An interview with Jack

Tell us a little bit about your work and your role. 

My role is purely based around spending time with Existing & New Onboarding clients. The thing I love the most is creating a LinkedIn campaign that builds a pipeline and brings an ROI in the form of new clients into my customers business. Frank (my brother and co-founder) and I used LinkedIn for the past 5 years to grow our own business and between us have active campaigns amongst most industries in the UK & Ireland.

What does your work with a client usually involve?

Regular contact. I’m a people’s person, and I love what I do. I cannot help but stay in regular contact with my clients and ensure they always have everything they need from me to ensure the success of their campaign. Our customer base is mainly built of long-term relationships.

I have to be there to advise a client on where I think their campaign would be best placed within LinkedIn and how we can get the most out of it.

How did you get into this field of work? 

5 years ago I made the jump and quit my job. Sat in my parents garden Summer House, I was left to work out how to gain new clients, fast. So I picked up my mobile phone and started connecting and messaging people on LinkedIn that fit my “ideal customer” description. I began closing new business…… My brother started his own separate company around the same time and popped his head round the Summer House door one day to find out how I was gaining customers.

Frank is the technical brain behind everything we do. He took my small concept on my mobile phone and turned it into a larger deployment. All of a sudden, both our businesses were growing at a similar rate, yet we were targeting different industries, with different messages. We got our heads together, realised we were missing a trick, left our old models behind and went into business together to begin delivering LinkedIn Lead generation campaigns to the outside world!

What excites you about your role?

Being able to show businesses that there is a different route to market. Some clients are sceptical when they first join us because we are marketing in a way that they’ve never thought of before. The feeling of seeing those clients turn into long standing happy customers is next to none!

What does your ideal client look like?

Anyone that wants to create a pipeline and generate new business.

What have your highlights been so far?

• Using this technique successfully on Ed, which generated this relationship we have today!

• Having built the available budget to hire a sales team! Until I went out on my own I’d always been part of a sales team, or when we first started I was the sales team. To now have a team to manage who are as passionate as I am about LinkedIn Lead Generation is brilliant!

• Launching Ireland and USA.

• Landing our first Corporate client!

What are the challenges currently facing your sector?

Patience. Patience can be key with a LinkedIn campaign. I’ll never forget a client who had built a fantastic pipeline with us across the first 3 months, but hadn’t closed anything so cancelled the service! 3 months later he called me back to rejoin as he had closed a deal that paid for us for the next 10 years! Patience can be key with a LinkedIn campaign as they require regular tweaking.

Do you find companies try to do this area of work themselves - and get stuck? What are the common issues?

To be successful on LinkedIn, you must do the high levels of activity every day Saturday to Thursday WITHOUT fail. Back to back meetings cannot stop you from your activity, otherwise the campaign will not work.

Some of our clients have tried to do this themselves, but admit that their daily working life gets in the way of ensuring they keep the activity levels to where they need to be to be able to get what they need out of it – New clients.

Other clients try to automate LinkedIn. We are completely manual, nothing but elbow grease….. Some clients have been caught automating by LinkedIn and have had their profiles banned or restricted as it is against their terms of service.

Should a busy entrepreneur prioritise this area of work? How can they make time for it with everything else on their plate?

They have to. A business always needs to have a healthy, growing pipeline that is delivering new clients.

If they tried to make time to do it themselves, they’ll never do it. Use us, never look back….

What's the best advice you've been given?

It may be a cliché, but my father always taught me that you have 2 ears and one mouth. Listen.

How do you see your work changing over the next ten years?

We are forever evolving. We started providing LinkedIn Connecting and messaging campaigns, now we have a content posting solution too.

We are already building for future years as we believe LinkedIn will become the front of a sales process, so we want to integrate SMS, email, calls etc all into one package.

What do you do when you're not at work?

My wife and I spend a lot of time running around after my 3 lovely daughters. Who needs a gym when you have 3 young children?

My world mainly revolves around my family and the sport I love most – Football!

What are the benefits do you think of working together in a collective way like Runway Advisors? 

How can you beat the spirit and benefits of working as a team? As a team we can all bring our expertise, experiences and knowledge to the table to help each other, and our clients.

Could you provide an example of a common question or issue that clients present you with, and write a few lines in response?

• My campaign has started slow with you, how can we improve this?

  • LinkedIn campaigns don’t normally fly from the off. They take a lot of tweaking to get the engine to a point where it’s smoothly running 6 days per week.

  • If a LinkedIn campaign starts off slow then we need to review the target audience and/or the messaging sequence.

  • Could we add more job titles, think outside the box…..?

  • Is the message too long? Where can we refine it? How can we make the approach softer, but more to the point?

  • These tweaks can have a huge impact on results and it is important that we stay on top of them through regular feedback from them.