"Don't believe the bullshit about LinkedIn, give it 12 weeks and make up your own mind"
Approaching a potential client for 5.000.000 CZK excluding VAT.
him a clearly structured offer and a few links so he can see how great you are. He's gonna get mad. Because he gets dozens of these messages a day. He'll rat you out for violating LinkedIn's internal terms and conditions and for not complying with GDPR regulations. And you're gonna get the flak.
If you use an automation tool on top of this, you may lose your own profile as a bonus. A don't get another one.
Yeah, it's a bit of a maximalist notion of LinkedIn armageddon. But hand on heart ... how many of us have walked on a knife edge? And how many of you have slipped your foot and sat straddling the blade?
Yeah, I had a few days of braiding years ago too. I've been more careful since then.
How to do it right? How do you present yourself on LinkedIn in such a way that your potential customers enjoy it and you can actually generate interesting appointments? Sergej Pavljuk from StoryMatters.online tells you all this in a new episode. Sergey needs no introduction. He is one of the most prominent LinkedIn promoters in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. On top of that, he is a promoter of data analytics. What could have come out of this? The following questions.. and answers...
🔸 What data can be collected about competitor behaviour on LinkedIn?
🔸 What are the dangers of using automation?
🔸 How do I approach a person I know is interested in me?
🔸 What kind of conversion should I expect on LinkedIn?
🔸 How to get 12 business meetings a month on LinkedIn from scratch?
HOW TO GET A MEETING WITH THE CEO (INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT)
Guest introduction
Martin Hurych
Hello. I'm Martin Hurych and this is another Ignition. Before we start, I have a traditional request. If you've ever seen a Zahžeh or heard something you liked from me, give me your subscriptions, likes, or tell a friend about Zahžeh. You'll help me through the social media algorithms and you won't miss another episode. On top of that, you'll help me attract a lot more great guests like tonight's to the studio. Today, we're going to talk about LinkedIn again, but we're going to take it from a different angle. To give it some meaning and high added value, I've brought in the man of the hour, very likely one of the most famous talking heads on LinkedIn, Sergey Pavlyuk. Hi, Sergey.
Sergej Pavljuk
Hi Martin, thank you for putting me in a spot right now where I can only mess things up.
What's the biggest nonsense that's out there about LinkedIn?
Martin Hurych
That's not gonna happen. Let's get started. What do you think is the biggest misconception about LinkedIn?
Sergej Pavljuk
There are two equivalents in my view. The first is that LinkedIn doesn't work. The second is that it is supposed to deliver fast results. That's complete nonsense. I am terribly fond of using the analogy on how I've gone crazy and started playing sports for the last 11 months. But the results are not there, or rather it's nothing that makes a total impression and I've been dedicating 2 to 3 hours a day to it for 11 months. People who haven't seen me in a year say I may have lost a little weight, but that's about it. That's LinkedIn. Gradually you go down that path, gradually you see those results and in the long term and even medium term it makes total sense. I don't like a person who wants results quickly and gets frustrated with it and then says LinkedIn doesn't work.
What is it like to run a business from a small town?
Martin Hurych
Today it's going to be a lot about stories, because Sergey is one of the three co-founders of the largest agency specialized in LinkedIn called StoryMatters.online. You moved to a city that doesn't look like much of a business. You're currently in Vrbno pod Pradědem, but you do a lot of work for clients in big cities. How do you manage that?
Sergej Pavljuk
The expansion to Vrbno pod Pradědem helped me to get to Switzerland in a simple way. It doesn't really matter if you go online with a guy from Prague or a guy from Zurich.
Martin Hurych
So you do all your business online?
Sergej Pavljuk
I dare say that the offline that is here, that I find myself in Prague, is mostly friendly and pleasant. It's for fun, like our meeting today, and it's not something that the business could do without. The way the business, as we have it set up, works in such a way that I get up in the morning, take the kids to the office and go into the next room where I have my office. If it's a Monday, I'll have a meeting in the form of a meeting with my team, which is scattered across five countries, and no one sits together either. If it's Tuesday through Friday, I'll meet with you clients who are also scattered across 10, 12 countries today.
Some would say that's terribly sad or it could be a terrible bummer, but I guess it's a matter of preference. I don't want to impose my way of doing business on anyone here, but for me it's totally awesome. I then shut my computer, get on my bike, ride up the hill where there is no signal, no one minds and the hill is just better than in Prague.
Martin Hurych
It's great to be 2 minutes away from family to work. How do you deal with when work ends and family life begins?
Sergej Pavljuk
You just have to set it in your head, but it's not about being in Vrbno, you have to set it in your head in Prague. A much bigger struggle from my point of view is the mental struggle that you have to explain to clients that you don't actually exist, that you won't come to them and it's much more of a problem in your head than in the reality of the client. It's not that the client, given the choice, wouldn't prefer you to personally come to their office, but at the heart of the matter, that's not what they're paying you to do. He's paying you for the fact that the service is getting him results and he'll continue to pay you even if you call him from Bangladesh and I like being able to call him from Bangladesh.
How to properly manage a virtual team?
Martin Hurych
In the bigger cities, I see that after Covid, where there was a big hype of these home offices, there is a trend for everyone to go back to the office. Because there's a perception that people are more effective together than they are when they're scattered across x number of countries. You're ferociously productive, you're growing, you're 30 today, you're successful for sure. What's the key to success, how do you manage 30 people remotely?
Sergej Pavljuk
I'm terribly worried that the typical listener will now think that this is terrible bullshit, this is some motivational bullshit from the young suckers here. First of all, I'm not that young anymore, secondly, I had a marketing agency in Mala Strana, everybody sat in the office, even the poor cameramen had to cut videos in the office and we were terrible about it. They weren't working properly anyway. Then when we did a 180 degree turn, which was not so long ago, 3, 4 years ago, and we said it doesn't matter if you do or don't do, you deliver the work, I'll pay you, you don't deliver, I won't pay you, it turned out that these people have their own engine. The fact that you give them some trust and the ability to get it done in a way that's productive for them within the deadlines is good for both parties.
What makes the StoryMatters approach unique?
Martin Hurych
Let's turn the page and go to LinkedIn. According to your website, you are the largest agency in the Czech Republic and Slovakia specialising in LinkedIn. I've been watching for a long time that you're trying to expand more now, you've already mentioned here that you're in several countries in Europe, but you're trying to expand out more massively. You've translated all your communication into English, which is probably a podcast episode in itself. What do you think makes your appearance on LinkedIn special that has allowed you this growth and this success? LinkedIn gurus, as a lot of them call themselves, there are a billion of them both in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and of course across Europe. In what ways do you think your approach is different, perhaps?
Sergej Pavljuk
I wouldn't want to pretend to be more successful than I am in the first place. The foreign country exists for the moment, but it's not a business success. It hurts and it doesn't make money, so I'll be awfully happy if I'm able to be here at this microphone in 2, 4 years telling you the success story of foreign expansion, but we're not there yet. The success is within Czechoslovakia and within Czechoslovakia we have a few things that set us apart. We have data and LinkedIn data in the Czech Republic, for example Future Sales and in Slovakia Data on Steroids, we are not unique in that, but that's about it. Nobody else really has data.
Martin Hurych
What does it mean that no one has them? Obviously you're basing it on data that exists somewhere, so theoretically anyone could have the data. Why is data so important to you? Why did you single it out as the differentiator, the difference between you and your competitors?
Sergej Pavljuk
Imagine you are the sales director of a foundry and you need to write to the operations director in Germany that he should take the aluminium castings from you and not from a Romanian or a Pole. The key for you is to know which one of those operations directors to write to, so you need to know who is actually following you on LinkedIn, who is actually reading you. That totally increases your chances and there aren't that many operations directors, so you can't carpet bomb and write to everyone you meet. That's also against your reputation, against your interest. So that's the first parameter, data, knowing who likes you on that online nowadays and does it make sense to get them out into the real world.
The second dimension then lies in what to write to him. All the things I thought of initially that needed to be written to these people were wrong. We tried a really incredible number of private messages that can be sent to the operations director on behalf of the Czech sales director. It used to work a little bit somewhere and it took about 2, 3 years to find most of the textures in most of the segments and the worst part is that it keeps changing anyway and what used to work is no longer working. At that point the data is critical in that you know who to write to and what to write. Because we see what our clients are writing and we can't tell you that your direct competitor is writing this, that's what works for them. We can't, but we can tell you that we can see that it doesn't pay to add a link to a web page, 7 bullet points, and call it an offer. What if you make it two sentences and the last one ends with a question mark. By the way, it's not a good idea to address a German by his first name, but conversely it's not a good idea to address a Brit by his last name. These are things you might say, I know that too, but you don't know. A bunch of things surprise you and you don't know until you try, until you send 30 x, 30 y, 30 z messages and put it in that spreadsheet and look at which one worked more. That's a lot of work and not many people put in the work.
The final data is the data that I know the other guys have, and it's what Hurych is supposed to be posting about. Some Hurych will get mad at me and say what's my business, but most Martins appreciate the feedback. You see, Martin, this is what works for your competition, this is what doesn't work for your competition, this is what your target audience is interested in today, and this is what they used to be interested in, but they are no longer interested in today. That doesn't mean that you necessarily have to be in the trend and satisfy everybody and comply with everything. But all of a sudden you're picking from a set of what's data-proven to work and you're picking from that what's close to you and what you have something to say. So instead of being blind to the individual aspects of LinkedIn.
you pretty much know, which I'm actually not able to offer you as Sergei. I don't have enough time, I only have 24 hours each day to measure the data and it takes about 100 hours each day to measure the data. That can only be done by a specialized agency that pays for the systems, pays for the people, puts in the grunt work, and that is worth doing. Because it's not just selling that data to you, it's selling it to a hundred others like it.
What data can be collected about competitor behaviour on LinkedIn?
Martin Hurych
I can hear two levels in there. One is what I'm doing vis-a-vis the market. Where I understand that some mass of experiments gives you your own database that you look at and you can create your own procedures. There I guess I understand that an individual who starts with LinkedIn and has some 253 contacts can't have that in their life.
So that's where I hear that we're gauging the interest and the pitch that that individual will respond to. The other level is some data analytics over what wave is going on right now on LinkedIn. Even there, I don't have any tools, a chance as an individual to look at what is my competition writing?
Sergej Pavljuk
It's just that you can do many things without me or anyone else pretending to be smart. You can, after all, do your own scribbling of the news that works for you, that doesn't work for you. Even if you have a smaller data sample in there, you can pretty much get that feedback on those posts and there are several tools to do that. Those tools are not banned by LinkedIn and they're not allowed, they're in a grey area somewhere, so if LinkedIn gets angry about it in the future, it's not my fault. Those tools are called Kleo, for example. That's a Google Chrome extension that you install and then you go to the profile of, say, this Hurych guy who's your competitor and you hit that extension. It'll show you all the, say, 300 posts that Martin has published, ranked from most popular to least popular. It's less convenient than the detail I see, because I use Favikon, which costs money compared to Kleo and work compared to Kleo, but I can see all the Hurychs there at once. You only see that one particular one in Kleu, but it's already good and it's a few clicks away and it doesn't cost you money. So if you think this Martin guy has something you want to learn from him, Kleo will only let you learn from the tenth that is the most successful at Martin. Plus, it will measure for you Martin's typical publishing times, his typical post formats, his typical publishing cadence, how often he posts, and his average number of interactions. So the analytics for people who are into that is available here for free to some extent.
Martin Hurych
What more can Favikon, or StoryMatters.online, add? We've been talking about something here that obviously takes some effort. I have to think about it in the sense that my LinkedIn is not just some wall that I scribble something on, but it's some kind of strategic sales tool, so I have to be interested in it, measure it and probe it somehow. The other thing is, like you rightly said, I'll pick one, two, three, because that's all I'm following. What I definitely don't watch are rising stars, some new people who
are growing surprisingly fast on LinkedIn. So what beyond that is possible with paid tools, and therefore with you?
Sergej Pavljuk
Before I start bragging, let me say something nasty about myself first. Favikon is a tool that is not perfect, it is relatively fresh and you can see how they are gradually improving it. Admirably fast and admirably in the right direction for me, but it's still just a certain methodology that you can't take to be sacred, it's great and it's the only one possible. That current methodology of Favicon is that they look at all the data that is publicly available on Hurych. It's not just data on how many people are liking him or how many followers he's gained in the last week, but it's also things like whether or not Hurych has a newsletter and if he does, he gets positive points for it. You, of course, can have an opinion on that and say that's the right method, or you can say that the newsletter doesn't matter at all. I'm not trying to make Favicon out to be some sacred tool here, it's just the best, it's just the least bad of the ones that exist and we've had the opportunity to try. Although I've been ringing it like this all over the world, no one has been able to point me to a better one.
The real interface that my implementation team finds itself in, when Martin comes in and says he's going to pay us to help him, that allows us to keep an eye on all your competition. We'll ask you who your competitors are and you'll say, well, it's interim managers. Then we'll ask you if that includes coaches and mentors, and since you're competing with them for attention, yes. That's how we define that target group. This is where I have to give a shout out to all the moms on parental leave who are a dominant part of my team of 30. These are incredibly caring, reliable, patient people who don't do it for rocket money. I tell them we have an assignment from Mr. Hurych. Find me all the coaches, interim managers and mentors through Sales Navigator who have at least 1,000 followers and have published at least one post in the last 30 days. This isn't hard technologically, but it's hard on time, attention and nerves. She spends maybe 30 hours of her time on it and she has to really manually validate it, find them and manually put them into that Favikon system. Favicon is great, but it's empty, you have to fill it up.
What's it good for? That's a long story, so let's cut to the chase. What it's good for is that we see live afterwards that your rank is 17th out of 128 relevant players in the market, and it's changed so much that you've dropped 4 ranks in the last week. The people who have overtaken you and the people who are catching up to you have now published these posts and because of that, they've done it, they've got you now. You've failed at this one in particular because you can see it's already trending down. For you, for example, the community still grew a third faster than they did, but watch out, what they're doing much better than you is they're doing newsletters and you're not doing the newsletter. We are then able to see that not in a one-off way, but always live. Most of the time it's not the most visible coach, that kind of long-term thing, that changes once a quarter. What's interesting is who is a rising star, who was a completely unknown quantity on LinkedIn and has become extremely visible in the last week, the last month.
It's interesting because this is the person who chose good topics and these are the topics that we're going to recommend to you to see if you would consider them and if any of this is close to your heart.
How to break through on LinkedIn with your own topic?
Martin Hurych
Now I can almost think of one thing that to some extent can make this LinkedIn thing revolve around the same topics for a lot of people. How do you break through in this environment with something completely new? If you want to set up a topic on LinkedIn that everyone will then copy you on, how do you do that?
Sergej Pavljuk
The first half we said, without the data you usually have no idea, you sit at your desk and tell yourself you have nothing to write about. The data solves that problem. The second problem is in your box, that's embarrassing, that's stupid, nobody's going to care what anybody thinks of me. I say that with complete respect because I have those problems too and you didn't know anyway until you posted. You may think it's great or you may think it's terrible, the data may show x or y, but still, life will show that result afterwards. The data just improves your chances, it doesn't give you any guarantees.
To answer your question, a bunch of things, whether you're doing it on your knee or super professional, are influenced by you as a Hurych. I would suggest one thing, please don't take yourself so seriously. People won't remember what you wrote. If the post fails, they won't read it, they won't like it, they won't comment on it, so no one will see it properly anyway. If they're liking it and commenting on it, it's probably going to be successful, and if someone writes two nasty comments on it, that's going to increase your visibility, and if your heart can't take it, there's an option to delete it. I wouldn't worry about it, I wouldn't trash the post, I would write what I would say in the real world on the subject and hit enter. You're right that there are those among us LinkedIn gurus who say the post has to be perfect and great. It doesn't have to be. Because I don't just see the marketing numbers, I see to some extent the business numbers it brings in the real world and I see that great posts don't make money. Money is made by posts on topics that interest your potential clients.
Then all you have to do is measure who read it and get them to the meeting. You don't need the Nobel Prize for Literature.
What are the dangers of using automation?
Martin Hurych
Paradoxically, these contributions have the seemingly least engagement. You said that these tools are kind of in a grey area in terms of LinkedIn. You've warned against using automation at several events, in your webinars, training sessions, etc. I kind of naively thought that that wave was behind us because I also happened to have LinkedIn going boo boo on me. So what is the real danger today if I use an automated machine for at least those first steps, like building a network?
Sergej Pavljuk
I don't know at all because I don't use an automatic, so I can't tell you the experience. But I'm telling you this based on the fact that every day I get a plea in my Inbox from someone that they've been
blocked by automation and they write
from the wife. I'm not a bitch, so I try to give advice to these people sometimes, help them out, and just ask them to give me feedback afterwards on how it went. Most of the time, though, they lose that profile and even if they start a new one, LinkedIn can still take that profile away.
Martin Hurych
So the advice is to throw away all automation immediately.
Sergej Pavljuk
I can't tell you what the threat is, because of course those who have blown up write to me, they don't write to me about how they use automation and everything is fine. A bunch of people are blowing up though and if LinkedIn is not a tool for you now just for the next 4 weeks and then a flood after me, but it's a medium term, long term asset for you, which it probably should be, I wouldn't use automation in my life.
Martin Hurych
You said you specialize a lot in IT companies, manufacturing companies, you have a similar bubble as I do. You prefer the sniper form rather than the area raid, and you don't really need automation at that point. Is that right?
Sergej Pavljuk
You don't need it. There are several hundred operations directors, automotive companies that can take your aluminum castings. Your finger won't fall off for clicking.
How to comply with GDPR on LinkedIn?
Martin Hurych
I did come up on Vojt's profile, on the profile of your partner, co-founder, that the GDPR and terms and conditions should be thought about within LinkedIn from time to time. Before I heard that, it didn't occur to me, nobody around me, because you kind of live in the idea that LinkedIn is America, Ireland at most, it doesn't affect us. It's some sort of encapsulated black box where you can do whatever you want. Why did you bring this topic to light?
Sergej Pavljuk
About 2 years ago Vojta came and said that someone of his friends here is being sued for violating GDPR through LinkedIn and they want 5 million CZK. Coincidentally, about 3 weeks later I also came across a similar case and it was in Slovakia. So we thought that since we are doing this LinkedIn, we should study it. So we contacted different law firms and there were different offers, the cheapest one was for 150 thousand, we took the average cheap one, it costs us today about 350 thousand. They produced for us about a 200-page document which they made from the GDPR, the commercial code and the general terms and conditions of LinkedIn, which they mainly drew from.
Martin, you may not send me any attachments in a private message. I didn't allow you to do that under LinkedIn's terms and conditions. If you send me a private message telling me that you have a great episode with Sergei here for me to listen to, you're in breach of GDPR. Likewise, you'd like to show me examples of your work or Martin Hurych's signature and zazeh.cz below that. It's all a violation of GDPR. Why is that? I, as a counterpart, did not give you permission to do that and you sent it to me anyway.Of course, if they were to fine everyone 5 million, someone would get really rich, because most people do it anyway. But whether we like it or not, we are gradually becoming that America. We've gone from a world where nobody is addressing it to a world where somebody is addressing it, and we're probably going to get to a world where a lot of people are addressing it soon. It's not attractive to sue you like Hurych, you're not exactly the one who's going to come to me and say, I'm offering you an out of court settlement, I'll pay you a million and a half, give me a break. But if you're a representative of IBM, a bank, an insurance company or, after all, a normal Czech family business with 50 employees, you should realize that if you send a thousand such messages, there's a pretty good chance that someone will sue you. Then when you sit in a meeting with your lawyer and he studies the laws, he will tell you that you will play this for 2 or 3 years, you will lose and you will have to pay for it. So you offer them an out-of-court settlement.
Martin Hurych
So what can I realistically do on LinkedIn? Can I message you? Hi, Sergei...
Sergej Pavljuk
Not exactly. Hey, Sergei, it's still okay, but even though we're connected on LinkedIn, we're friends there, I didn't give you permission to send me a business message. So if you write, hey, Sergei, I'd like to offer you these services, you've violated the commercial code.
Martin Hurych
So what is the right way to do it?
Sergej Pavljuk
Hi Sergey, I'd like to invite you for a coffee, let's have a chat about productivity. Sounds similar, but the difference is a few million.
Martin Hurych
But realistically, I'm also offering you cooperation there.
Sergej Pavljuk
That's not provable, maybe you're interested in my opinion on the subject of productivity and you're asking me.
Martin Hurych
So we're back to the type of address, I'd be interested in your opinion on...?
Sergej Pavljuk
Probably not so spastically, but in principle you can have a professional debate on LinkedIn, that's fine. You're not allowed to spam people on LinkedIn with a commercial message and that's very much a question of interpretation and I've told you my interpretation.
Martin Hurych
Obviously, we both get a billion of these messages, just in case, 7 bullet points, 4 links. There's obviously spamming there and I think people can filter it out. What about those, I've noticed, Martin, with your videos, there's a ton of room for improvement, we do this and that, let's talk about it?
Sergej Pavljuk
That's a bid, a violation of the law.
Martin Hurych
It's almost like I can't do anything on LinkedIn. So does that mean that I should transfer that indication of who would theoretically be interested into that feed, measure what's happening in that feed, and then pick up from there those people who show some sign of interest?
Sergej Pavljuk
You say it exactly. I would deal with whoever showed interest in you and primarily write to those people. That's legally better, by the way. But when I found out what the rules were, I was completely
and I was wondering how it's possible that there are fines for that. But then I calmed down for a second because I looked at our data analytics and I figured out that the hardball business stuff wasn't working anyway. Hello Mr. Hurych, we would like to offer you our services as a LinkedIn communications agency and as part of our fulfillment we can do something. It doesn't work. Hello Martin, I appreciate you sending me an invitation to follow your company page and would like to ask you if you would like to discuss the topic of LinkedIn Communications Ignition. That's a bit more human and legally difficult to challenge. I'm naturally responding to the fact that the first step was on your side.
Martin Hurych
I read it immediately as an offer to collaborate, logically you see something there. So how is it less objectionable than the sharp version, I see the flaws, let's work on them? You're saying the same thing.
Sergej Pavljuk
I can basically just repeat what I said. I'm offering you a debate on the topic, not an exact list of my services. When you then ask me, Sergei, what exactly you have in mind to discuss, I essentially already gain the right to tell you the specifics of my offer, because you have asked for those specifics.
Martin Hurych
Advanced Sales Navigator. They haven't let me in yet, I'm struggling. I can't fight my way to get it assigned to me because everything is legal with my profile, but historically I've had two subscriptions there. When I was looking for a job, I had Recruiter paid for and I had the standard Navigator paid for. The support can't breathe it, so they're still figuring out what to do and I can't get to Advanced.
Sergej Pavljuk
You've asked me to give some kind of bonus to all listeners, so how about if I give those listeners a link to LinkedIn support through you where somebody actually answers and somebody actually solves the problem that you're addressing. It's completely untraceable, they hid it in the dumbest way they could, but they have to have that support and it really exists, we really found it.
How do I approach a person I know is interested in me?
Martin Hurych
I've talked to several countries supporting LinkedIn in Southeast Asia, nothing happened. You built it up with your webinar, then I easily forgot about it, and now I remembered to try again. So, how do I reach out to the person that I know that maybe the tracked PDF in Sales Navigator Advanced will creep up on me? He's interested in a particular service, he's reading a particular page for me, so I can see that he's really crawling through it in detail. At this point, what can I do under GDPR to make sure I don't break the rules?
Sergej Pavljuk
Good question. A comment for normal people, Sales Navigator Advanced allows you to see who read your PDF, how long it was, when it was, what exactly they were interested in, and so on. It's one of the many features that are really worth the money. To answer your question, don't write to him saying you know. It wouldn't be a legal problem, but it's a human problem. I'm not smart, so as soon as I found that feature I immediately wrote, hello Mr. Hurych, I saw that you read our case study here about the communications of that firm and that you were most interested in that part. I thought that Martin would be impressed with what a skilled LinkedIn specialist I am, that I could do this and prove my competence and that the report would be totally addressable. It's funny, but the 30 Martins we tried it on didn't respond at all.
Martin Hurych
So how should it be right?
Sergej Pavljuk
Hello Martin, I would like to suggest that we follow up on our connection on LinkedIn and have a coffee on LinkedIn. It will seem like a coincidence. The best part is the conversion. Marketers and mall people will understand that it's a great conversion, normal people will think it's not enough, but the conversion here is typically 40, 50%. That means that less than half of those people will actually confirm that they want to meet you. That's an unprecedented number in my industry.
What kind of conversion should I expect on LinkedIn?
Martin Hurych
What do you think is an acceptable conversion for such an invocation of some coffee, if I'm not allowed to invite to a business meeting?
Sergej Pavljuk
We consider success within our internal KPIs, which we set for our consultants, 20%. That is indeed an achievement and a commendation and we will not rest until we have achieved that in our client campaign. But what we typically start with is 5, 7, 8, 12% and that's after 3 months of publishing good professional content. We haven't touched on that topic and I'd just like to briefly mention that it's not content about being an avid cyclist, what you think of Andrei, and that you're on a trip in Uruguay right now. That doesn't help and sometimes hurts. Now I mean the boring professional content. We tried this tactic as well, my first thought as a marketeer was what will garner the most likes, give Hurych a kitten, click it, put it out there and it will get a lot of views. Then we sent out those acquisition messages and wondered why no one was writing him back, why no one wanted to meet him. So I was a kitty supporter, I have 5 cats at home, I'm not normal, but I'm not writing about it on LinkedIn as of 2021.
Martin Hurych
What would you say is my most successful post of the past year?
Sergej Pavljuk
My guess is that it's still going to be some of those micro videos from Ignition, but ones where you're doing more of the talking and telling the solutions to the problems that are burning these people up. That's my guess.
Martin Hurych
10 times more success was a post about getting up at 4am, but that's mainly about the likes and comments. But that's what a startup person normally sees on LinkedIn. I see a bunch of people around me who say they've been trying it for six months, three quarters of a year, a year and they still have 4 likes. You're not prepared for the fact that in a lot of my industry and a lot of the clients that I work with, the counterparty is significantly passive. You don't see anything happening for a long time because they don't lick, they don't comment and then at the end of the year you get a call saying, I've been following you for a long time, so here I am.
Sergej Pavljuk
I can't tell you my clients' internal data, I can't, so I can only be completely transparent about myself. On behalf of Sergej Pavljuk in the Czech and Slovak Republic from 2020 to 2024, Covidy, War, from Karviná and then from Vrbno pod Pradědem, I have won over 2,200 business deals through LinkedIn. I didn't run it all myself, I delegated everything to colleagues over time. Yet my typical post has a measly 20 likes and 5 comments and I have 25 thousand followers. I know how to squeeze 500 likes out of a post, that's not a problem, but I'd rather have the money. I am 1,70 m tall with a belly from Vrbno pod Pradědem, where there are 4 LinkedIn users, yet I am able to get meetings with CEOs of the biggest companies in this
country, but also in Switzerland, Germany and so on. I write about what they are interested in and the normal generalthe director will never give you a like.
How to get 12 business meetings a month on LinkedIn from zero?
Martin Hurych
I can totally hear people telling you that you've got the 25 grand, you've been there for years, you've got the history. How am I, poor guy from Vrbno pod Pradědem, if I happen to be the 5th user of LinkedIn and I want 22 meetings a year, how am I supposed to build up from nothing so quickly? This is standard, and I keep hearing that with the distance from Prague the people on LinkedIn are relatively few, but the beginner base is huge. So what if I'm not Sergey, but I'm the 5th guy from Vrbno pod Pradědem and I need to charm those CEOs within six months too?
Sergej Pavljuk
I'll tell you the ugly stuff first, it's going to cost you either 5 to 15 hours a week of your own time or to some extent someone else's time and you're going to have to pay tens of thousands a month for that. But in the domestic market, those sales meetings are real by month 3, 4 of that campaign and you should demand that of yourself or the people who are doing it for you. If we're talking about why and because of what, it's because you can ask 100 potential clients for connections a week. Huge disclaimer when you've got the Social Selling Index right and those people are accepting it, but if you've got those things right, there's 100 leads a week. That's 400 CEOs a month, that's 1,200 CEOs in 3 months. Typically you'll get about 700, if you're a woman, a little bit more, if you're a CEO, a little bit more. For being a woman, roughly +10%, for being a CEO, roughly +10%, for being a businessman, roughly -15%.
Martin Hurych
A female CEO therefore means 20%.
Sergej Pavljuk
We have a female board member of a manufacturing company and she has incredible conversions. The 700 CEOs that take you up on that, they're going to read that content of yours, even if it's professionally good, realistically 120, 140 of them, and the key for you is to underwrite that. Not to be selfish and just talk about myself, listen to the podcast episode here at Martin's with Honza, my competitor from Future Sales, who talked about where you underwrite it, how you underwrite it, he told it well, why would I dub him here. So when you undercover, who's reading you, who's interested in you, then you write them the right private message and out of that 120 you get about 10% to the meeting and that's 12 CEOs. That's for the first month.
that's enough and let's move on next month. You're never going to let that go, but most of those people don't go beyond that initial investment, they just don't put that patience into it.
Martin Hurych
It's like with business, a lot of people say we don't have money, but they don't really want to go into business. So did I hear correctly that if I invest those hours or those tens of thousands of money, I can expect to have 12 coffees arranged in 3 months?
Sergej Pavljuk
At the turn of the 3rd and 4th month and thereafter, you can expect to bring in 2 to 10 meetings a month depending on what industry you're in and of course how good your content is. All this stuff I'm saying here applies to B2B. There's a huge variation in B2C and most B2C stuff in my experience on LinkedIn is not worthwhile to communicate, it doesn't have enough margin for you to get a return on that investment.
Why be on LinkedIn at all?
Martin Hurych
What have we forgotten, what are one or two more red flags?
Sergej Pavljuk
Maybe the motive alone to do that LinkedIn, because after all there are tons of other tools. You either have one or you don't, I'm not going to impose mine on you, but I'll share mine. Ironically, that's an incredible freedom, you can really deliver your idea to that counterpart with basically no intermediaries.
You don't have to have a salesman, a trade show, a PR, a journalist. I, Sergei, have an idea, I'll deliver it to Martin, directly to the Martin I care about, and I'll see if Martin is interested. In that sense, this LinkedIn completely has no alternative, and in another sense it has no alternative. For people with the right business mindset, the golden pages are no more, that's a terrible shame, but these are the golden pages. That's where all those decision makers are today, that's the only social network where they're, where they're stating that about themselves, where they assume and they're okay with you reaching out to them in a reasonable way. Through tools like Lusha, RocketReach, Apollo, you can get a phone number for them in a lawful way.
Summary
Martin Hurych
If, in the information noise that rages around us, one sentence, three at most, were to be left out of this podcast and put in the headline, what would it be?
Sergej Pavljuk
Don't believe the bullshit about LinkedIn, give it 12 weeks and make up your own mind.
Martin Hurych
Thank you so much and I wish you to do more things as great as you do on LinkedIn, keep it up.
Sergej Pavljuk
Thank you, Martin, I appreciate it, and thank you to the distinguished listeners.
Martin Hurych
The next part about LinkedIn is over, relatively quickly after Honza Kyselý, we have a double fight. If Sergey and I got you excited about something again this time, or made you think about something, we certainly did our job well. I'm sure we'll be happy to see you both on LinkedIn, because for me it's the network of the day too, and if you're not on LinkedIn, it's like you're not. Right, Sergey?
Sergej Pavljuk
I'm not such a radical, I like my neighbour Bohus, he doesn't have LinkedIn and he's great at helping with wood.
Martin Hurych
So if you can help with the wood, you don't need LinkedIn. Anyway, check out the bonus that Sergey mentioned here, it will have a secret support link if you have something wrong with LinkedIn. I'm going to try to get a little more out of Sergey. I'm going to repeat my request from the beginning, if you liked us, subscribe, like us, forward us to someone else who might like this episode
Help. You can help us get through the algorithms of more than just LinkedIn. I can't help but keep my fingers crossed and wish you success, thanks.
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