642: LinkedIn Strategies that Double Lead Generation | Geoff Chaney

Are you looking to boost your lead generation efforts on LinkedIn?

In this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast, we are excited to introduce Geoffrey Chaney, a professional with over 13 years of experience in SAAS technology.

Currently a partner at Relentless Venture Studio, Geoff’s expertise has played a crucial role in multiple private-sector M&A transactions. He previously achieved remarkable success by overseeing licensee training and business development for SMS Masterminds, resulting in an Inc. 5000 award and a significant merger.

Today, he leads CASTANET, a LinkedIn lead generation platform, and is renowned for his commitment to creating value, delivering exceptional results, and cultivating enduring relationships with clients and partners.

Tune in for an insightful discussion on SAAS, automation, and relationship-building with Geoff Chaney.

Conquer Local is presented by Vendasta. We have proudly served 5.5+ million local businesses through 60,000+ channel partners. Learn more about Vendasta and we can help your organization or learn more about Vendasta’s Affiliate Program and how our listeners (like yourself) are making up to $10,000 off referrals.

Are you an entrepreneur, salesperson, or marketer? Keep the learning going in the Conquer Local Academy.

LinkedIn Strategies that Double Lead Generation

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast! Our show features successful sales leaders, marketers, thought leaders, and entrepreneurs who will inspire you with their success stories. Each episode is packed with practical strategies, as our guests share their secrets to achieving their dreams. Don’t forget to check out and subscribe to our YouTube channel for the video version of each episode, where you can see our guests in action. Tune in to learn the highlights of their remarkable accomplishments and get tips to revamp, rework, and reimagine your business. Whether you’re a  small business owner, marketer, or aspiring entrepreneur, the Conquer Local Podcast is your ultimate guide to dominating your local market. Tune in now to take your business to the next level!

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Geoffrey Chaney

Geoff has over 13 years of experience in SAAS technology and is a partner at Relentless Venture Studio, which has led to multiple private-sector M&A transactions. Prior to Relentless, Geoff oversaw licensee training and business development for an international loyalty and mobile marketing platform called SMS Masterminds. After joining, the company went on to achieve an Inc. 5000 award in the first year qualifying, and later merged with a publicly traded enterprise. 

Today, Geoff oversees CASTANET, a LinkedIn lead generation platform and is passionate about creating value, delivering results, and building lasting relationships with his clients and partners. 

Get ready Conquerors for Geoff Chaney coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

CASTANET Automates LinkedIn Outreach for Efficient B2B Networking. 

Jeff Tomlin: We are joined today by Geoff Chaney of CASTANET. Hey, welcome to the podcast. How you doing, Geoff?

Geoff Chaney: Hey, thank you. Thank you, Jeff, appreciate it, glad to be here.

Jeff Tomlin: Hey, well, it’s great to have you. Thanks for taking some time out of your busy day to join us on the Conquer Local Podcast. I was really looking forward to this conversation. Over at CASTANET you guys do a lot of cool things, and one of them, you do some really interesting things with LinkedIn Outreach, and so I wonder if you could kick off by talking a little bit about your secret sauce, and how you guys are approaching that?

Geoff Chaney: Yeah, I’d be happy to. We are first and foremost an agency first model, and so we’re really designed to work with agencies as a tool, as a service, that they can provide to their clients on a variety of different levels, but at its core, LinkedIn is an incredibly powerful social media network with about 950 million B2B professionals who are looking to network with one another. And CASTANET just makes it a little bit easier for the average user, for the average sales rep, or an individual professional who’s looking to engage with a specific audience on LinkedIn. So we are at its core, we’re an efficiency tool. We take all the things that you would have to do in order to get an authentic conversation started on LinkedIn, and we automate as many of those repetitive actions making it so that you as the human, you’re involved in the real conversation once that gets started while the machine is doing all the work of the repetitive behaviors you would have to do to get that conversation started.

LinkedIn is an Underutilized Platform for Business Professionals and Sales. 

Jeff Tomlin: Very cool, like, channel is super, super important and LinkedIn is such an important channel for people to really master because you can target people and business professionals unlike any other platform. And so I’m sure that your clients see exponential gains when they can really leverage the power behind LinkedIn and the audiences that they have.

Geoff Chaney: Yeah, and I hear more often than anything else how underutilized LinkedIn is for the average person. When they hear about CASTANET and what we can do, they come to us and kind of go, man, I’ve always wondered how I could better engage on LinkedIn. It’s just one of the social media platforms that a lot of people overlook, or they only do the bare minimum on it, but the power is there, the potential is there. I mean, it’s probably of all the social media platforms, it’s the one that is most geared up for sales and business development purposes. Whereas, Facebook and Instagram, that’s more about creating a following and getting content out there and selling very lightly, but LinkedIn is a place to do business and we’ve got a whole lot of people there who wanna do business. So we’re just trying to make it a little bit easier.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, you guys have an interesting model over at CASTANET and strategic partnerships are really important to you guys. Maybe talk a little bit about how your background startup M&A influenced your strategy over at CASTANET.

Geoff Chaney: Sure, sure. Well, it’s for me, I mean, I’ve been in technology for 13 years, and most all of that kind of revolved around the S&B mainstreet, you know, serving the underserved. That was always a passion of mine, finding ways to take technology that enterprise type organizations already had and make it a little bit easier for the average person to use that same technology. And the path into market with any one of the companies I’ve run, I’ve always leveraged partnerships like Vendasta because you have the people that we want to work with, and I’m not just talking about affiliate type partnerships, those are completely different things, but an actual partnership of integration and where we have each other’s best interests. Those are some of the things that we look for with every one of our SaaS technology platforms we’ve run over the years. And it’s really been a cornerstone to how we go to market, how we do business and we invest very heavily, very aggressively in nurturing these partnerships to make sure they’re getting everything they deserve on both sides.

Partnerships and Integrations are Crucial for Successful Customer Acquisition. 

Jeff Tomlin: You know, I think a lot of companies take for granted partnerships approach. Things like partnerships, community, and their whole sphere of influence, because when you do a really good job of that, it does miracles for your ultimate customer acquisition costs when you’ve got sort of this network of partnerships that are helping pull business in. I don’t know if you agree with me or not, but I think what really makes or breaks a lot of companies is their ability to control the costs around acquiring new business. It really gives you an unfair competitive advantage when you’ve got sort of this moat of partnerships surrounding your business.

Geoff Chaney: Well, it’s all about finding organizations where you complement each other, right? Where your product coupled with theirs, one plus one equals three when you put them together. And that’s what I look for is ways that we don’t just make sense. It’s like unlocking the key when you put these two tools together. Those are the types of partnerships we look for, but they are oftentimes under invested in. And I think that’s where partnerships really go sideways for a lot of organizations is that they’re kind of a byproduct, not really invested in. It’s there, but we’re not working it on one side or the other. So we focus on partnerships that are mutually beneficial, where everybody’s gonna win, and we try to make sure that that’s a key element of the sales channel and that we’re really putting all the energy into it we need to.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, speaking of sales channel maybe talk a little bit about some of the emerging trends. God, in this space, it is so hard to keep up on all of the changes, and so I always like to ask the guests to talk a little bit about emerging trends what they’re seeing. And so particularly when it comes to, like, automated sales processes, what are you guys seeing that’s coming out new that people gotta get on top of and what impact it’s gonna have?

Geoff Chaney: Well, I think the first thing everybody’s gonna think I’m gonna say is AI, which is a big, big trend in the industry and automation, but let’s just push that aside for a second because I really just want to focus on the importance of integrations, and making sure that all of your tools, all of your systems are talking to one another, and you’re building a process that removes the human element and the potential for human error and streamlines everything. So we’ve designed CASTANET to integrate with just about any CRM tool, for example, because we wanna make it so that as you’re engaging with prospects, as you’re getting authentic conversations started, you can automatically transfer that lead into your CRM workflow and nurture it outside of the LinkedIn environment. That’s critically important. I think that’s where you see a lot of companies opening up their willingness to connect with third party and to bring in third party platforms so that you can seamlessly manage the lifecycle of your customer acquisition.

LinkedIn Strategy: Personalized Outreach and Partnership Building for Results. 

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, by the way, how are you keeping up on all of the trends, and the changes in the software space, the tools that are out there, how people are sort of approaching integrations, new approaches to doing things like with the AI, how do you carve out time to keep on top of all of those things so that you guys are always out in the forefront?

Geoff Chaney: Well, it’s funny because I have to put my blinders on to a certain degree because there’s just so much and there’s no end to creative things you can do. And I think that’s one of the risks of being in business is that it’s easy to kind of constantly be running after the next shiny thing. And what we try to do is really focus on our partner needs and we let our partners and our clients help us better understand where their needs are evolving and how they’re evolving and looking into solutions that solve those problems proactively. That’s a big part of what we do.

Jeff Tomlin: So I’m curious, maybe give me some colour about how you’re approaching the LinkedIn strategy? I always find, like, practical examples. I don’t know if you’ve got a customer story in your back pocket that you can share that sort of demonstrates, but how you approached LinkedIn, how you guys sort of implemented the strategy, what impact it had, just to sort of draw out a mental map for people that are listening along of how you get the most out of the LinkedIn strategy?

Geoff Chaney: Sure, well, there’s several different strategies or there’s several different paths that you can take with LinkedIn. You can be a content marketer, produce content, push it out there, build your following, and kind of organically engage with people in that environment, which I’d strongly encourage anybody to. We focus on the one-to-one really isolating hyper concentrated list of ideal prospects using the LinkedIn filters that they provide. And once we get that list of prospects as concentrated as possible, our goal is to get you connected with them automatically and then engage with them in a way that is compelling and interesting in a way that they would be most likely to respond and then notify you as soon as a response is detected. Now, when you apply that strategy across a variety of different verticals, and industries and use cases, the way in which you might actually do that could be very, very different one to the other. And oftentimes the strategy with LinkedIn is not the most obvious one. I think that’s why people really struggle with LinkedIn and understanding how to best leverage it because as much as I hate to say this, we’re very selfish creatures. We kind of go into everything thinking, I want more sales. And when you put it in that framework, sometimes you can have those blinders on and neglect the nurturing and the relationship building and the authentic one-to-one human element that is so important in the LinkedIn community. I feel like I’m practically contradicting myself because I’m an automation tool talking about human, but that is where it really comes together. When you apply automations, you have to be as genuine and authentic and human-like as possible and step in and take over that conversation as soon as you can. You really don’t wanna let AI or automations continue to run their course when someone’s ready to talk. You gotta be ready to step in. One good example that I’ll share with you. I had an agency partner come to me and say, Geoff, I have a client. He’s a chiropractor and he wants more patients. It’s obvious in LinkedIn. And I thought, well, the most obvious is you could go out there and ask everybody whose back is hurting. That’s one way you could do it, but the results are gonna be dismal. Even though you can isolate a group of people in a geo-targeted area and say, okay, show me anybody who’s an executive level in the city of San Luis Obispo, California. There’s the list, but you don’t know if there’s a need. You don’t know if there’s an interest in your product or service. So to just hold outreach on LinkedIn oftentimes falls on deaf ears. So the unusual path that we helped him achieve, we got him the patients he was looking for, but the path to get there was very different. We actually reached out to gyms, personal trainers, yogis, anyone who works one-on-one with patients that may suffer an injury or have back pain, or need the services of a chiropractor. And we actually focused on a partnership play. So, again, bringing back the partnership strategy, we helped him partner with organizations and individuals around his community who could refer business to him. And what made it even more unique was digging in with the client and really kind of understanding what is your value proposition? Why would somebody send you their client? He said, well, one of the things that I have that nobody else has in the whole city is this unique imaging system and it’s mobile. We can go on site and I can do an X-ray of their entire body and identify the exact point of pain while in motion. It’s a very unique system, and he goes, it’s a cash cow. And every minute that it’s sitting in my parking lot, it’s costing me money. So I wanna be doing as many of those. I said, yes, you can, you’ve got a great tool, you’ve got a great value proposition here. Let’s get you partnered with doctor’s offices and all these other facilities around the community that could be referring you patients one after another. Then your chiropractic services become your upsell. Now that you’ve got the relationship and you’ve served them once, build upon that and nurture that relationship. So that was a really good example of a use case that we did for an unlikely candidate on LinkedIn, ended up generating tremendous results.LinkedIn strategy: focused, personalized outreach and partnership building for results. 

Leveraging LinkedIn to Nurture Existing Relationships and Generate Leads. 

Jeff Tomlin: And that’s not totally different from the basic inbound philosophy of creating some value before you actually ask for the business.

Geoff Chaney: Right.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, you know, you step into a partnership and you’re thinking about the value first to the end person makes a really easy conversation for creating a partnership with them.

Geoff Chaney: You treat one of their patients well, they’re gonna send you another one. I mean, and at the end of the day that’s really what it comes down to.

Jeff Tomlin: Very, very cool. You know, there’s a phrase always bounces around in my head, what have you done for me lately? And finding new customers is one thing, but it’s infinitely more cost-effective to keep the ones that you have and keep them happy. And so maybe just some thoughts on how you guys sort of approach creating longlasting relationships with customers in the long term so that you’re not prematurely throwing away the dollars that you spent on acquiring those customers in the first place. How do you create longlasting?

Geoff Chaney: Sure.

Jeff Tomlin: Or how do you guys think about how a business should go about creating longlasting relationships?

Geoff Chaney: Well, let’s put it in the context of LinkedIn, right? So if this whole conversation is really about how do you leverage LinkedIn to nurture the relationships you already have, I think that is probably one of the most under leveraged and kind of underserved aspects of LinkedIn is most people are so shortsighted. They’re always thinking about the next lead, the next lead, the next lead. And they forget about the 4,600 people in their network that they’ve connected with and they haven’t done anything with to engage or reengage in the last, who knows, could be years, but one of the things that I recommend is to go through, if you have an existing network, you can go on LinkedIn and go to the search function and filter by your first-degree contacts. Your first-degree contacts are the people you’re already connected with. And then you can filter that by industry and by title, or role or geography. So if you sell in the U.S. you could filter by United States. Then you could add title owner and now there you go. You’ve got a list of people who are already connected with you in the United States who are owners. And, you know, what do you have to say to them? What do you wanna follow up with? Do you have a newsletter you could subscribe into, or offer them to subscribe to? Or is there a new initiative that you launched in the last six months that they may not know about? Is there a new video or resource, a download or white paper that you could share? These are the things that you can do and you can automate with CASTANET. We could set that up so that CASTANET is doing a once a month drip on all of your existing network to just keep them in front of you, to keep your brand. Realtors love this. This is one of the things that realtors really like about our platform. Not everybody’s ready to buy or sell a home, but as a realtor you wanna connect with all the people who are executives and higher earners in your community. And you just wanna have that touchpoint every once in a while. Talk to them about what’s happening in the market as things are changing. You can build that out so that all of that is automated and running on your behalf and you’re going to get a lot of engagement with your first-degree network. Those people are gonna respond, hey, thanks so much, appreciate it, or hey, I’ve got a sister-in-law who’s looking to sell her house. Can I pass it along to you? Those things happen all day long.

Automation is Important, but Human Interaction is Crucial for Success. 

Jeff Tomlin: Share your knowledge, share your expertise, it’ll come back to you tenfold. Love the idea of making time for that. And I for one I’m guilty of not doing it enough and my role is in marketing obviously, so. And by the way, I find a lot of people spend a lot of time creating content and content pieces and they do not enough in proportion to actually promote that. And so I think taking the time to work with your network and share your expertise and provide value, a great way to create and keep relationships going. You know, a couple of takeaways you have for the audience that you would want them to have top of mind?

Geoff Chaney: A few takeaways. So I think the main takeaway is automation will change the way you do business, but it won’t replace the human experience. The most successful companies out there are the ones who are embracing automations and embracing integrations and leveraging tools to increase efficiencies within their organization, but they’re not neglecting that your client, their client, still wants to talk to a human being. And that’s where you gotta find that balance. And I think that’s what you can do with CASTANET, what you can do on LinkedIn. You can also do it wrong and you will drive people away if you’re doing too much automation and not enough human. So that’s what I would encourage people to do is be human, be authentic. Leverage technology to automate the repetitive behaviors that you would have to do in order to get that conversation started, but then step in from there. It’s kind of the 80-20 rule. You got a thousand prospects, someone’s gotta reach out to ’em five, six, seven times before they eventually respond to you. And you’re probably only gonna talk to about 20% of that thousand. So let the tool do all the heavy lifting so that you can focus on the people that are ready to talk. I think that’s really key.

Connect with Geoff Chaney on LinkedIn or www.gocastanet.com 

Jeff Tomlin: Words of wisdom from Geoff Chaney. The company is called CASTANET. Thanks for taking some of your very valuable time to spend us with us here in the “Conquer Local Podcast.” And come back and join us again in the future. Love to have you back.

Geoff Chaney: Thanks Jeff. I appreciate the opportunity. This has been fun.

Jeff Tomlin: Last word, Geoff, if someone wanted to reach out to you and continue the conversation, how do they reach you?

Geoff Chaney: They can look me up on LinkedIn and you could also find us at www.gocastanet.com for our main site. Check out a demo, book a meeting, whatever you need.

Jeff Tomlin: And with that, sir, I bid you a fantastic week. Thanks much.

Geoff Chaney: Thank you.. 

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: There you have it – Geoff Chaney from Castanet with some clues on how to leverage LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s network of close to 950 million professionals now. And you definitely should not be ignoring it.  Castanet really is a great tool to help initiate authentic conversations. As a CMO, I’m always looking for new tools that fit into our stack that help us increase lead flow, or lower lead cost or increase lead quality.

A key takeaway from our conversation is that while automation and AI are important trends in the industry, it’s crucial not to neglect the human element in business interactions. Successful companies leverage tools like Castanet for automation but Geoff emphasizes the importance of stepping in and maintaining authenticity during conversations to build long-lasting relationships. It’s always easier and more cost-effective to maintain and grow the relationships than to have to create new ones.

If you’ve enjoyed Geoffrey Chaney’s episode discussing LinkedIn Lead Generation Check out Episode 628: How to Craft Successful Cold Emails with Frank Sondors, or Episode 627: Driving Business Growth through Effective SEO Strategies with Nic Padilla

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!