$2 million from a single LinkedIn post.

Martin Henley: Probably where we should start is with this $2 million sale from a single LinkedIn post. That sounds like hype. That can’t possibly be true.

Michelle J Raymond. Michelle J Raymond: You would think so, but it actually is. And it was one of those pinch me kind of moments. And sure, it wasn’t just from the one single post because I’ve been using LinkedIn for social selling as part of various roles for around eight years now. But one day cast your mind back to around February 2020. It’s D-Day for COVID in Australia. Things are starting to get crazy At the time I’m managing a cleaning chemical manufacturing company and as you can imagine, the cleaning industry just went bananas at that time. So hand sanitiser was like liquid gold. Prior to that, the company I worked for, we literally might make, you know, 24 bottles a month of hand sanitiser. So because I’m so active on LinkedIn, I do a post and say, by the way, did you know we manufacture a hand sanitiser? Lucky for me, one of my connections who was not active on LinkedIn, I didn’t even know she logged in, all of a sudden pipes up and says, Oh my God, do you guys do that? We’re looking for a manufacturer. Within the next three weeks, because things turned around so quickly, Yeah, they’re handing over a check for an order, $2 million worth of hand sanitiser. Put it in perspective. The business I was working for that was roughly their annual revenue. So it was a huge deal that I was like, wow, this is the power of LinkedIn. This is the power of social selling and it’s just reinforces the opportunities that are out there if you’re top of mind and just keep showing up.

Martin Henley: 100% being top of mind and keeping showing up because it does sound like hype but you don’t say it often, so people don’t really know this about it to be fair to you. But it demonstrates something really important to me about marketing, which is everyone thinks there is some secret to marketing or you’re going to do one thing and everything’s going to drop. It might be like in this instance, you do one thing and everything drops, but it’s because you’ve done the, whatever you’ve done before, you’ve built your network, you’ve shown up, you’ve been posting regularly, you know, you are being seen, you are being promoted potentially by the platform. All of that work has gone in to get to the point. So I think people think that it would just magically happen overnight. That’s what I think people think and occasionally it does happen magically overnight, but it’s not actually very magically. It’s because you’ve done the freaking work, you know.

Michelle J Raymond: From my case, we’re talking like six years previous to that. So as part of my journey on LinkedIn, we’re talking that I get a job through LinkedIn, I start this new job and I turn up and I say, What do we sell? Because it was a completely new industry to me. I was selling all the raw materials and ingredients for beauty products. I had no idea. I couldn’t pronounce them. I had no existing network to leverage off. And so I said to my boss, like, what do we sell? Pretty obvious question for a salesperson showing up at a new job. And they said, Michelle, there’s 10,000 ingredients. Just go. And I said, Yeah, no worries. I know that’s my job, but I’ve got 10,000 ingredients, you’ve given me a customer list of 80 people spread around a country the size of Australia, and then you want me to just go and reach them all magically each month. I just said, this is craziness. Like, we’ve got to find a way that I can reach more people at a time. so I asked him, could I do some posts on LinkedIn? And he just looked at me and said, Is it free? And I said, Yep. And he said, I don’t care. Go away, Michelle. Just go and sell and off I went. Fast forward, here we are. I built an amazing B2B community in the beauty space and chemical space, and that took time. We’re talking probably the best part of five years, which is why that one post goes boom, because I’d already built the network, I’d built my community and I’d built my authority in that space. The planets aligned and I took advantage of that coming through.

Martin Henley: Excellent. And thank you for sharing because it proves my point, which is there is a secret to marketing, which is do the work, do the work.

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