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Ben Kniffen is president and COO of LinkedSelling and President of The Elite Digital Group. As co-founder of LinkedSelling, Ben works to help clients increase sales & improve their marketing efforts through LinkedIn marketing tactics, media creation and other online marketing strategies. He oversees the day to day operations of the company which has grown from a team of two to over 50 team members.
Takeaway Quote:
“People don’t want to interact with a brand or a logo – they want to do business with a person they know, like, and trust.”
Show Timeline:
2:06 An introduction to LinkedSelling
4:39 Thoughts on how to differentiate yourself from the competition
8:21 The power of marketing via online communities
12:10 The process of building a prospect profile
19:15 Positioning a strong online profile of your own
25:48 How to maintain and nurture prospective relationships
30:31 Incorporation of paid social marketing in prospecting, and the long game strategy
35:04 The first steps you can take to take action on these ideas
Links:
Website: https://linkedselling.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LinkedSelling/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/benkniffen
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benkniffen/
Want more?
Stephen Wershing: www.TheClientDrivenPractice.com/checklistblog
Julie Littlechild: www.absoluteengagement.com/blog
Episode Transcript:
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. We hear a lot about social media, the opportunities for it, and you probably have a website and a LinkedIn profile of your own. But how exactly do you leverage those digital platforms to actually get to meet real live ideal prospective clients?
In this episode, we talk with Ben Kniffen who is president and COO of LinkedSelling and president of The Elite Digital Group, and we talk about how to leverage those platforms, specifically LinkedIn, to attract more folks, to establish relationships with people and eventually to convert them, over time, into ideal clients. We start with the basics of how to optimize your LinkedIn profile, we talk a little about paid social and how you can promote yourself affirmatively on those platforms, all the way to establishing LinkedIn groups, even transitioning from the virtual groups to face-to-face events where you get to bump into those ideal prospects in person.
Listen through to the end, where we talk about how to play the long game of marketing and what you can expect to get in terms of return on those investments and how fast you can expect to see it. There are a lot of really good actionable ideas in this episode. We think that you will get a lot out of it. So, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Ben Kniffen. Ben Kniffen, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. Welcome.
Ben Kniffen:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m actually really excited to be here and hopefully… I happen to know a couple of directions this conversation will go, but hopefully I can give some information and some knowledge to your group and community that’ll benefit and helping them grow their business and just generate more business for them as a whole.
Steve Wershing:
Well, we will do our best to surprise and disorient you through the conversation. But before we go… before we do that, why don’t we… You run a business that helps your clients, folks like financial advisors, build their businesses through LinkedIn. Can you give us some background on that? Tell us a little bit about what your business is about?
Ben Kniffen:
For sure. Yeah. So what’s interesting is you’ll commonly… If you hear me speak either live or other podcasts, you might’ve heard me say this before, but we get branded as LinkedIn experts a lot because it’s a powerful tool that we use, but it’s really just that, it’s a tool. And so in the same vein, I always say you wouldn’t call a carpenter a hammer expert, you call him a carpenter. But he is a hammer expert, and so really what we are is… typically we’re known as either B2B lead gen specialists or just lead generation specialists in general, is that our business, our focus is generating leads for our clients, helping them… Especially if you have a high ticket type of sale.
We don’t typically work with clients who are trying to sell $50 widgets, unless they’re trying to sell a million of them at a time per se. And the way that we started that business is just myself and my partner in crime, Josh Turner, who you may have heard speak in a number of different arenas. Just both of us had histories using LinkedIn to generate leads and also, both of us had histories with our family being involved in real estate and construction services during the 2008 crash. And so we both were involved in businesses that were close to us that just got really affected and couldn’t keep their doors open because they didn’t have enough leads, essentially.
And so just through some of our own individual backgrounds… Josh and I have been friends for, oh my gosh, over 20 years now. And we started a number of businesses together, but this one grew out of the fact that we just saw a need that a lot of small businesses out there don’t know how to market themselves. They don’t know how to generate leads, they don’t know how to increase sales, and they need help with that. They’re experts at the thing they specialize in doing, but when you really start growing a small business, you realize pretty quick, not only do you need to be good at the thing that you do, you need to be good at generating leads and getting yourself to additional sales opportunities to be able to really grow and survive.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah. So now, from what I understand about your process, and let’s hear it in your words, but I know a lot of it is based on really promoting expertise and becoming that definitive resource in a particular field. Can you talk to us a little bit about that strategy and maybe how that applies in financial services?
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