's awesome.
So you must describe that process, the pre-process you're talking about as eating glass and linked
in zone, Reed Hoffman defined it as pushing a plane off of a cliff and repairing it as
it's going down.
Yeah.
Right.
It is a lot.
In flight or in fall, whichever you want to do, you're going to be trying to build the
plane as you're following.
I agree.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
So wise words, wise words.
In your wise words, your quote, sales fail when you don't follow up.
I was meeting today with the, one of the founders of Flowchat, Sean Malone.
We had a great conversation.
One of the things they love about their program as well is that they have an amazing email
nurturing sequence.
And I happened to catch one of the case studies because I was evaluating, is this a newsletter
I want to see regularly or is this one that goes to that filtered messaging?
Right.
I mean, it was really on point.
I was, I was shocked.
And so I watched the interview a little bit, skipped ahead, but this lady said on there,
you know, she's talking about all the secrets to success and she has this amazing case study
with them.
And, you know, but she, she, it's not the case study.
She says it point blank on the interview.
The key is follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up, follow up.
You know, nobody wants to hear that.
I even asked my team, I asked five people, what was the key to her success?
Nobody heard it.
Even though she said it four or five times in a row.
Right.
And so she says, her corporate sales background and her ability to follow up that ultimately
drives the business forward, but it is so helpful when you can automate these initial
sequences that can be such a distraction and a nuisance from our ability to be consistent.
You know, if we're stuck, you know, writing the addresses on the envelopes or we're stuck
dialing the system, right?
I'm not a bad person just because I don't want to push the buttons anymore.
I want a system to automate that, that ability to get to next person.
So yeah, I know I love what you're doing to piggyback on that a little bit from my own
LinkedIn starting point.
I was with restaurant connect.
This was almost, I don't know, like 10 years ago, eight years, something like that.
It all gets, becomes a blur.
But I realized a little LinkedIn hack.
I realized, I thought, you know what, before I became productive, I was looking at who
was viewing my profile.
You know, I was addicted to it.
And I love to see like, who's seen my profile?
You know, this makes me feel important.
So I'll just go ahead and waste some time looking at that list, maybe make something
happen.
And then it dawned on me.
I'm probably not the only person who does this.
So I started to open restaurant owners profiles, but I would just open as fast as I could.
100 profiles, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And I would click and close 100 profiles.
The hardest thing that we had with selling our software was we couldn't get past the
darn gatekeepers.
And so now that I've done that, I would look the next day and see who's looked at my profile
or the same day.
And sure enough, five or six owners had looked at my profile and I would call the restaurant.
And I would say, Hey, you know, I'm calling to talk to John.
He was just checking out my LinkedIn profile.
You know, can I, can I find out there's anything I can help him with?
He would put me right through.
And I would get to John and I would say, Hey, John, you know, I saw that you were looking
at our profile and what we do with, with restaurants, you know, can we, can we talk about that?
Almost everybody met with me.
And I was, I'd never had anything that got me in the door like that.
So I ended up, I was going to go to my business partner and say, All right, he was this great
plan.
It's going to be awesome.
He can pay for it.
You know, I go to, I go to Fiverr.
I found somebody for $3.33 an hour.
I got ready to present it to him.
And then I was like, am I really going to ask him for $3?
How embarrassing.
You know, junior co-founder, I come like, I'm asking him to pay for my $3 system.
And it was one hour a week was all I needed from a VA to do this.
And so I ended up taking that big bold step of courage, you know, as a 22, 23 year old.
And I paid for my own LinkedIn guru kid that goes to the database for me.
And, you know, I felt like, you know, Richard Branson, you know, at this point, investing
my three bucks in this guy, giving him my asset, right?
My LinkedIn profile.
Oh man, heaven forbid something goes wrong in my LinkedIn profile.
You know, my whole life was shattered if I lose this super awesome profile that nobody
knows about.
I mean, your system is, I've been very impressed with what we've learned and our team's been
very impressed with what you're doing.
You know, we're gearing up to work with Cold Click as well and start integrating your stuff
with what we're doing at first class business.
I've known you for a while now.
We've been kicking your tires, you know, checking out the car, seeing how things go.
We're really happy with the relationship, how it's unfolded and the mutual respect that
exists.
I want to know from you, for our audience, what's your vision for entrepreneurs that
as far as working with Cold Click, what is it that you want them to learn?
What is it that you want them to be able to achieve with, you know, what makes you excited
for them?
More than anything else, I think when you start talking about what I want for these entrepreneurs
is I want them to understand that no is not an option anymore.
No, I tell people it just means not right now.
And as a young entrepreneur scared of strangers, we're still fearing that no work, right?
And we're also fearing it in ourselves and a lack of confidence saying, hey, I don't
know if I can make this work.
I don't know if I can make this happen.
There may not be enough times in the day.
And I want to point out something to you earlier that you mentioned about the automation side
of it.
Automation does not mean dehumanization.
It just means that you're allowing something to do a repetitive process for you that you
would normally do on your own or could potentially do on your own.
And that's where the automation comes in.
It doesn't mean dehumanization.
And you have to be human in this whole process.
So entrepreneurs, tons of great ideas.
And there's millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of great entrepreneurs in this
world.
And they don't ever get past that first step because they always fear what they don't know.
And that's where I will tell them that be afraid, but also embrace it because there's
people, there's processes, there's services out there for lack of a better way of putting
it that can help you attain and reach your goal just like you did with your stuff.
Well, you're like, hey, for $3.35 per hour, I could really get some automation here.
Well, your automation at that point was a human.
So guess what?
Now if you take that automation, like people are trying to do right now with things like
chat GPD, they're not dehumanizing it.
They're basically going in and saying, hey, I need to speed this process up.
Give them 0.8 a point, whatever, faster.
And then I'm going to go in and I'm going to put the human touch on them, what I would
say, my voice, if you will.
And that's where I think most entrepreneurs need that encouragement.
They need that support.
They need to know that they can go find somebody to help them and support them throughout all
that they're doing.
Even if it is going back to what I was mentioning earlier, a coach, whatever the case might be,
you have automation that's there.
Coaches don't come in without a game plan.
That is a form of automation, guys.
It's a playbook, right?
That's their automation.
Everybody's got to learn it.
So if everybody's clicking, then everything is good.
I love that.
So then let's go in and talk about some of the goods, the bads, and the ugliest of LinkedIn
and automation.
I call LinkedIn a spam jungle.
I have a lot of fun picking on the platform.
I feel like they've done a lot of things wrong.
I think a lot of that has to do with being bought by Microsoft.
And I know that Bill Gates' favorite customers, according to him, are the ones who hate the
most on the platform.
Because he knows they're not hating.
They're trying to ask sharply for the system to improve.
And it would be fantastic if we did see LinkedIn improve.
One of the big improvements on the good side that they recently made, at least from my
profile, is I now have the ability to finally schedule my posts.
That was freaking annoying.
I don't have time to be on social media during the day.
I'm interacting with real human beings during the day.
So if I get a creative vibe, it's usually something that comes at a very awkward hour.
Nobody's going to see it.
It's not going to help anybody.
And it's going to make me look unbalanced to people who have limited perspective on what
balance happens to be.
I told those shower thoughts.
Those are shower thoughts.
That's right.
So that's some of the good that exists.
Question for the audience.
If you had, if there was a child or somebody that you didn't know and you were at the Grand
Canyon and they were walking towards a cliff blindfolded, what would you do?
Stop them.
I would.
Yellow.
You might yell at them.
That's right.
It might not be calm.
It might be like, holy crap.
Well, that's a stranger.
That's a stranger.
And you happen to be saving their life in that instance.
Now, some people can't catch the vision of how an automation tool or a business thing
associates with saving a life, but I can.
I absolutely see it.
I see the value of what you're doing.
People are losing their hopes and dreams right now economically.
COVID has crushed businesses.
But even before that, the pain and suffering that exists in this world because of the lack
of success that people have due to their lack of coaching, their lack of strategic providers,
their lack of systems, I can't tolerate it.
I'm not willing to tolerate it.
So you'll notice at the bottom, we've got a thread going down there.
LinkedIn done wrong is killing your business.
If you have LinkedIn not going correctly, it is killing your business.
And authentic automation is not an oxymoron.
It's more like the holy grail.
So those are the things that we want to talk about.
Good, bad, ugly of LinkedIn.
Art, where do you want to take it from here?
I'm going to take, I'm going to first share a slide with you guys.
This is from a normal presentation that I do.
So bear with me one second here.
I'm going to share my screen.
While you're doing that, while you're sharing the screen, I was looking up an old, I don't
know, a comic colleague, because I only, I went to dinner with him once.
He was the parent dealer for home security systems for a sub dealer I worked with in
San Antonio.
And he came to visit us because the sub dealer that I was helping with growth became his
number one sub dealer for the month and for a couple of weeks in a row after we got some
things rolling.
So this guy came and met us.
Funny personality, of course, anybody running companies at that large, you know, has, has
a thing or two up their sleeve regarding success.
Well, he was facing an FTC charge at the time.
And he was talking us through that a little bit.
And I was like, man, like that's some, some big stuff.
Again, I don't, I don't know who the wolves are and who the sheeps are.
I don't, I don't want to call anybody out.
It just is what it is.
And I looked him up the other day, like yesterday again.
And I saw that he lost, he lost his, he lost his fight and his fight was over cold calling
and calling the do not contact list.
He faced an $8 million fine.
Doesn't surprise me for no, it doesn't, but it surprises a lot of people on the audience.
Right.
Facing it.
What caught my attention in this article is like, Oh man, like that, that's probably
not good.
Two things, because of the funds that he had, he only paid $88,000.
Got it.
I'm looking at that going like, how do you, how do you escape an $8 million fine on a
second time?
How do you deal with that one?
Exactly.
Right.
I'm looking at that and thinking, huh, there's some loopholes to learn about here.
But it too, I was awesome.
So I'm like perplexed, you know, and just flabbergasted at this.
And then number two, I noticed he's a CEO of a solar company now.
You know, and I'm like, I thought he might be in prison or something.
I had no idea, you know, what, what the situation could be.
But you know, what it really, what it really opened my eyes to as well was like, okay,
yes, when we, when we're utilizing these resources and we're doing the best that we
can to learn how to use them in ethical fashions, you do risk being shut down by a number of
different entities.
You can have your Facebook account banned for almost, you know, nothing easy because
they're trying to protect the business owners too.
Right.
From themselves.
They're trying to protect bank accounts.
There's a lot of systems.
You can lose your money, rhyme or reason.
It doesn't mean you're a criminal mastermind.
But I was looking at that and thinking, wow, if this guy can survive an $8 million fine
from the federal government and find a way quickly to have bounced back and found a business
like, you know, if you lose or get your LinkedIn account banned or something because X, Y or
Z happens, don't panic, don't freak out, don't give up, follow up, follow through, get back
on the horse.
You know, keep riding.
I see so many people give up and fold the cards and I just, I don't ever want to be
that guy who gives up and folds the cards because I made a mistake in life.
So good, bad and ugly are, let's see it.
Here's, here's the good, the bad and the ugly.
My screen's not sharing.
I think you guys might have to say or enable it, but I can tell you what the good, the
bad and the ugly are here.
Okay.
The good with LinkedIn is that look at it as a giant networking.
Okay.
You're going to walk into this networking room and everybody's there to engage.
Everybody's there to see if there's opportunity for business, whether it's you buying their
product or service, vice versa, collaboration, you name it, right?
B2B, B2C, B2Everything, right?
That's the way I like to look at it, but it's this giant room.
And how you figure out where you need to be is using the search criteria and the demographic
information on LinkedIn is phenomenal.
Remember, okay?
You're going to be able to find that breakout room where your people are going to be as
I like to call it.
Okay?
So that's the good with LinkedIn.
It also puts everybody in one spot at your fingertips.
That's the other good about it.
Billion plus people on the platform now, all across the world, doing what they need to
do to try to earn business from there.
Here's the bad.
Everybody's trying to use it.
Okay?
Yeah, everybody.
And that's fine.
But for those of you that have watched Groundhog Day, you can be Ned Ryerson if you want to
in that giant networking room and run around handing out your business card to everybody.
Right?
I'll sell you this.
Just buy, buy, buy, buy.
You can do that if you want to.
You're not going to be successful because nobody wants a stack of business cards.
What they want are people that are true, genuine, and authentic, that care about them first.
Okay?
So when I go through and I tell people, you need to design messaging that is more about
them than it is about you so that you can build that relationship, it would be the equivalent
of walking into, again, I'm going to use a proverbial metaphor of a bar and saying,
look, I'm going to find my future soulmate out of all these people.
Do you think my future soulmate is going to want to hear about me first?
Do you think they're going to want to tell me about themselves and feel like they're
heard and feel like they're understood and feel like they're appreciated?
And that's the constant.
I know that you care.
You know that I care.
Exactly, right?
So that's the good, the bad.
Here's the ugly.
The ugly is that LinkedIn has a lot of limitations and there really is one concept that you have
to remember if you don't want to get in trouble on LinkedIn.
If the automation that you're using, again, you're not dehumanizing it, but you're maybe
using some automation that's in there, can be, cannot be done at the same rate that a
normal human being could do it, that it's going too fast and you will get in trouble.
Okay?
What I mean by that, I'm going to use your example that you had earlier.
You would go in and you would open somebody's profile, visit that restaurant owner's profile,
close it, go to the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one.
Are you going to sit there eight to 12 hours straight doing nothing like that every single
day over your normal human being would lose their mind, right?
So again, if you're going to use automation, make sure that you're using good automation
that has regulations in there that allow you to be true, to be genuine, be authentic.
Thank you.
Appreciate the quote there.
I'll set.
You have to be that way and it's got to be done at a pace that a normal human being
could do.
Here's the key.
Okay?
And this is another great thing about LinkedIn.
Traditional advertising talks about click through rates all the time, right?
And let's talk about that real fast.
And impression is you see that advertisement, right?
You see it on your screen and you just see it there.
Nothing else happens.
You see it, it registers something in the background that's considered to be an impression.
They put it in front of you.
That's the equivalent of you sending your connection request message to a stranger.
Okay?
So you're on LinkedIn now.
You've identified this target demographic and you say, Hey, I want to impress myself
upon them.
I'm going to invite them to connect.
So I'm going to send them a connection request on LinkedIn.
That's an impression.
You can only do about 100 to maybe 300 of those a week on LinkedIn nowadays.
Okay?
Here's the big difference.
You could send out tens of thousands, if not millions of impressions with advertisements,
right?
And you're really trying to get people to do what's called click through.
They're trying, you're trying to get them to click on the ad, go visit the ad, give
information, information like email addresses, phone numbers, other ways that you can get
to them, if you will, you want those click through rates, right?
Traditional advertising campaigns, less than 1% of the people that are impressed upon actually
click through and you could do millions of them.
Okay?
That's again, that's huge.
However, on LinkedIn, 25 to 30% will click through and become a connection of yours, where
now you have access to email addresses, phone numbers, you name it, all the demographic
information on their profile, where they went to school, you know, what awards they have,
all these talking points or what I like to call relatability.
You did this earlier, Jackson.
You asked me to explain these things back here.
There's a reason why I have them here.
It's relatability.
It makes me a human being.
It makes me, it gives me something to talk about, right?
Every LinkedIn profile has relatability on it that you can find as somebody that's truly
and honestly and genuinely trying to know who this person is that is a stranger to you
now, they're telling you things that you can relate to.
And whether it's you guys went to the same school, whether it's you grew up in the same
community, whether it's they live there now, whether they work for a company that you work,
there's tons of relatability there.
That's what strikes up conversation.
So when I send a message to someone for one of my clients that is truly and genuinely
about that person or trying to get in touch with it says, Hey, Jackson, thanks for connecting
with me.
I noticed that you are part of this particular group or organization.
I am too.
I have a firm belief that what they're doing is meaningful in this world.
I was hoping you and I could continue that conversation off of LinkedIn, get to better
know each other, see how we can help out.
All of a sudden now it's you going back to your restaurant example.
Hey, I'm calling to talk to our business owner that owns this restaurant.
I noticed he was looking at my profile on LinkedIn.
Can I talk to him?
Sure.
Let me grab him for you.
Yeah.
That's the relatability factor.
People don't understand that, but that you can do that all day long on LinkedIn.
So click through it again.
Get them to connect with you because 98% of people that connect with you do not disconnect
from you.
No matter even if you've made them mad, even if you've seen 10 messages and said, Hey,
I want to, I want to get to know you.
I want to go on to earn your business.
They still don't disconnect from you.
To be fair, LinkedIn makes it very hard to disconnect from people.
But that is a value, right?
That is an advantage to those who are a bit more pushy with how we insist on providing
value.
And again, if you truly believe somebody is running towards a cliff with their life,
then by all means run and tackle them.
Save them from themselves in those scenarios.
And I know that's hard with so many people out there utilizing these tactics to manipulate,
right?
To be inauthentic, to be disingenuine, to bring partial truths only to then turn around
and ultimately hurt you and your business.
I'm glad you brought up this connection rate.
That is one of the things that is hot.
It's beautiful to know about.
And it's also so important to be wary of is that, yes, the traditional advertising means
of 1% click-through rate, right?
Compared to what you said.
I've seen most automation campaigns, people are lucky to get a 3% to 5% click-through
rate.
But there are powerful campaigns that can stretch from 25% to 40% click-through rates
and response rates, depends on how your profile is set up.
I've also noticed that in some different testing we've done with being parts of different companies,
some of the companies that are very heavy on making fast offers and talking, you know,
like, oh, we can make you this much money, this fast, blah, blah, blah.
They get phenomenal response rates from a percentage standpoint.
But the quality of response is awful.
The people, right?
The get rich quickers are the ones that are falling victim of that because they have their
own addiction to wanting to win fast.
Well, let's rewind real quick.
When a business becomes so powerful in terms of their attraction, their messaging, their
offers that they can convert a 1% click-through rate because they inspire and because they
build irresistible offers and because they meet people where they're at and they don't
need a whole threshold of people to talk.
They just need a few people because they're so valuable.
There's extreme virtue in building your business to where you can convert the 1% and your formula,
right?
I'm not going to ruin that with, if I can get my business attractive to the 1%, how much
more attractive will my business?
I don't know if I lost you, Jack.
I don't know if that was you or me.
There we go.
We're in the gap.
The water project's awesome.
Also art is very into sustainable farming.
We had a good conversation about that.
We got one minute, brother.
So I'm going to put that one on hold.
I'm going to let the audience connect to you on that one.
You know, I'm looking forward to the day where, you know, who knows, whether it's a year out
from now or six months out from now or longer that we start planning something, some type
of cool charity or promotional event that we do to do something cool for sustainable farming
for some community in need.
I think it would be awesome.
And thank you for sharing your vision.
Art, where should people be connecting with you?
What events do you have coming up that they should be aware of?
Absolutely.
So you can always find me on LinkedIn.
I'm Art Hoffman in Link Advisors on LinkedIn.
You can track me down there.
And I suggest that you do.
Reach out.
You can reach me also at Arthur at inlinkadvisors.com or info at inlinkadvisors.com.
You can find us at cold-click.com.
That's our website.
Perfect.
Ideally, if you feel like doing the old human thing and calling me or us here at the office,
go for it.
602-609-6445.
Reach out to us that way.
We still talk to human beings, I promise.
I was going to say, I dare y'all to be human and call a human on the phone.
That would be the coolest thing ever.
You would be the most courageous person that we've met through a podcast episode.
That's what Todd Herman of LaserWay did when he found out about video power.
He called us right away.
That's what powerful leaders do.
They reach out without fear to the other lions that exist out there because at the end of
the day, we're all lions, part of different prides, and lions don't need other lions.
So you've got the ability to hang out.
I highly recommend giving it a try.
Give him a call.
I'm waiting for the phone to ring, guys.
That's right.
All right.
Great to have you, man.
Thanks so much for being here.
Vision Pros.
Go out there.
Build your visions.
We appreciate you.
If we can do anything for you, don't hesitate to reach out.
Everybody take care.
Have a fantastic day.
Thank you, guys.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
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