"So I wanna go someplace where we know somebody who can plug us into the social pipeline.” ~Lloyd Christmas

In my prime I was making 5-10 thousand cold calls a year. I would talk to 10 people a week, only setting 1-2 meetings. My lack of success didn't have anything to do with a lack of skill but everything to do with metrics that were outside of my control. So I started looking into what I could do differently. Now in 2017 using the approach below I have watched our engagement as a team go from 4% to 18% and currently rising. In 2012 I would have 12 conversations on the phone or email if I was lucky now it's closer to 60 conversations a week or more. Those are the leading metrics I track every week.

You don't have to agree with me, but numbers don't lie.

When you joined this platform you had an expectation. Most likely that expectation centered around making connections and furthering your professional career through absorbing wonderfully written and compelling content. There’s one problem though, when you logged into LinkedIn today it wasn’t filled with wonderfully written content, well some of it was I guess. Most of it was a combination of selfies and low-quality videos. You know the kind of pictures that seem like they would have been so much better and they just asked someone to hold their phone and videos that were filmed in the front seat of someone’s car, most likely while they were driving it.

The last thing that would ever cross your mind certainly wasn’t a quote for the single greatest piece of cinema in history, but if it was, it was probably closer to John Denver being full of it than Lloyd introducing you to what I am wanting to discuss. I’m talking about a little place called Asssspeeeen. Ok, I’m joking, this is all about the social pipeline.

Before I begin, you have to understand what a marketing funnel is first. Marketers [the digital kind] distribute content to very specific people at different stages in their buying process. As a certified Hubspot aficionado, I’m inclined to describe their version of inbound marketing to you but for the purposes of this blog, I will save that for another day. Hubspot breaks the buying process down into three categories each designed to direct the reader/prospect towards the next step in the funnel. Marketers may call this nurturing or a workflow, regardless of what it’s called, we are all currently in someone’s workflow. And no, I’m not going to waste time proving that to you.