Two New Tools to Grace Los Angeles Seminar on June 27

The Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn (EGLI) will be on the road next week, when I’ll present a private edition for the Institute of Management Consultants, Southern California (non-members accepted). Being in a room of management consultants, I guess it’s all the more fitting to expand the role of two new tools that participants will learn to increase the value of their LinkedIn activity.  Here I’ll brief you on how the seminar is evolving and give you a preview of the new tools.

EGLI Evolution

Having worked with executives around the U.S. and internationally for several quarters, the result is consistently that the material is highly regarded and impactful; the biggest challenge participants face is applying the concepts and tools long enough to see results and thus begin the virtuous cycle.  Therefore, the two new tools are focused on helping people to measure and manage their progress when using EGLI’s innovative processes.

The other key area of innovation is emphasizing how to use LinkedIn together with Twitter, Facebook and others to magnify results.  For most business executives, LinkedIn is the platform of choice for finding, interacting with and doing business with other executives, but other venues can help significantly.

In this seminar, we will include Facebook and Twitter as supporting tools.

The Relationship Value Map

The Relationship Value Map is a tool for segmenting your LinkedIn relationships, so you can focus your activity on the right people for the right reasons. Since LinkedIn is about aligning your intention with the right people, it will help to think about the Trust Vector and the Interest Vector, which divide your Connections into four groups.

When you first meet someone, they place on the left side and, as you have interactions with the person that serve to increase your trust of him/her, s/he moves to the right.  The Interest Vector delineates how much your professional interests are complementary.

When you put the vectors together, they enable you to prioritize your interactions.  Give highest priority to people with whom you have many common interests and high trust.  People with whom you share interests but don’t know well enough to have high trust are in Quadrant III.  Your goal is to interact with them extensively, so you can increase trust and move them to Quadrant III.  Quadrant IV people you trust (friends and family might be here), but you may not have common professional interests.  You want to keep them informed about what you’re doing, but that’s not urgent.  Using the value map, you can be more efficient and focused. Purposeful.

The Social Network Life Cycle Model

It is easy to say that relationship building takes time.  Executives and enterprises are naturally suspicious of new things like LinkedIn and social networking because they don’t know how the new things work and worry that they will lose time.  The Social Network Life Cycle Model (SNLCM) addresses the problem head on: it traces the steps of relationship building and provides milestones and quantitative metrics to measure your progress through the stages.  By the way, revenue materializes in Stage IV, Conversion. You need to work through the other stages to get there.

Participants will learn how to use the SNLCM to trace their progress and skills with LinkedIn.  It is a vital tool for teams as well because they can use it together to create a formal sales process for using LinkedIn for business development.  The four stages of relationship development are: Discovery, Qualification, Engagement and Conversion.  Each stage includes milestones, key activities, expected results and measurements.

Parting Shots

• This is shaping up to be a pivotal session due to the high octane audience and the new tools. I understand that it has not sold out and non-members are welcome.  You can learn more on the IMC SoCal website.
• Please share your questions or comments below.