105: Leverage LinkedIn and Network Your Way to New Connections with Mike Shelah

Robert Plank: We're going to be talking about LinkedIn with Mr. Mike Shelah. Now, Mike is a LinkedIn-made man. He is a sales pro who rocketed his way to the top. Thanks to effective networking skills. Mike teaches others how to harness the power of LinkedIn, infectious, enthusiastic, and practical. I can't wait to talk to this guy. Hey, Mike. How are things today?

Mike Shelah: Robert, things are wonderful. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

Robert Plank: I'm glad to have you, and the big reason is because ... I mean, this site called "LinkedIn." Maybe I should get logged in right now. LinkedIn. I have an account. I filled stuff out. I've made a group. I've done a couple different things, but I really don't get it, so I'm hoping that you could clear a bunch of things up about it today.

Mike Shelah: Yeah. I am happy to do so. Because of people like you, I have a career, so I am grateful for that.

Robert Plank: Nice, so tell us about it.

Mike Shelah: The first thing that I like to say is what LinkedIn is not, and it's not Facebook. A lot of people are very familiar with Facebook. They enjoy it, and they engage on it on a regular basis, and then they look at their LinkedIn profile almost next to never. They occasionally log in to see if they have new invitation requests. They'll use it rather heavily if they're looking for a job, and sales professionals to some extent are better at using it, but even most sales professionals really use LinkedIn incorrectly.

Here's what I mean by that. Over the years, I've developed what I call the "ABCs of LinkedIn," and I don't mean always be closing. Most people think of Alec Baldwin in the movie Glengarry Glen Ross where he goes, "Always be closing. Coffee is for closers." I think that might be one of the most despicable things that's ever happened to sales because people really look at sales that way that you have to beat people over the head with a hammer in order to get them to buy your product, or you have to trick them, or you have to manipulate them, and that's not what sales is.

The most important piece of sales is if you imagine the products and services that your company offers as a circle, and then you imagine your customers' needs as another circle, and then you imagine your competitors' needs as a third circle.

Robert Plank: Okay.

Mike Shelah: There's a spot where all three of those circles lay over each other, and specifically, there's a spot where your circle lays over your customers' circle and your competition's circle doesn't, and that's the value edge. That's the differentiator that makes you the preferred vendor over your competition, and LinkedIn can do such an effective job of helping people sell. When I say sell, I like to remind people that looking for a job is temporary sales. Very rarely are salespeople out of a job for a long time because they're used to selling themselves, and most people that are not in the sales world, they don't embrace the sales mentality because they don't want to be viewed as salesy, and I can appreciate that.

Robert Plank: Got you.

Mike Shelah: There's a lot of horrible examples, but LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful tool to find clients and to find your dream job, and I'll start with the first ABC which is "Always Be Connecting." I did a speaking engagement for the Baltimore Business Journal here in Maryland a couple weeks ago. I had a great audience, and when I began speaking, I told the audience, "I want you to look to your left. I want you to look to your right, and what you should have seen are people."

Human nature inclines us to sit next to people we already know, and if you do that, you're doing networking wrong. The whole idea of networking is to sit next to people you don't know and strike up a conversation. It doesn't have to be a sales pitch, and it doesn't have to be deeply probing, but let people know that you're not a stalker, and that you're friendly, and that you're human, and that's the connection. That's the first piece.

What I tell my audience is, "You go to that event. You collect 10, 15 business cards, people you never met before, and the first thing you should do when you go home is send them connection requests on LinkedIn to say, ‘Hey, Patrick. It was great meeting you at the event last night. I hope we have the opportunity to do some business together this year.'" What I just touched on there were the other 2 ABCs which are "Always Be Cultivating" and "Always Be Customizing."

Here's what I mean by "Always Be Customizing." LinkedIn has all these generic responses. For example, if you send a connection request, it says, "I would like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn." If the person you're trying to connect with has any level of stature, meaning they're not regular people like you and me, but they're an executive level, they're not going to accept that connection unless you're higher on the totem pole than them.

For example, if you're Dale Carnegie and you send a connection request to a C-level executive, C-level executives probably are going to accept that connection request from Dale Carnegie if you're still alive because he's a step above the totem pole. Anybody below you on the totem pole, you're not accepting from. You're just not, unless you're introduced to that person or that person sent you a message that had a direct value to you and your company.

Robert Plank: Could you explain that a little bit because like one of the first things you said here was that LinkedIn is not like Facebook? When I go on LinkedIn like I had a profile to fill out, I ... and other people to like I guess friend request or connect, but then I've noticed this too like some people I'm connected like 2 connections away or something, and there's some kind of a link for the person in between us to do this introduction thing.

Mike Shelah: Introductions are probably the most valuable piece of LinkedIn. It's what they call the "second degree connection" because my network is valuable to me. My network is probably more valuable to you because it's potential. It's the potential to do great things, and the way I explain this is ... Again, this can work for a salesperson. It can work for a person in a job market. Come up with your top 5 accounts you want to go after or the top 5 companies you'd like to work for.

You could do that just as a general search right at the top of LinkedIn, and then you search the job title. It could be a hiring manager. If you're in finance, you would probably work for a controller or a CFO. If you're in technology, you might work for a director of IT or you might work for a CIO. Depending on your industry, what's the title of the person that you would report to? Then, do a search for that title. The nice thing about LinkedIn is if you type in "CFO," it will also pull up everyone that says, "Chief Financial Officer." It knows certain abbreviations like that, the more common ones.

Robert Plank: Cool.

Mike Shelah: You've got that ... Go ahead.

Robert Plank: Go ahead. I was going to say like ... This is all new to me because to be honest like from what I had seen of LinkedIn, I honestly didn't even know until right this second that there were jobs ... There were actually like real-world jobs on LinkedIn like this was new to me. All I thought that was that you could fill out your own basically resume. You could make like a blog post on there. You can make your connections.

As you were saying that, I just searched ... I was searching in the search bar like Google and Dropbox, and it shows me all of the job openings, and then there are a lot of tiny things like there's a thing that shows me who ... Like people who went to the same college as me who also work at that company. That's huge, and even as far as what you're talking about as far as like the middleman basically like the people making the introduction, so now, if I really wanted to work at a certain company, I really wanted a certain job, now I know who I can maybe talk to about that.

Mike Shelah: Absolutely, and you bring up a great point. You have to leverage your tribe. Seth Godin, famous writer, wrote a book called "Purple Cow," wrote a book called, "Linchpin," and he wrote a book called "Tribes." In that, he talks about how we are naturally comfortable of other people that we perceive to be the same or similar to us, and my favorite example of that is sports. Patrick, you're a sports fan?

Robert Plank: My name is Robert, and no. I like a little baseball, maybe a tiny bit basketball, but that's where it ends.

Mike Shelah: Okay, so not a sports fan, but let's talk about baseball just for a second then.

Robert Plank: Okay.

Mike Shelah: You know people that are crazy about baseball, right?

Robert Plank: Yeah, like fanatics.

Mike Shelah: Sure, and if you are from a certain area ... I live in Maryland. I'm an Orioles fan. If I'm out of town, I'm in North Carolina, I'm in Florida, I'm in California, and I see someone wearing an Orioles t-shirt, or an Orioles hat, or an Orioles jersey, the likelihood of me walking up to this total stranger and saying hello has gone up 800%, right?

Robert Plank: Right.

Mike Shelah: Think about your favorite musical band. It works the same way, something that you're passionate about. You're a comic book fan, if somebody has on a Superman t-shirt. Whatever your passion is, you identify with that group even though the person is a total stranger, and colleges are a great tribe. The bonding that comes from that, even if somebody went to the school 20 years before you or 20 years after you.

Robert Plank: It's still something.

Mike Shelah: Yeah. I got a meeting last summer with the CIO of a pretty big real estate company here in Maryland because when I looked him up on LinkedIn, I saw that he was a graduate of UMBC, which we referred to as the "Retrievers." That's our mascot, and so when I sent him a message, the message I sent to him didn't have a title about, "Bob, I'd like to tell you about my business." It didn't have any of that. The title of it said, "Go Retrievers."

Robert Plank: Nice.

Mike Shelah: Right there, I had that little something that 99% of the other salespeople didn't think to put in front of them, and I got the meeting, and I got the opportunity. When you think about leveraging relationships that way, think about getting a job. How much easier is it if you have the secret handshake, if the person sitting behind the counter went to the same college as you, went to the same high school as you, likes the same football team as you? The list is endless, and the best thing about LinkedIn is it gives you that ammunition ahead of time, and if you just have a mutual connection with them, that's my favorite because if it's somebody that you know well and they know well, you're practically guaranteed to win the opportunity.

Robert Plank: Cool, so about LinkedIn and all the stuff. What kind of big mistake other than these couple of ABCs like the lack of customizing and lack of being personal, what's like a huge, huge mistake you're seeing all over the place with other people on LinkedIn?

Mike Shelah: The 3 big ones are, they are not having a complete profile. For example, there's a section that you can add that's called "Advice for Contact." Why on earth wouldn't you add that? Put a phone number in there. Put an email in there. Make it easy for people to engage you, and I've had some people say to me "Mike, I don't want my personal information out there," and my response to that is, "Well, first of all, it's probably out there. If somebody really wants it, they can find it."

If you're uncomfortable, and I appreciate that, it's very easy to set up an alternate email just for LinkedIn. You could do that through Google, Yahoo. Any number of platforms will give you a free email that you can create just for your LinkedIn account, and you can get a Google Voice number to pair with your cellphone. If you go to my profile, the number on there is my personal cellphone. I don't have any problem sharing that, and I think I can count on 1 hand how many times somebody has actually called me that I didn't know already.

If you want that extra layer of protection, just go to Google Voice, sign up for your phone number, and the best thing is you can get that number from any part of the country. If you are in Maryland and you want a California number, you want a Los Angeles number, you can pull that from the dropdown menu on Google Voice and it will give you a Los Angeles number. The nice thing is you could turn it on and off. You could do a customized greeting. Whenever anybody calls you, before you accept the call, it gives you an announcement of who it is calling and gives you the choice to accept the call or send it to voicemail, so that's one of the first things.

Robert Plank: That's pretty powerful stuff so far.

Mike Shelah: That's the first piece is make sure your profile is full and complete. Put in your volunteer experience. Put in your interests because interests act as keywords and can help people find you through a keyword search. In addition to ...

Robert Plank: I like that, and even, I'm looking at ... I'm on LinkedIn right now for the first time in a couple of years, and I'm looking at my profile, and there's like some pop-up where you can check off like, "Do you care about these certain causes?" like, "Do you care about animal welfare? Do you care about disaster relief?" That's cool because it seems like with LinkedIn like the more information, the more stuff that's indexed, the better because then, like you're saying, if you're making some new connection with someone for whatever reason ... Even if you haven't gone to the same school, even if you can't find any music, or sports, or location in common, then maybe you have the ... like education, or human rights, or politics in common. Like there's all these different things it seems now that they have listed where you can find something in common with someone.

Mike Shelah: Yeah. I'll share a quick story with you about that. About a year and a half ago, I was working with a director of IT for a transport company here in Maryland. They had the big armored trucks that take the money from the retail stores to the bank. One of those companies.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Mike Shelah: I got a call set up with the director of IT, and it's her and me, and I'm waiting for my manager and my sales engineer to join the call. While waiting, I said, "Mary, I just have to ask you. I looked at your LinkedIn profile and it says under interests that you play Guitar Hero." I said, "Tell me more about that." I said, "I'm a huge Guitar Hero fan," and we spent the next 20 minutes talking about Guitar Hero.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Mike Shelah: She had played it at work one day as a goof, and she loved it so much, she ended up buying it for her grandkids, and they have the guitars, and the drums, and they sing together. I said, "Oh, what's your favorite song?" She said, "Oh, I do Livin' on a Prayer by Bon Jovi," I never met her before, and we had that connection, and I ... gave me something to fuel the fire even though we had never met before. After the call, my manager says to me, "I was on the call for about 15 minutes, but I kept silent because I was listening to you engage the customer."

Robert Plank: That's cool.

Mike Shelah: Yeah. It's just another great little piece about LinkedIn. The other 2 things that people really want to be aware of and be proactive about is keywords. What I mean by that is you want to create your profile for the job that you want or the client you are seeking, and I'll give you a couple of examples of that. I worked with a lot of college students, and they will tell me, "Well, Mike, my degree is engineering, but I don't have any experience in engineering." I'm like, "You absolutely have experience in engineering. You have 4 years of school." He said, "But that's not real-life experience."

Here's the thing. You have the skills. You have the certifications. You have the accreditation. You were to put those terms throughout your profile. You want them in your summary section. You want them in your headline at the top of the page. You want them in your school experience. You want them all over your profile because that will move you up the link in search rankings, and it will move you ahead of the other people that want that job.

In addition to that, even though you don't have experience working as an engineer, you have plenty of valuable work experience. Most college students at one point or another worked in a restaurant. They either bus tables, or they're a waiter or a waitress, or they're a bartender, or they're a cook, and you want to talk about a high-pace environment with extreme pressure, and working as a team, and collaborating. It's some of the best experience in the world.

When you can convey that, when you could convey that you're promoted from just being a waiter to being a shift leader, that you were promoted from being a bartender to an assistant general manager, when you could show those leadership skills in your profile, companies want to hire that. They want to hire people that can think and can lead in addition to having the technical expertise to fill the specifics of the job.

Robert Plank: It sounds like there's all those little tidbits to look better than all of your other competitors trying to get that same job?

Mike Shelah: Yeah, the better job you do of completing that profile and putting your best foot forward. LinkedIn has search algorithms built in to it, and if somebody searches keywords ... For example, nobody searches for telecom salesperson. They don't do that. They look for the things that the telecom salesperson could sell them, and if you have those keywords in your profile enough, then you will move higher than the person whose profile says they're a telecom salesperson.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense.

Mike Shelah: Then, the last piece is the profile picture. The short version of this is, again, this is not Facebook. It should not be a picture of you with your spouse, you with your boyfriend or girlfriend, you with your kids, you leaning on a car, you drinking an alcoholic beverage, you at a party, you in a bathing suit. It shouldn't be any of those things. It should be a clear, up-close picture that shows you from about the shoulders up, and you should be in professional attire, and preferably, it should be taken by a professional. That's usually about a $100 to $120 investment.

For people that are on a budget, what I say is, "Find a wall with a neutral background that's well-lit. Have somebody take a fairly close-up picture." Don't make it a selfie. Do not do that. Have somebody else take the photo, and use that until you can get a professional to take your photo. If you're on a budget, there are a couple of ways to get your photo less expensively. Here in Maryland, the Baltimore Business Journal does an expo, a business expo twice a year, and once of the things that they offer is there's a vendor right by the front door that is set up there that does photos all day long, and they do them for roughly half price. They do them about $50 or $60. That's one way to get it less expensively.

Last year, LinkedIn actually had a tour bus that went around the country. I think it made 12 stops across the United States. The big ones, New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, Los Angeles. You could register ahead of time to get a free LinkedIn profile photo on the LinkedIn photo bus.

Robert Plank: That's awesome. Just think, once we figure out drone technology, you could just say, "Fly a drone over to me," and it will come, and hover over to you, and snap your picture, right?

Mike Shelah: There you go. Someday.

Robert Plank: Cool. I think that I'm starting to get LinkedIn. It seems to me like ... You keep saying that it's different than Facebook, and I think that just from what I'm hearing, it's like ... There's a lot of times when Facebook is inappropriate, and a lot of times when like you don't really know someone. Like you said, like there's the time when you talked to the woman about Guitar Hero, and it's like you're going in and trying to find a job. We're going in for a job interview like you're not going to go and add someone on Facebook. That's almost creepy, but it seems like with LinkedIn, it doesn't have the creepiness of Facebook or the ... Like you said, the party or the extra weirdness of Facebook that might turn people off or disqualify you, but it has all these little details, and things, and more like stories about you. Things that break the ice, I guess.

I really like everything you shared with us today, Mike. I really liked about the ABCs of LinkedIn, "Always Be Connecting," "Always Be Cultivating," "Always Be Customizing." I like how you told us to have a complete profile and put an email address in there. If you're afraid of sharing your email address, get a forwarder. If you're afraid of sharing your phone number, get a Google Voice number. Put some keywords in there for the job you want, and for different skills and things you have, and put a profile picture.

Even earlier in this call, I was ... As I said, I logged in to LinkedIn for a minute, and I noticed that there were a couple of people that I'd known from college like in the list, when I searched for like jobs or places that will be cool to work, and near the bottom, there were a couple of people who I knew but didn't have a profile picture. They filled out a couple of things, but no picture, so guess what? There were at the very bottom of the search results. Even them, like I didn't ... I wasn't compelled to even go and talk to them and say hi because I'm thinking, "Man, if they don't have a profile picture, they must not even be using this. If I send them a message, there's going to be no one there to even see it because they haven't even spent the 10 seconds to put a picture on there."

Mike Shelah: Yeah. There's a lot of truth to how human nature makes us perceive that sort of thing. We trust the face. You really ...

Robert Plank: Yeah, because ... Yeah. You're on a website, you're on a computer, and you see someone's profile without a face or a picture, it's just like, "Oh, it's a machine right there. It's a computer." You see the face, "Okay. Now, it's a real person." Man, I really like all the stuff you've been talking about us with LinkedIn, Mike, so could you tell us where people can find out more about you and get more of your LinkedIn training?

Mike Shelah: Absolutely. Thank you, Robert. I tell people I'm very "googleable." I'm very easy to find once you know how to spell my name, Mike Shelah, which is S-H-E-L-A-H. You could go to my website, which is mikeshelah.com. You will find me on LinkedIn naturally. You will find me on Twitter, @Mikeshelah. You'll find me on Instagram, @Mikeshelah. You'll find me on Facebook, Mike Shelah Consulting, and for your listeners today, 2 things. Anybody listening to the show can go to my website right now, mikeshelah.com, and they could sign up to get a free 3-page review of their profile where I customize it, I review their profile, and I give them my top 12 items for enhancing their profile as well as my 5 tips and tricks for really getting the most value out of LinkedIn. That's first. That's for anybody listening to the show.

In addition to that, I do one-on-one coaching sessions with people. I could do them in person or I could do via Skype, and those sessions are 90 minutes for $500. The first 3 people from your show that send me a connection request on LinkedIn and say, "Hey, Mike. I heard you on Robert Plank Show. I loved it. I want you to coach me," they get that first session half price for just $250.

Robert Plank: Awesome, so where can they go to get that, that specific offer?

Mike Shelah: They go to www.mikeshelah.com.

Robert Plank: Okay, and they can get to the coaching offer and all that from that page?

Mike Shelah: Yeah. All they have to do is when they connect with me on LinkedIn and say, "Mike, I heard you on Robert Plank Show," and they will get the 50% discount.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Cool. Lots of golden nuggets about LinkedIn, Mike, and thanks for being on the show and sharing everything you have to share with us.

Mike Shelah: Robert, thank you for having me on the show tonight. It's been a lot of fun.