The $400,000 Click – Getting LinkedIn to Business

Lynne Wallace, Vantreo Principal and NDOI Co-Founder

I admit it…I have not taken social media seriously enough as the CEO of a growing insurance agency. Yet I find Gary Vaynerchuk’s energy and sense of urgency about social media fascinating. I certainly do not want to face irrelevance by 2016. So I decide it is time that I do something more with LinkedIn. I go to my NDOI co-founder, Sammy Precup, and ask him for help.

We are sitting in his office and I sign on to LinkedIn. Sammy takes a look at my profile and says “Oh man, Lynne you have 276 invitations!” To which I reply “Well I haven’t gone into LinkedIn for a while. I don’t want to let just everyone be my friend without seeing who they are.” Sammy looks at me like I just grew another head. “This is not Facebook…these are business people who you should have exposure to.” he says. With that he clicks “Select All” then “Accept”. Now it’s my turn to look at him as if he were crazy “What have you done! Now I’ll be inundated with messages!”

Sammy ignores my concern and begins to take me on a tour of LinkedIn. After about 5 minutes a message pops up in my Inbox from an insurance agent I didn’t know located in a near-by city. It was titled “We should have a conversation” and the message was simply a telephone number. Sammy says “Look you have a message already”. I responded “Well, I don’t know that person. I am not going to respond now. I will take a look at it later.”

At about 5pm that afternoon, I decide to reply to the message. “What did you want to discuss?” I typed. Almost immediately the reply came “I’m interested in working with you. I own my own book of business. When are you available to talk?” I replied “Well, I’m here now. Does that work?”. Within 30 seconds my phone rings and I am in discussion with an insurance agent who owns a $400,000 commission book of business and wants to talk with me about partnering to grow it. We have a wonderful conversation and at the end I ask him why he decided to reach out to me now. He explained that he had sent me a LinkedIn invitation months ago and I had never responded. Today, he was having a particularly rough day in his current work situation and just as he was trying to figure out what to do, I accepted his invite. He took it as a sort of sign.

So note to self, it’s not all about me. People reach out to you for lots of reasons. Time to take social media much more seriously…especially since it has the potential to deliver a $400,000 click!

I guess I will be buying Sammy and his family dinner.

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/MccEJh