“What I want you to do is to get the LinkedIn inbox zero and manage your time communicating with the people that reciprocate to you most and keeping the amount of time it takes for you to communicate with your network manageable.” – Jack Wilson in today’s Tip 1352
How about you? Do you keep your LinkedIn inbox zero?
Join the conversation below and be sure to connect with Jack on LinkedIn!
Jack Wilson on LinkedIn
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from someone who’s more than just a LinkedIn connection. Here’s Jack Wilson:
Jack Wilson: What’s going on Daily Sales Tips Community. Jack Wilson back with another tip. Today’s tip is about getting the most out of your network and communication with LinkedIn. One of the problems I think we have with LinkedIn is it gives us access to so many people that it can be extremely overwhelming. Think about how many direct messages are in your LinkedIn inbox that either you haven’t responded to in a long time, they haven’t responded to you, or past the initial connection or pitch slap. You just never connected to them in the first place. Here’s the problem with that.
Hidden in that inbox, if you scroll really, really deep, are some golden nuggets, are some people that you really wanted to connect to, or are some recent conversations that you would love to reference back to, but it’s so difficult to continue to dig through that inbox to find those. So my tip today is a multistep process to get the best out of your LinkedIn inbox.
So first of all, what I want you to do is I want you to take the next time you get in a scroll lock and I want you to focus on the inbox instead of your feed. And what I want you to do is very purposely and intentionally select every individual conversation and scroll all the way back. And then what I want you to do is to hit Archive on every single conversation. Yes. I want you to go to LinkedIn inbox zero.
Now, hold on. I know you might be panicking because that might be sort of a repository for people that you want to remember and conversations that you want to have. So while you’re scrolling and selecting the messages to Archive, perhaps have a list, whether it’s a notebook or whatever digital note-taking system you use. Just jot down a couple of those important names so you don’t lose them. Basically, move the parking lot from your LinkedIn inbox somewhere else.
The next step is, once you have inbox zero, I want you to let a whole week go by. And at the end of that following week, I want you to deliberately choose a time slot that you can focus on LinkedIn for 15 minutes. Now, this should probably be the same time block that you’re going to engage or react to other people’s posts you’re going to respond to messages, just call it a LinkedIn or social selling or networking time block. Part of that time block, what I want you to do is open up your LinkedIn inbox and focus on the messages that came in this week. The people who reached out to you. I want you to decide, is this a deleted or to keep it? And is this a respond? So if it’s someone that you want to delete. Make that decision pretty quick delete and move on. Those are your pitch slaps. Those are your blatant automation. If it’s a keep, do you want to respond? I would recommend you respond immediately and then archive the conversation.
Now don’t forget, when you archive it’s, not deleting the history. So when they respond back to you, you’re going to have the historical conversation there. Now, why I want you to delete it is because you’ve done your job. You’ve played tennis with it, so to speak. I used to have a great leader that said, if I emailed him late, don’t worry if he responded back or not, he’ll play tennis with it when he could. So what I want you to do is when someone hits the ball to your court when you’ve planned it, hit the ball back, then archive and wait for them to respond. This is important because if people aren’t responding to you and they’re not reciprocating the time or effort, then why should you be doubling down on your time to try to follow up with them?
Now, obviously, this doesn’t apply to anyone you’re prospecting on LinkedIn. That’s a completely different motion. This is specifically just for your network and people who you want to connect with. So now that you’re at the end of the week and you’ve responded to everybody that communicated with you, go into that list that’s on your parking lot and say, who did I want to proactively reach out to? Now keep that number reasonable because if you overwhelm yourself with people to communicate with and you get that many responses back, next thing you know you’re right back in the place that started this whole tip in the first place.
So deliberately choose a handful of people that you want to message and then archive those messages as well. Every week, what I want you to do is to get the LinkedIn inbox zero and manage your time communicating with the people that reciprocate to you most and keeping the amount of time it takes for you to communicate with your network manageable.
There’s a few things that are going to come out of this. You’ll notice that you’ll start to foster a lot closer relationships with the people who also want to foster relationships with you. You might even spark the desire for a new relationship because of your deliberate intentionality behind the practice. Give this a try for at least a month. It takes a little bit of time for this to catch on and for you to get used to the new practice.
Once you do that, hit me up on LinkedIn. I’ll check my messages once a week and I’ll be sure to respond to you.
Scott Ingram: And of course, we’ll have a link for you to connect with Jack on LinkedIn at DailySales.Tips/1352. Once you’ve sent Jack your message, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!