Alex Pirouz’s entrepreneurial journey started at the age of 13 when he got involved in a school charity fundraiser selling chocolate door-to-door. He had always been a good communicator and he enjoyed working with people to accomplish a goal. After quitting school halfway through his eleventh year, he went on to launch businesses in the property, health, publishing, and advertising industries with no real success.
Hitting rock bottom at the age of 26 and having less than $1,500 to his name, he decided to give it one last roll of the dice partnering with a friend to launch a door-to-door sales company in Wollongong. Over the space of 18 months, he managed to scale the business into a seven-figure company employing over 45 staff.
After successfully exiting that business he went on to launch and exit another business in the automotive industry before moving back to Sydney to start his own advisory firm. Using LinkedIn selling to grow that business, he saw a need for LinkedIn marketing services with other growing businesses, and so he launched his eighth company, linkfluencer.
Motivation is key
Pirouz was originally driven by money. To this day, he believes this was the reason he failed in his first four businesses – he was only chasing monetary success. He worked with a mentor who taught him to instead pivot his focus to two things – impact and legacy. As soon as Alex made that change in his thinking, he became much more successful.
His end goal is to create community housing around the world that will get kids off the street and into good homes. This includes not only a roof over their heads but also educating them and introducing them into the workforce. This is the impact he wants, and in order to materialize this goal, he needs concrete results. He is motivated to get these results by the thought of the positive impact he could have on the world.
Discovering the power of LinkedIn Selling
LinkedIn selling and marketing became Pirouz’s passion project. His seventh business was an advisory firm, which he grew entirely through LinkedIn’s platform. Pretty soon at his seminars, people were asking more questions about how he managed to fill the room via LinkedIn rather than about the topic of the seminar. That’s when he realized there was an opportunity in that space.
He sat back and took a look at all the campaigns he’d been running on LinkedIn and noticed that there was a similar process behind each one that was leading to its success. That’s how he got the idea for linkfluencer.
Over the course of the next few years, Pirouz discovered that while customers saw how useful LinkedIn selling was for growing a business, they couldn’t manage it themselves. Keeping track of all the conversations, contacts, and content was unwieldy at best and nightmarish at worst. Scaling conversations and lead generation required a more software-orientated approach. This inspired Pirouz to create Jayla, which simplifies lead management for anyone on LinkedIn, at a price point that is affordable.
Common pitfalls on LinkedIn
The biggest problem Pirouz sees with people on the platform is that they don’t have a consistent strategy. They are sporadic with the conversations they have and end up wasting time without a proper step-by-step process to follow.
Jayla can help customers by keeping track of potential opportunities and reminding people when follow ups are necessary. The process looks like this:
- A customer marks someone as a potential opportunity in Jayla
- They supply a date for when they want to follow up with that opportunity
- Jayla sends the customer an email with a list of opportunities that require follow ups.
Building a good strategy for LinkedIn Selling
One of the problems with LinkedIn is many people don’t know what the outcome is that they’re looking for when leveraging the platform.
Lay the Foundations
Have a clear concept in mind for what it looks like when your LinkedIn selling strategy has succeeded. If there is a certain sales target, use that.
Create a Profile
Who is the customer that will be most interested in your product, and will they provide the path of least resistance to getting your target met? Create a profile that you will use to find ideal candidates on LinkedIn.
Get Your Targeting Right
This part is crucial. Create a profile and message that will be the most compelling to your target audience. Use that to reach out to potential customers.
Implement
Have actual conversations that will lead to sales. Software like Jayla can help scale this step to make it much easier to maximize sales opportunities.
How small to medium business can use Jayla
The first step is to go through the online program to get your strategy locked down. Then you will have to implement that process, and when opportunities open up, keep track of them.
Jayla’s features allow you to find someone on LinkedIn who matches your profile and add them as an opportunity. You can include information such as the likelihood that the deal will close, the stage the customer is in, and more. You can also include a date for follow up. Then, on the Jayla homepage, you can see, in chronological order, all the leads you need to follow up with.
With everything included in Jayla, you don’t need to buy another CRM or have spreadsheets to keep track of all of your LinkedIn contacts. Jayla also has a reporting functionality, which tells you how many invites you’ve sent, how many people have accepted, and so on. This allows you to perform analytics on the quality of your customer profile, conversations, leads closed, and the time you spend on LinkedIn.
You can also filter opportunities by location and deal price to prioritize who to meet and when. With all these features put together, it is a powerful platform to expand your market share.
These tips will help anyone keep clients longer and grow their business using LinkedIn selling.