Your team member must understand the following.

1. When in doubt, they should discard a profile. They are looking for only a small number of great partners to join their team. There are enough people with outstanding LinkedIn profiles not to be too concerned about working with lower quality profiles.

2. Roughly only about 30% of the people they send a connection request will connect with them with a “real” message, in other words, with a message other than an emoji.

3. When your new member gets good at the process, they should only need to send out about 200 connection requests to onboard 5 members of their team and achieve the Core-5 level. Let them know they are recognised as Core-5 and can attend Core-5 meetings when they have a team of 5, of which they have personally introduced a minimum of 3. Many people have done this purely with the people they know, without using LinkedIn at all.

4. We have some great tools to help them save searches and send messages on LinkedIn. Let them know that the MyMostTrusted app is a potent well-documented tool that you will be helping them to learn how to use.

5. Let them know that we also have an in-house developed tool affectionately known as “Arnie”. Arnie will allow them to automatically select a more relevant list of profiles by allowing them to assign points to words and select only profiles that have at least the number of points they specify. Unfortunately, the process associated with Arnie is a bit more complicated, so their new builder must start using MyMostTrusted.

6. Consistency is the biggest key. There is no doubt that the results will be achieved when their new builder follows the process. However, consistency is difficult until small daily habits have been established. Until those habits are firmly locked in, it will take deliberate focus on the part of their new team member to stay on track. However, the prize of creating a growing team of team building advocates means that this effort will pay off many times over.

You can visualise your explanation as falling into 2 parts:

1. Explaining the Boolean operators and how they work.
2. Discussing how they can use these operators to find great network-building partners.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to copy a search you have used, paste it into the chat function of Zoom and then ask your new team member to paste it into the Search box of LinkedIn. You can then help your new team member tweak the search to make it more relevant to them.

It also helps to give a simple explanation of the Boolean operators accepted by LinkedIn. They are AND, OR, & NOT.

A good example might be to explain Tall, space, Dark, space, Handsome would result in all profiles which contain all the words Tall, Dark and Handsome.

On the other hand, Tall, OR, Dark, OR, Handsome would produce all profiles containing these words (obviously a much more extensive list).

It is essential to point out that space between words implies the Boolean AND. It is better to use space because when booleans are expressed as AND, and OR, LinkedIn will allow a maximum of 5 in the same search string.

It is also vital that your team member understand that Boolean operators must be capitalised—for example, OR (all in capitals) & NOT (all in capitals).

Now, you can help your partner see the results from the search you pasted in the chat. After they have pasted this in the LinkedIn search box and clicked Search, ask them to select “People”, then choose 2nd level connections from the Connections drop-down in LinkedIn, and finally select the Locations they are interested in.

When they click “See all results”, LinkedIn will show them all the people that meet the criteria they entered.

Ask your team member to explain to you the difference between 1st and 2nd level LinkedIn connections. If you feel they are not entirely clear, explain the difference and how just a few first-level connections expand to a much larger number of 2nd level connections.

If they are searching for 2nd level connections, they should keep the list of results to somewhere between five hundred to two thousand. Explain that this is because LinkedIn will allow them to access a maximum of the first 1000 profiles in the results.

Also, explain that when they reach out to 2nd level connections, they will be sending those contacts a connect request message with a maximum of 300 characters.

Explain to your new team member that, in many cases, their new team member will ask them what kinds of attributes they should search for on LinkedIn profiles.

Firstly they should search for words that indicate character or attitude. Words like: reciprocity, others, difference, and attitude, often indicate a person who has the type of attitude of a person they would like to have in their team.

In addition to this, they can use other words that may help them connect better with a stranger because of common affinity. For example, if you have a tech background, it may be worthwhile reaching out to others who also have a tech background.

A couple of important points to reinforce with your team member.

1. There are other ways they can find new contacts. However, we know LinkedIn works to find great team members quickly. So when your team member is getting great results from LinkedIn, they can show their team members how they are using LinkedIn to achieve fast network-building results. In other words, it will pay your team member to set the example and duplicate it.

2. As when learning any new skill, it takes time to become good at it. They should encourage their new team member to form a small, consistent habit of searching and examining profiles for great candidates. As they examine these profiles, suggest that their new member looks for words that stand out on the profiles they like. They may be able to use such words in future searches.

3. When it comes to network-building, their new member’s LinkedIn outreach objective is to meet great candidates on a face-to-face call. Also, reinforce that they are reaching out to people they haven’t yet met for the initial primary benefit of those people. In particular, they may introduce those candidates to other great people they know once trust has been established.

4. Your team member is introducing their new team members to using Booleans on LinkedIn. We also have Workshops and Syllabus items that can help them learn more about doing great searches.

5. Once a Search string has been tested, it’s a great idea to record it on the “My Searches” sheet of the Collaborators+ workbook so that it is readily available for future reference.

The message could go something like this:

Hi firstname,

We've been connected on LinkedIn for a while so I thought of reaching out to you.

This year I'm looking to build a community of like-minded professionals so that we can all advocate for each other.

My experience is that this is by far the most effective use of our time in producing Tangible results.

It's not about pitches, sales, offers or deals - and for me it's definitely NOT about immediate transactions - it really is about building genuine pro-actively advocating relationships.

I reviewed your profile and realised I have a number of close associates in my network who could also be good connections for you if you are like-minded.

We all know that business has been greatly impacted by the events of this year.

I think it's made us all realise that we all do better by working together.

My motto is: Build trust by "giving first".

If this resonates with you, just click the following link and book a time for a quick Zoom call in the next few weeks so we can see how we may be able to help each other.

There’s no point in JUST being connected on LinkedIn is there? - let's take it further!

I’m looking forward to getting to know you better and seeing how I may be able to best help.

This message could be sent on LinkedIn.

However, we have found emailing rather than sending a LinkedIn message to be very effective.

Among other benefits, sending Email (rather than LinkedIn messages) has the upside of being a different medium and reaches those that only rarely look at their LinkedIn.

On the other hand, emailing can be a more time-consuming process than sending LinkedIn messages. The email process may require your team member to manually extract email addresses from LinkedIn profiles. However, we also have automated tools available that can make the process quick & easy if your team member is tech-savvy.

In order to send a message or email to their 1st level LinkedIn connections, your team member will need to select a great list of good candidates.

The process for doing this will be to capture a great filtered list of their 1st-level connections using Boolean searches on LinkedIn. This process is described in the next section.

The next step will be to examine that filtered list and select the connections they want to send a message to.

The next topic covers how you can best help your team members help their new team members start using Boolean searches on LinkedIn.

In this case, it may be good to re-iterate that such customer acquisition strategies tend to be short-term strategies that need to be continuously applied.

Assume your team member is looking to expand their team or team building advocates so that eventually they will have a large and increasing number of others advocating for them.

Can a customer acquisition strategy be combined with a search for like-minded others who want to build their relationship-based networks?

Yes! In many cases, your team member can combine a customer acquisition strategy with a strategy to find great potential network building partners.

The key is for your team member to search for others on LinkedIn who meet the following criteria:

1. People who are potential customers or strategic partners.

2. Others that have a pay-it-forward attitude. In other words, they believe in building trusted relationships with others (by first helping them make the right contacts) without expecting any immediate return.

Your team member can then reach out to such people with the intention of helping them make the right connections rather than trying to sell them their offering.

When your team member has a conversation with such people, the person they have reached out to will likely ask your team member how they may be able to help them.

If they are a potential strategic partner for your team member, they will probably know many others who could be good contacts for your team member.

Regardless of whether your team member is looking for clients or network builders, it will work for them to add a short paragraph to the top of the “About” section of their LinkedIn profile that conveys the message that your team member is open to helping others and is not necessarily simply about trying to sell something to unknown others. This message could, for example, have words to the effect:

“Although you and I may not be able to do business together directly, it is highly likely that I will know others who are great contacts for you. I am always happy to help others who also have a “pay-it-forward” attitude.”

The main thing your team member is looking to achieve is a face to face conversation (on Zoom) with others who have a like-minded attitude. So when they are conversing with like-minded others, they will probably be able to establish a great connection in their first call.

If the person they have reached out to is a potential strategic partner, it is likely that your team member may be able to help their new associate meet some of their relevant contacts and vice versa.

In the first session of Workshop 07, we reinforce the value of building a network before outlining the work to be done to on-board new team members.

In the second session of this workshop, we show you how to take new members through the Syllabus, the fast track, and make a start on their “Homework”.

In the third session, we show you how to help your new members start conversations with people they already know, to determine if the concept of network building (in addition to networking) is important to them.

You’ll also learn how to help your new members book into CC Intro sessions and make the best use of them.

In Session 04 (this session), we cover how you can explain to your new members how they can make the best use of LinkedIn to find a few great network-building partners.

This involves creating filtered lists from both 1st and 2nd level connections using Boolean Searches, and showing new team members how to examine these lists further to determine which of them they want to meet on Zoom for a Discovery call.