Brian Basilico — May 3, 2019 — May 3, 2019
There was this movie that I remember from the year I graduated high school. I mean, there were a lot of movies that year, but this one kind of stuck out. Now, I’m not going to tell you the year (but you can go look it upon Wikipedia). The name of the movie is “10“.
Today, I want to talk about how to meet your perfect 10 on Linkedin using the 80/20 rule, which is also known as Pareto’s Principle. If you don’t know about Pareto’s Principle, you look that up on Wikipedia too. Actually, it’s pretty simple, but we’ll dig into it. So, 10 was a romantic comedy. It starred Dudley Moore and Bo Derek, and also had Julie Andrews in there. The reason that kind of resonated with me was because he was a songwriter, he was middle-aged, and he saw this girl in a car and basically fell in love with her and chased her all over the world and ended up in Mexico with her.
It’s a romantic comedy, and it’s kind of crazy. The core message in the movie is that he found out that his dream wasn’t necessarily as great in reality. When he had finally gotten to the point where he got with his 10, it wasn’t as good as he thought it was.
Dream vs Reality…
That’s kind of what I hear from gurus on LinkedIn. I hear them ask, “Are you killing it on LinkedIn?” There are tons of courses promising unlimited leads: “Try my unlimited lead system, my LinkedIn prospecting system.” But what they are selling is kind of a myth and hard. I want to talk about this a little bit differently because I don’t believe you should go into LinkedIn and connect up with everyone with the hopes of snagging a few sales. I think what you really need to focus on is your perfect 10.
Who’s In The Perfect 10?
Who is your perfect avatar? Your perfect avatar is the person who you absolutely love to do business with, and the person who absolutely loves to do business with you. Now, it’d be great to find one of those people. It’d be even better to find 10 of those people. But I have to tell you, there are probably 100 of those people with LinkedIn accounts. They may not all be perfect 10s, maybe some are nines or eights or sevens. The bottom line is a lot of those (so called) systems focus on hitting a mass audience and trying to draw in the right people, which, in theory makes sense. But here’s the thing: if you really understand who is a great fit for you and your business, and you could connect with 100 of them on LinkedIn, the chances are at least 10 to 20 of those people would at least be good potential power partners in working with you. Let’s talk through that math.
The Pareto Principle is also known as the 80/20 rule. What it basically means is for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. So if you interpolate that, it means that 80% of the benefit comes from 20% of the people that you connect with. So, are you willing to connect with 100 people to let 80% of them kind of wallow? The right answer here is, if you could have 10 perfect 10s out of 20% of 100 people, then yeah, I’d do it. I don’t know about you. Using this math will help you increase your odds of success. So let’s break that down a little bit further.
What’s a QUALITY Connection?
First, we need to start by defining what is a quality connection is to you. A quality connection is somebody who has relevance to you and your business, but they don’t always necessarily have to be a direct sales opportunity. That’s where I find a lot of the other systems flounder, and frankly fail. Just connecting with all of these people that fit a broad criteria doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to buy from you or they’re going to be perfect 10s. They may be transactional, which means that you may have to fight on price, or they could be tire kickers, and often, they are just waste your time.
A 1 In 10 Chance Beats 100% of 0
What you really want to do is find 100 people that could relate to you and your business, and narrow it down to your perfect 10. Some of those quality connections could be influencers, they could be vendors etc., while others could really be ideal referral sources, meaning people that they might refer other people to you. That leaves the last group of perfect potential customers. So, should you only focus on people that are going to buy from you, or are there other opportunities that you may be missing by skipping influencers or vendors or referral sources? I am telling you that you should pay attention all of them.
Start With the Great 100
So, if you connect with 100 quality people, you will find not all of them will be active and responsive. I have found this to be the reality of LinkedIn, both for myself and others I’ve taught how to effectively use LinkedIn. Here’s how it works:
First and foremost, connect with that great 100 people. Out of those 100 people, about 50% of those people will be completely inactive. That means you can send them a message, but they probably won’t respond. They could be perfect, but they’re just not engaged on LinkedIn. They may not using it the way that you hope for. The next 30% of people may actually watch, read your profile, pay attention, or even see what you post. But maybe they’re not really ready to engage. They’re not ready to reach out to you and say, “Hey, I want to buy what you have to sell,” or, “I want to refer people to you,” or any business producing interaction. Let’s call them Looky Lous!
So with that, 50% of the people aren’t going to pay attention, 30% of the people are going to be watching, maybe engaging, but not ready. So that leaves us with 20% and that’s the Pareto’s Principle 80/20 rule.
That Special 20%
So from that remaining 20% think about it this way: What if 10% of those people could be good referral sources, maybe people you could refer business to and maybe people that can refer business to you? Treat them as if they’re a resource and not as a sales opportunity. Then the last 10% could be some of the people that potentially are going to buy from you, but they have to be in that perfect 10 range YET, right? They have make need a little relationship building to be transformed into that optimal person, that perfect Avatar.
So if you break it down: 50% are probably not going to pay attention. 30% are going to kind of wallow and watch. 10% will maybe refer or at least maybe share some of your stuff to their audience where you could potentially get in front of the right people and 10% would eventually maybe purchase from you.
Final Thoughts
Now, let me ask you this question. What could 10 new clients do for your business today? What could it do in the next month? What could it do in the next year? Now, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t extrapolate. Just because you connect with a thousand people doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get 100 good clients out of it. What it boils down to is you have to start focusing on creating quality connections and quality relationships with people that can help you become more consistent in your business. With that being said, it’s a very realistic path to success on LinkedIn.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?
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