Unlocking LinkedIn: How to Find Your Perfect Customer

LinkedIn is a phenomenal resource for B2B sales professionals to research, and then connect with potential customers. Even the free version of LinkedIn has powerful search tools to help you search for your perfect customer. In this episode, Steve is joined by Christian Walter, Pascal le Floch and Jonathan Slasinski for a face to face recording of The Luxury of Choice, following a team strategy meeting. The panel discuss how to use LinkedIn proactively, and why sales professionals need to thing about their personal profile, writing it about their perfect customer. 

Steve Vaughan, Jonathan Cooper, Pru Layton, Christian Walter, Pascal le Floche,  Jayne Green  and Jonathan Slasinski are Sales Trainers from george james ltd.  You can email the show at:  Podcast@georgejames-training.com

 The trainers on LinkedIn:

 Steve Vaughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/steve-vaughan-salestrainer/
Jonathan Cooper https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-cooper-18716b1/
Pru Layton https://www.linkedin.com/in/pru-layton-b46a3528/
Christian Walter https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-walter-a1857b1/
Jayne Green https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayne-green-salestrainer/
Pascal Le Floch-Riche https://www.linkedin.com/in/pascal-le-floch-220ba46/

Jonathan Slasinski https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-slasinski-449a655/

george james training website https://georgejames-training.com/

Transcript

Steve Vaughan (00:01)
Hello again, and welcome to the Luxury of Choice, a B2B Sales and Business podcast brought to you by the training team of George James Limited. My name is Steve Vaughan. I'm a Senior Sales Trainer here at George James, and I'm also the host and producer of this podcast. And today we're actually live. We're not live as in we're broadcasting live, but we're actually all together for once in a fantastic Air B &B in Chalbury in the Cotswolds in England. for once we're actually together as a training team because we've had a meeting here.

And I'm joined by my three colleagues, Jonathan Slasinski Christian Walter and Pascal Le Floch So how are doing guys? Jonathan, how are you?

Jonathan Slasinski (00:38)
Doing great. It's kind of cool to be with everybody around the table.

Steve Vaughan (00:42)
It's weird isn't it? And Christian, how are you?

Christian Walter (00:45)
Very good, thank you very much.

Steve Vaughan (00:46)
Yeah,

great. Pascal, things.

Pascal Le Floch (00:48)
Yeah, very pleased to see that we are all together.

Steve Vaughan (00:51)
Yeah, we actually have legs, not just heads and shoulders on cameras. We've had our team meeting, we've had a very productive meeting working on strategy and also training material to take us forward for the next few months and years ahead. But in terms of our topic today, we're going to look at the world of LinkedIn and we've explored LinkedIn a little bit before on the podcast. But today we want to look at a specific topic, why your perfect customer is on LinkedIn.

And just to give a bit of context to that, I did a bit of research before we started the show today. LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with over 1.2 billion registered members across 200 companies. It has 310 active users per day. The average demographic, interestingly, is 25 to 34 year olds. That probably rules all us out around this table.

It has a global reach of 70 million businesses and 160,000 schools. I guess that means universities and things as well. And from a gender split, 57.2 % are male, 42.8 % are female. I'm not sure what that tells us specifically. Why have I gone through those statistics? Being honest, think most salespeople go on LinkedIn when they're looking for a job. I know I did when I first started on LinkedIn a number of years ago.

but it probably is now the premier place for business people to interact with each other in a virtual community. So the topic today, as I say, is why is your perfect customer on LinkedIn? Well, first of all, perhaps we should define what we mean by a perfect customer, guys. So what does a perfect customer mean to you? Anybody want to pick that one up?

Jonathan Slasinski (02:31)
Yeah, someone who wants to buy my product and engage with me on a on a level. Just on a level about, know, are they really into training? How important is this kind of, you know, the things that we offer to them? Sure.

And to me, LinkedIn's a perfect vehicle for that because we can, search function, we could talk about this a little later, but the search function itself, just being able to filter out people that would be receptive to the message or the things that I'm gonna try to potentially pitch them.

Steve Vaughan (02:59)
Absolutely, yeah. And we'll come onto the searching in a little bit. What does Perfect Customer mean to you, Christian?

Christian Walter (03:04)
It's a

customer that has the needs I can fulfill. And they are on LinkedIn because everybody's on LinkedIn. So many people. And I can actually find them because of all the wonderful search functionalities that are at my disposal.

Steve Vaughan (03:14)
Not everybody, I people who

Yeah. And what about you Pascal? What's a perfect customer mean to you?

Pascal Le Floch (03:30)
I would say people who want to have long-term relationships with providers as they can see them as partners. So we can easily look for the needs they may have through their posts or we will discuss this. But then yeah, that's the reason.

Steve Vaughan (03:46)
Yeah.

I think it's important in sales we do have a contact of a perfect customer because yeah, know, all customers are perfect, but some are more perfect than others.

Christian Walter (03:57)
If just

a thought, know, people buy from people, not companies from companies. If I reach out to companies, it's normally quite unproductive if I don't have a way in, if I don't have a person that I can contact. So I need to find the people that work for the companies that have a need for my products or for my services.

Steve Vaughan (04:04)
Absolutely right.

Christian Walter (04:22)
Therefore, I have to find these people. In the past, maybe I could find them at exhibitions or could perhaps find them in research symposia or places like that. Nowadays, I can find them on LinkedIn and that's maybe the interesting thing about

Jonathan Slasinski (04:39)
Yeah, I love, I love how you just talked about, you know, selling to people and people buying from people because it is a people place. I love being able to identify people through that search, but I did want to bring it back to something, Steve, you said in the opening, which was, ⁓ you know, this is a place that reps used to go to find jobs. And I, do, I agree with that. That's kind of what I started using LinkedIn for when I, you know, when it, when it came out, but I will say,

Seeing salespeople build their brands on there now. It's definitely LinkedIn's definitely taken on a new role in their careers and you're seeing salespeople show about their products, their knowledge, their kind of non-value, some of the things that we like to train about through LinkedIn. So it's just not a place to find jobs. It's actually a place, what Christian was saying is to find people, connect with people and try to, you

Engage with them around the things that you have to offer.

Steve Vaughan (05:32)
Absolutely and I should say the get-go before we go any further we're not going to get into the paid versions of LinkedIn today so obviously there are things like sales navigator which are premium products if you've got that guy is great we're not going to get into that today I don't think it is no

Christian Walter (05:44)
It's not necessary. Just, you

know, maybe be a little bit provocative.

Steve Vaughan (05:50)
That doesn't sound like you, Christian.

Jonathan Slasinski (05:51)
Now I'm nervous.

Christian Walter (05:53)
It

can be bit cringe as well. You know, these guys all telling about their great achievements and, you know, creating double-digit growth here and saving the world there and doing all these wonderful things. Everybody's trying to position themselves in the bestest of lights. But actually, is that necessary? I think it's more, maybe more relevant.

Steve Vaughan (05:56)
It can be very cringy.

Christian Walter (06:20)
be yourself and to be authentic.

Steve Vaughan (06:23)
What do you think, Pascal?

Pascal Le Floch (06:24)
I do agree, I was close to talk about the networking power of LinkedIn and the ability we have to express how we are, but also show the customers or the potential customers who they could deal with, who is behind a service, a product or whatever. Because as you said, it's a B2B system, but people buy from people.

Steve Vaughan (06:49)
Sure. So with the statistics that I gave at the start of the recording, the chances are, not everybody, the chances are that most of your potential customers are on LinkedIn and whether they're active on LinkedIn or not is another topic really. So you mentioned the search function. So what do we mean by searching on LinkedIn without using the paid version? What kind of things can we search for on LinkedIn?

Jonathan Slasinski (07:12)
job role, titles, companies, connections. So I love that because you can kind of filter, I'll look for head of sales enablement and then I can filter on who am I connected with or where do have a second or third connection with.

Steve Vaughan (07:27)
And you're absolutely right. So, you when I run training around things like LinkedIn, there is that big search box at the top, which most people seem to ignore. And you can type in, you know, a particular buzzword, don't know, single cell genomics or whatever is a relevant buzzword for your industry. And it's amazing what will come up in terms of things like jobs, you know, who's hiring, the chances of the hiring that might be expanding, might need some training or might need some more products, training and our perspective. they might, you know, it might be companies.

people are posting about their topics and all that stuff for free isn't it? None of that stuff means spending any money.

Christian Walter (08:01)
You're

a little bit smart about it. Maybe search for a keyword first and then look for that keyword in particular geographies or in particular companies. But you have to be a little bit clever about it, not just put in the keyword and then you get 10 million hits. That doesn't help you much. You need to really narrow it down a bit further.

Steve Vaughan (08:11)
But you can filter for that.

Cause you can easily go down rabbit holes with this stuff as well for that matter. Yeah. So something you've all alluded to as well is the importance of our own perspective or our own profiles on LinkedIn. So something that I always get amazed by when I train people around things like LinkedIn, they don't seem to consider their own profile. So they'll go and look at a customer and read all about, you know, them and their background and their history. And if you've got an appointment with somebody, you know, hopefully we do that beforehand.

But they don't seem to think about their own profile. Do you get that as well, Pasco? Do you see that sometimes in the training?

Pascal Le Floch (08:58)
I think that number of people are linked in just because they have to be. So what is the value they bring? Looking at their profile and this is what we have to have in mind. I think it's key that at least we have some clear statement about what we bring and when we want to connect, what could be the link?

Steve Vaughan (09:04)
Yeah, that's true. ⁓

Pascal Le Floch (09:22)
what would be the reason people would be interested to go further with us? That should be in the message that we would send.

Christian Walter (09:29)
You know, if somebody's totally, how do you say, not a social media savvy.

⁓ I think it's more important that they utilize LinkedIn for prospecting, for finding their customers, or maybe do the outreach through some other means. But rather than pretend that they are social media savvy and open a profile, it doesn't fit. Particularly if they use all these AI-generated posts, I think it is not going to lead to the desired result.

I would 100 % support that.

Steve Vaughan (10:04)
If by all means think about using AI, but if you do use it, please use that to give you some ideas, not to give you the chapter and verse of content really. We were looking at LinkedIn earlier and looking at some people we were prospecting and obviously we don't get mentioned some names, but some of the profiles we looked at were a bit cringy, if I can use that phrase. And I don't know what you think about this, Jonathan, but I think we sometimes forget that...

when we write our profiles, do we want our customers to see them? And if so, hopefully we do. What do we want our customers to think about us? Do we want them to use words like highly driven, motivated, passionate, top performing, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, do we want to use words that might make them think we're a bit more approachable?

Jonathan Slasinski (10:47)
I think the first thing we have to remember, this is social. It's your profiles out there for everybody to see. And I just had this situation with a C-suite executive who was building their profile for the first time in a while. And I read it and I said, this reads so wrong. It just reads all ego, all driven about, you, your growth, all this kind of stuff. And you.

Steve Vaughan (10:50)
network.

Jonathan Slasinski (11:10)
And he said back to me, he's like, yeah, but you're not my audience. My audience is VC. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, you're on a social network. It is everybody who's going to be looking at you. I, you know, going back to the original question was, are people's profiles? Even my profile wasn't geared towards.

generating business. thought it was my resume, but there was really no value. Where's the value that I bring? And I did have to, you know, when I started using LinkedIn to reach out for business versus just kind of connecting with people or looking for jobs, you had to change it. But you have to realize it's a network for everybody, you know, not just the people you're looking for. So,

Christian Walter (11:46)
And

you want to have people who... look at your profile. You want them to think, he's got something to say. I want to come back. want to maybe follow that person because it's interesting information and it brings me something that otherwise I wouldn't get.

Pascal Le Floch (12:04)
what is the first reading that people could have about watching your profile? So how do you want to appear for others? And to me, today, what probably works better than before is authenticity.

Steve Vaughan (12:19)
That's so important. That is so important. Tell us a more about what you think you mean by that, because I agree, but tell me a bit more about what you mean by authenticity.

Pascal Le Floch (12:27)
I mean, sharing who you are, not pretending first, not, let's say, just sharing what any other would do if he would be in your position, in your role. So what do you bring to the world? What do you bring to colleagues? What do you bring to customers? What do you bring to your management? Whatever. But something where you think you are different and you bring value.

Steve Vaughan (12:51)
So important. So important. I think back to this sort of profile and what we put on there and how we describe ourselves. I always think it is networking, albeit in a social media format. And if we were at a conference somewhere and we met somebody, we wouldn't say, hey, my name's Steve. I'm the most dynamic, thrusting, positive, top performing. Because you're going to think you're some kind of weirdo. But why do we do that on our LinkedIn profiles? I guess because if we think

It makes us look great really. But one of the things I always try and encourage people to think about is write your profile about your customer, not about you, about what your customer would want to know. And I guess even more importantly, why you do what you do. Everybody's on LinkedIn, you know, has a choice in terms of their career and what they focus on and why do they do it? And I don't mean the salary, that's the output. Why do you do what you do, Jonathan?

Jonathan Slasinski (13:45)
I take immense joy in trying to better people's skills. Absolutely. I like to think that my profile does reflect that. The things that I've done in my career and the way I position myself. Again, you try to get away from the cringe and try to get into the reality, the authenticity.

Steve Vaughan (13:52)
Yeah, and he does.

Jonathan Slasinski (14:01)
I think once you can do that, that's when it's really, that's when you have those real reach outs going back to Christian, the person in person reach outs. mean, like, I don't want to hear, I'm going to increase your funnel by eight X. Okay. Who are you and why do you do what you do?

Steve Vaughan (14:15)
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. What do you think, Christian?

Christian Walter (14:18)
So I believe we need to kind of differentiate between using LinkedIn for outreach, for finding target people. So that's rather functional. It's a beautiful tool. It's a tool. are other tools available, but I think it's the best tool available. It has the search functionality. has groups, for example, a super resource. know, you've got a group on analytical chemistry. You've got groups on medicinal chemists, formulation people.

You can really narrow it down to the business you're in and you can find relevant targets. And that's a relatively mechanistic way of using LinkedIn. So that's the prospecting side. And then there's the social selling side where it's more a soft approach. You provide some relevant content. You reach out maybe with some posts that could mean something to your...

target customers and you wait what happens. the more you do it, the more response you get, the more interaction you get. And all of a sudden there's actually a positive dynamic developing. At least that's my experience.

Pascal Le Floch (15:26)
Thanks Christian, an example came to my mind when you say posting something which is meaningful for your audience. It reminds me of a service guy who said that he was here to support customers and to fix problems. He could say, fine, we understand what he's doing, but it's not enough. So what he did is that he posted...

on a regular basis, the different types of instrument breakdown and how we help customers to fix this. And being very honest, know, but showing the day-to-day life he had and so on. And step by step, he got hundreds and hundreds of new views. And suddenly he started to be connected to, know, to daily use services. So that's fantastic.

Steve Vaughan (16:18)
Absolutely, but it takes time. takes time. So many people I speak to say, oh, I put a post on LinkedIn and nothing happened. So it's a waste of time. And they probably put a post of them, and forgive me if you've done this recently guys, but it's probably a post of them standing looking bored by a creased tablecloth in a lobby at a chemical company somewhere with a bit of brochures and a bit of kit on a table. That isn't posting regularly on LinkedIn. That is just putting a picture on it.

Christian Walter (16:45)
You

mean the tabletop show?

Steve Vaughan (16:46)
Yeah, you know the ones I mean the two guys standing by we're all set up at the University of Fred Smith Looking bored. Please come please come and see us and so we can sell to you. I mean, I'm I know I'm being facetious, but

Jonathan Slasinski (16:57)
Don't look at my post history

Steve Vaughan (16:59)
But that isn't posting regular LinkedIn that is that is just putting something in there and wonder why nobody sees it how That's a really good question, how often do you post?

Christian Walter (17:04)
often should we pose?

So I don't post regularly enough. I need a good reason to post. I don't post on a normal week when I'm out and about, when I have something important to say, then I will post. This week I posted twice. I was in England. I had some positive experiences. And I could use this to make some social media posts. But I think you should post multiple times a week, ideally, or at least once a week.

Steve Vaughan (17:37)
We're getting into dangerous territory here because a lot of people will say, ain't doing that. What do you think about posting on LinkedIn, Pascal? Is it something you're comfortable doing?

Pascal Le Floch (17:46)
Yes, I am. And the thing is that, yeah, algorithm may drive some posting decisions, but it should not be the only reason. will not be there. As Christian said, you have to post if you have anything to say.

Steve Vaughan (18:03)
And let's be honest,

none of us know how the LinkedIn algorithm works and it's foolish to try and pretend that we do or even try and guess what it is. But you must have come across this in your career, in sales training and enablement. Not everybody's comfortable putting things on LinkedIn.

Jonathan Slasinski (18:17)
Yeah, I think you have the people who are very comfortable and those are the natural ones. And then you have people who just, don't want to put themselves out there in that regard. I'm kind of in the middle where I feel comfortable posting to me. It's just when's the right time to post. What is the right post? And you know, like when I'm on there, I'm like, my God, it's like a full-time job for some of these people. seeing what their posts are. And to me, that's the exhausting part of social media where it's like, what do I have to do? How do I have to keep up?

Steve Vaughan (18:24)
Yeah. And that's a personal choice. Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (18:44)
Whereas I would love to just be every authentic every once in a while and send something a meaning and have that gain traction. But I don't know if that's the right way to gain traction. So it's just one of those things. But again, that doesn't mean that it's still not a tool to reach out just because I don't post doesn't mean this is not an excellent tool for me to be on to read, to learn. And then again, reach out through messaging and

Steve Vaughan (19:07)
I think that's a super point. think, and you said this a while ago, Christian, really, and we moved away from it, but there's really two facets to this. One is just use LinkedIn as a glorified database, albeit one that's got pictures of people and their job titles. Even better. Yeah. If you only do that, you're doing more than lots of salespeople are really. But I guess if you're comfortable doing so, then yeah, putting yourself out there. It's a bit different for us guys, because we're the product. We're trainers. We're selling ourselves to a large degree.

that people may not feel so comfortable about.

Christian Walter (19:36)
I've been recently talking a lot to people about the outreach, about prospecting, that seems to be big theme at the moment. People need to find customers, find opportunities. so we've been actually teaching the approach to research the perfect customer on LinkedIn. And then maybe finding out something personal about them, something relevant to their specific role at the company.

they are and then maybe composing a message that has this personal element that's the P. Then it has a value to the customer so we talk about something that's relevant, important, meaningful to that customer so that's the V. And then at the end we end the message with a call to action and that would be the C so it's PVC. so the research starts on LinkedIn but then maybe we go to email.

and we send a PVC message to that person we researched and the success of those messages is surprisingly high. What do you think, 20 %?

Jonathan Slasinski (20:39)
I, I, this stats definitely, they're way higher with putting in that formula, but just again, we're human beings. How do we connect with somebody? Right. And there's such a genuine way to connect through what people put on LinkedIn where you can, you know, when you personalize that, this person actually read my post or this person actually read the article that I was talking about. That's that.

Steve Vaughan (21:01)
It's a reason to start a conversation. Hey, you know, love what you're running on LinkedIn last week Pascal I thought it was great, you know, we have a meeting to find out more about what it is you're talking about? You know, I don't think people do that enough do they?

Jonathan Slasinski (21:11)
now.

Pascal Le Floch (21:13)
And again, this is about how we differentiate from others. So people like to see, OK, I've not been approached this way. So I would be interested to have a better idea of who this guy is or who this person is.

Christian Walter (21:29)
And it really works when somebody does their research. I always love to tell the story about my accountant. So she started off about the same time as I did with her own company, accountancy company, one woman band. And she researched me and she realized I had started my own consultancy company. And she sent me an email and said, hey, I noticed you just started. I just started in a few villages away from you and now I'm doing accountancy. You must have issues with your accounting.

I would love to help you. And she's my accountant now. So it does work.

Steve Vaughan (22:03)
So it's research,

it's relevance, personalization. What I really, you guys must get these as well, really annoys me is somebody, you get a connection request and by and large I accept most connection requests. And you accept it and then you immediately get somebody pitching.

Jonathan Slasinski (22:20)
You'd really like this pharmaceutical list that I have for you. I'm like, how do you know that? Versus what Christian was talking about. Read something about me. Yeah. Read something that I've done. Hey, because of this in your profile, I really felt that this could be of value to you. Let me know if it is. Yeah. Would love to chat if you can.

Steve Vaughan (22:38)
what I always say to people and this is going to show my age now. When you connect with somebody, it's like what they used to say on Star Trek, you've opened a channel, it doesn't mean we're communicating. and you've got to find another reason to communicate. Yeah, you're nodding Pascal, yeah.

Pascal Le Floch (22:51)
Yeah,

definitely. mean, if you jump onto the other, like, I want to sell you something, you create the opposite. First of all, you know, so how connecting together and developing your relationships as in life.

Steve Vaughan (22:58)
Yeah.

Jonathan Slasinski (22:58)
So.

Steve Vaughan (23:07)
There'll be people listening to this, undoubtedly thinking, nah that's not for me, I don't do LinkedIn, I might go on LinkedIn if I need a job, but no I'm not going go out on LinkedIn. What's our thoughts about that person listening to that right now?

Jonathan Slasinski (23:19)
their competitors are on LinkedIn. The people that they're trying to do something with are gonna be engaging on it. I get the uncomfortableness. It's just, again, it's another tool to make you successful. And when you're talking about prospecting and reaching out and trying to find customers.

Steve Vaughan (23:21)
That's a good point.

So it's not, you're saying it's not optional then? You have no choice?

Jonathan Slasinski (23:41)
I would say no. mean, where people are, I mean, I don't know if I'm being provided.

Christian Walter (23:48)
Don't die.

Jonathan Slasinski (23:49)
where we are in society. Yeah, I mean, if you're thinking about how do we connect with people, you can send a million emails out, no one's gonna reply to you. The reply rate on LinkedIn is much higher. And then it's even much higher if we do what Christian talks about where we personalize, put a call to action at a value. But if you're not gonna engage with it, you're leaving out a whole section of customers.

that is going to be a lot harder to reach out to in another way.

Steve Vaughan (24:18)
That's my view. And when people have said that to me in training courses, say, that's fine. You know, it's your personal choice, but what are you going to do instead? Exactly. How are you going to replace that massive opportunity, that sort of database in your pocket called LinkedIn? What would you say, Pascal?

Pascal Le Floch (24:32)
Are you talking about using all the ways that...

Steve Vaughan (24:34)
Well, if

you've got somebody on a training course and they say, I'm just not going on LinkedIn. I'm not comfortable with it. It's not my thing.

Pascal Le Floch (24:43)
Yeah, let's have a break.

Steve Vaughan (24:44)
You

Pascal Le Floch (24:46)
Yeah, as Jonathan said, mean, it's a media that you cannot ignore. It's very hard to. So it's like someone who has told me probably 15 years back, I'm not going to use email.

Steve Vaughan (25:00)
Yeah.

Pascal Le Floch (25:01)
Nowadays, it's quite a different story. It's one of the tools, but it's a combination of the media tools that make the difference. So the reason I make this point is that some people work with pharma companies and for instance, know, with production guys, even people are not in LinkedIn, they have no profile. So it's a yeah, why should I use ⁓ LinkedIn? Okay.

Maybe you have the company profile on LinkedIn. You can have information about what they do and so on and so on. And maybe there are all the names. There are people from, I don't know, research clinics who could work with the type of people you target. So even though your targeted customer is not there, there are people in their ecosystem who are present.

Steve Vaughan (25:51)
point.

Christian Walter (25:52)
My view is it's a tool at our disposal and like any tool adoption is irregular and older people find it sometimes a bit more difficult, not as a norm, but sometimes like when the railways first came, some people decided I'm not going to travel by railways for

Steve Vaughan (26:13)
Not

quite that old, know.

Christian Walter (26:14)
No, but I think it's really important to also challenge ourselves, you know, and particularly if we have got some silver silver back, you know, we have have the t shirt, got the postcard and been there, you know, maybe then maybe then we can still learn new tricks. And LinkedIn is a new trick that is actually benefiting

our sales practice. Same as email is a new trick that benefited us 15 years ago. AI is a new trick that's benefiting us and maybe that's for another...

Steve Vaughan (26:48)
podcast

Christian Walter (26:51)
But

these are the new tricks and even old docs can learn new tricks.

Steve Vaughan (26:57)
Absolutely. One last thing I want to explore around the world of LinkedIn. And by the way, we're not sponsored in any way by LinkedIn. Chance would be a fine thing. And what do we think about, and we hear this a lot in training that we're in, my company says I have to do this on LinkedIn. I have to put this on LinkedIn. I must do this. I mustn't do that. What are our thoughts on that?

Jonathan Slasinski (27:19)
there's again, you're an employee for a company. you know, and some of my former roles, we had social media guidelines. They, well, we presented them as guidelines. And again, you want people to follow your guidelines. If you're going to post about the company, it needs to be in a certain way, reflecting the brand in a positive way, things like that. And I think there's definitely something to that, but you get into the gray area because this is social media.

Steve Vaughan (27:26)
Okay, guidelines or rules?

Jonathan Slasinski (27:46)
Right? This is your personal account or it can be your personal account. It depends on what email you link to it and all that kind of stuff as well. But if you're going to be doing, if you're an employee for a company and you're to be posting something for a company, companies are well within their reason to have guidelines on what they expect, you know, their employees to do. And it's something that we used to train to, you know, we wanted them to follow brand etiquette, brand guidelines, brand messaging, things like that.

Steve Vaughan (27:50)
Well,

A

bit of different opinion?

Christian Walter (28:15)
I have a slightly different opinion. I used to work for a company that had very strict guidelines on LinkedIn because the CEO believed it was ⁓ a headhunting portal and people were presenting themselves to be headhunted away. So it was discouraged to do a lot on LinkedIn. And I think that was not good for that company in the long run and they're slowly starting to change. So I think it's a fine line.

I believe it's important that there's no offensive content. Of course. If you have some racist content, for example, from an employee of a company, that goes totally unacceptable. On the other hand, think the company can ask, but it can't request because it's still the personal account. And I think in the end, it's a give and take.

Steve Vaughan (28:51)
course.

Jonathan Slasinski (29:00)
guidelines exactly yeah

company gets some brand awareness through their employees.

Christian Walter (29:07)
But they need to leave a little bit of freedom as well.

Pascal Le Floch (29:11)
To add on this, maybe something which could help people who are still hesitant or don't know if they are right or not when they publish something. It's about common sense. Let's imagine that you are a salesperson and you want on the customer side. What is the expected behavior that the customer and your company would wait or expect from you? So this is about it. So write your post, thinking about it.

Steve Vaughan (29:41)
Common sense surely applies and my view is it is your personal profile. However, if you work for a company there, they have, I think it's fair enough for them to give you guidelines, but they are guidelines. aren't, know, as long as there are things that are not acceptable clearly, as we've obviously said really so, but it's my profile. One of the things that again, I hear often on training courses is that shouldn't be on LinkedIn. That's Facebook. Who said?

Who said you can't put something personal on LinkedIn? Where's the highway code? is that.

Jonathan Slasinski (30:11)
So

this is where I will agree with that person. And some of the things that I feel where LinkedIn's going, it's a professional network. It's it's a network to engage with like minor professionals or meet people, connect people, find customers. I don't want to see a post about politics. I honestly, I don't want to see you and your family's vacation. I want to talk about what's going on in careers.

in jobs, the environment, you know, for us, it's life science. want to, I want to learn about papers. That's just my, again, it's, it was built as a professional network. It still is, but I do get annoyed every once in a while when I'm like, God, here we go. Here's another.

Steve Vaughan (30:52)
when I

So you were walking in the blue bells earlier, Chris, didn't you put that on LinkedIn?

Christian Walter (31:00)
Yes,

yes, I'm a bit more relaxed about ⁓ bringing personal content to LinkedIn because I think it shows me as a whole person and I don't believe you can separate who you are in private life from who you're in business. And I like my customers to know me who I am. Yeah. So I'm not going to send pictures from beach holidays and stuff like that. There's always a connection to the business side.

And I also won't put political stuff on. I sometimes have commented on political posts, but more along the lines, hey, it's not appropriate to talk about this here, or it's not an... I disagree with that, but it's anyway not the right place.

Jonathan Slasinski (31:48)
I

feel too.

Steve Vaughan (31:49)
How do you feel,

Pascal Le Floch (31:50)
No, so far from what my colleagues say that I'm fully aligned in the sense that, again, if you want to share anything, what does it bring to the others? Of course, as we are, all of us around the table, we are freelance. So it's quite a different story. We may be more relaxed, as Christian said, to share more personal stuff. When you're in a corporate organization, are...

Let's say guidelines, even rules. However, it's about you. So it's a question of balance and your style.

Steve Vaughan (32:24)
I think that's it. I think it's a question of your personal style and your personal brand. What do you want your personal, not your company, what do you want your personal brand to be? I want mine to be friendly, approachable, sometimes slightly lighthearted, but also knowledgeable, experienced. And I think we want you post on LinkedIn. If you do post on LinkedIn, you can absolutely control that.

Guys, we can talk about LinkedIn for another few hours. I'm conscious that we need to wrap things up because we've got a dinner reservation fairly soon. One final comment from all of you for anybody that's listening to this that is skeptical about using LinkedIn proactively to grow their business. I'm going stop.

Jonathan Slasinski (33:02)
Yeah. The search function is fantastic. And again, it took an excellent trainer called Steve sitting next to me to let me know that there was more than people searches that you can do on it. But once that opened up this LinkedIn became this immense database where I can really filter down and search and make those connections. Cause again, people sell the people. How do I make the right connection? How do I show my value? But the search function is something.

people really, really should investigate it. It's a function. It is fantastic.

Steve Vaughan (33:32)
Absolutely. Christian?

Christian Walter (33:34)
I just

trained a group of people last week and I challenged them to do prospecting and outreach as a homework, as a task and to feed back. One guy sent me his message. He sent to a customer in the pharmaceutical industry and the customer replied and said, hey, we should have a meeting. How about next week? So it really works. And I think that's my message.

Steve Vaughan (34:02)
Great one. And for you, Pascal.

Pascal Le Floch (34:04)
It's called social professional network and there is network in the world here. So what I mean is that please use this to connect people together. If you don't feel comfortable to just talk about you, but you can connect people and they will see the benefits for them and then we'll come back to you. Let's go on.

Jonathan Slasinski (34:24)
that.

Steve Vaughan (34:25)
And for me, there's two points, if I may. One is that LinkedIn wants people to waste time on LinkedIn, because the more time you spend on LinkedIn, the more you see their advertisers' content. So that's why posting on LinkedIn can be a benefit. And for those of you that are skeptical about posting on LinkedIn, just to know that only 3 % of LinkedIn users regularly post content on LinkedIn, which is more than once a week.

So if you think you'd like to start posting on LinkedIn, you will very, quickly stand out and be visible if you start doing more than the occasional post, a bit more than standing behind the tablecloth in the lobby. So Jonathan, Pascal, Christian, thank you very much. It's been great working with you the last couple of days and thank you for taking the time today for the podcast as well.

Christian Walter (35:01)
You

Jonathan Slasinski (35:01)
Bye.

Fantastic

to be together with everybody.

Steve Vaughan (35:12)
It's

to be back together. It's nice to the podcast face to face. It's very different. Yeah. But it's fun as well. If you've enjoyed this episode, listeners, don't forget to give us a review on Spotify or Apple podcast. If you use either app, does help us in lots of weird and wonderful ways. A bit of exciting news. We are planning to take the podcast video format. So in the next few weeks, we're planning to start putting our podcast onto YouTube.

and also the video podcasting hopes up in Apple as well. When I've worked on that to do it. So Watch This Space will be putting more video content of the podcast. And on that basis, I think we should wrap up. Guys, thank you very much. Thanks for your time. Thank you, dear listener, for listening to us. And we'll be back again soon.