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December 2016 • The PCB Magazine 55 CATCHING UP WITH LINKEDIN EXPERT BRUCE JOHNSTON dIn to find prospects in St. Louis that the rep who had worked in St. Louis for five years didn't know were there. I do this all the time because the bottom line is, LinkedIn's database is bet- ter than yours. When someone leaves a com- pany and goes somewhere else, they change their LinkedIn profile to reflect the change. Your email list doesn't do that. I like to say that LinkedIn is a database that updates itself. That's a powerful concept. Then, once you find a prospect, you have a decision to make. So the second aspect is teach- ing clients how to decide the best way to ap- proach a prospect. Often this is via LinkedIn, but there are several ways to approach someone on LinkedIn. Sometimes, using LinkedIn is not the best way to go. I teach my clients how to make the right decisions and come up with the best way to approach a prospect that will result in the highest probability of the prospect re- sponding. Third, I coach my clients on how to write LinkedIn messages that prospects will reply to. This is the area that most companies ignore and it hurts them. They use LinkedIn, find the right person and they just cold call them and that's that. They get a couple of percent response rate. And if they had used LinkedIn they could be getting two, three or four times as many leads. Beaulieu: Do you offer coaching for other social media outlets? Johnston: I also work with companies on Face- book, Twitter, YouTube, Google Plus and blogging. Blogging is becoming critical these days. So many companies resist writ- ing content for their prospects and customers and they could make such huge gains that it's a shame they feel that way. I will advise and help clients with all of those. Beaulieu: You mentioned that you offer personal coaching as well as webinars. Please talk about that. Johnston: I use screen sharing or webinar style software over the web. I have found two big advantages to this: Clients don't have to cover my travel costs, and the client's team can log in from anywhere. If the client has people all over the country, great; just pick a time they can all log in and away we go. I have never met over 90% of my clients face to face. Welcome to a new age. Beaulieu: What makes your company unique and outstanding? Johnston: My depth of experience in sales. I have more than 30 years in sales. I have experi- ence selling in recessionary times. I know what it's like to be a manufacturer's rep, a direct rep and a distributor. I know what it is like to work for a $10 million company when your main competitor is Hewlett-Packard. I have been there and done that. Beaulieu: LinkedIn guru Andy O'Hearn recently selected you for his top 100 LinkedIn Thought Leaders list. How did that come about? Johnston: Curiosity mostly. I don't accept things at face value. I look at LinkedIn features and the first thing I want to do is turn them on their head and use them in a different way to my advantage. And I'm also suspicious of the party line. If everyone says you should be doing A, then I want to start investigating B. So while other people are concerned with 20 key points on how your LinkedIn profile should look, I am figuring out how to send mes- sages to prospects via some little known (but free) method. Beaulieu: Tell me how you can help a company. What is the pro- cess? Johnston: There are two main paths. Starting from no expe- rience with social media or LinkedIn is the first one. In that case, I instill the basics, but at the same time, instill basics that lead to immedi-