Harness LinkedIn to become the go-to authority in your industry. This session covers building trust and awareness at scale using thought leadership and a formula for cutting through the noise. Discover strategies to stand out, track essential metrics, and align LinkedIn with your broader marketing efforts. Leave with actionable tools to enhance your LinkedIn presence and drive engagement.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander of Collective 54. You’re listening to the Pro Serve Podcast. This is a podcast dedicated to founders of boutique professional services firms. So if you are somebody in the expertise business, maybe you’re a consultant, a marketing agency, a software engineering firm, what have you, this show is for you. We aim to help you do three things: we help you make more money, we help you make scaling easier, and we help you get to an exit someday when you want that to happen. On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about executive presence, which is particularly important for founders of professional services firms because they are trying to project themselves and their firms into the marketplace with authority and credibility, and make meaningful connections with their clients, prospects, and employees. So it’s really important to have executive presence, and we’re lucky that we have a member of our community with us today. His name is Justin Nassiri. Justin, did I pronounce your last name correctly?
Justin Nassiri: Oh! Nassiri!
Greg Alexander: Nassiri. Oh, sorry about that. Justin is a new member we met recently at our Collective 54 conference down in Fort Worth, Texas, and I was fascinated by what he did. I asked him to come on the show. So, Justin, would you please introduce yourself and your firm to the audience?
Justin Nassiri: I’m Justin Nassiri. I run a company called Executive Presence. We’ve been around for three years, and what we do is we help companies build trust and awareness at scale through thought leadership on LinkedIn, executive thought leadership on LinkedIn.
Greg Alexander: All right. So let’s start with some basics. Give us a working definition for what executive presence is and why it matters in today’s world.
Justin Nassiri: It’s a phrase I heard when I was in the military, and I don’t think it was ever defined for me, but what I kind of picked up on it being is like that sense when someone enters the room and the temperature changes a little bit. People stand up a little bit straighter, people hold themselves more accountable. The phrase that I came up with is that you’re projecting the sense that you’re worthy of being followed. I really like that definition because, in a social media setting, it’s about whether you have something worthwhile to say that makes it worth clicking on that button to follow you. Is it worth working for you and literally following you, or becoming a client or an investor? I like this sense of leaders not just being the CEO but really showing up with their values, who they are, what they believe in, and what they know. Does that inspire people to want to follow them?
Greg Alexander: I think that’s a great definition, especially in the world that we’re living in, where LinkedIn followers, just as one example, matter in today’s world. Alright, so let’s get into the components of it. What are the core components that make up a strong executive presence?
Justin Nassiri: Let’s deal with LinkedIn because I think if we’re dealing with the 80/20 rule, LinkedIn is where to put all your effort. I don’t really think there’s any other social channel that matters. Let’s talk about the basics. The LinkedIn profile is kind of table stakes. Let’s actually zoom out for a second. It’s important for people to know that when it comes to LinkedIn, your company page doesn’t really matter. People do not go to LinkedIn to engage with a faceless corporation. They go there to engage with other people. So everything I’m going to be talking about is for the CEO, a leader, or an executive—their personal presence, which is the best way to build awareness for their company. The very first part is obviously your profile. We can talk about that and double-click. It’s fairly easy. It’ll take 30 minutes or less to get that to kind of sell your company in every section on the page, and that’s a nice thing because you do it once and don’t have to really revisit it for a year or so to refresh it. In my view, if you’re wanting to build up authority on LinkedIn, if you’re wanting to be seen as a subject matter expert in your space, it really boils down to one thing, and that is publishing high-quality content frequently. To be specific on frequently, in our view, that’s at least once a week, as much as five times a week. Most CEOs I meet with—and I met with 570 in the last year—post once a year. They get a round of funding, they have a major milestone, and then they’re crickets. Then they resurface six months later when they have something newsworthy. We’re talking about a fundamentally different approach of publishing value-additive content that establishes subject matter authority frequently on that weekly or more basis.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, you know, I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. I post frequently. We have members who write for Collective 54, and I repost and things like that. I agree with everything that you just said. I will tell you, however, if I can play devil’s advocate just for a moment, I don’t follow a lot of people. I don’t follow a lot of people because I find LinkedIn to lack clarity in communication. It’s very noisy. So since you do this for executives, how do you break through the noise?
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, I think it starts with empathy. Usually, when I’m doing someone’s content strategy, the first question I ask is, look, if I could fill a stadium with 10,000 people to hear you give a keynote, who do you want in the seats? We’re not training for the masses here; we are being very precise. Usually, for CEOs, that’s going to boil down to a segment they want to hire, a segment they want to acquire, a segment they want to become customers, and a segment they want to become investors. Usually, off the tip of their tongue, they can define these people. Then the next thing I ask is, okay, what do you want them to do? I want them to buy from me, I want them to invest in me—whatever that is, we get clear on their goals.
But then the biggest question for me is, okay, you’ve got 10,000 people in a theater to hear you give a keynote. You’re about to get up on stage to give an hour talk, and before you step on stage, they say, look, if you mention your company, your service, or your product, we will yank the mic, shut it down, and pull you off the stage. What do you talk about for an hour that keeps those people mesmerized? That’s really the bulk of what we want to do on LinkedIn. We want 80% of your content not showing for your company, not saying you’re so humble to be featured in some magazine. We want you to show up as an expert and say, look, this is what I know. I built and sold a company for $167 million. Here’s the biggest mistake I made. I would drop what I’m doing to read that post. That’s a kind of flex followed by vulnerability.
You’re not talking about productivity or how to get a job—that’s kind of like the cheat sheet to get a million followers. We are being very precise and saying, I’m going to have empathy for who I’m speaking to, and I’m going to speak directly to their pain points with concrete knowledge. The great thing for people listening to this podcast is that you are probably an expert in your space. You could probably riff off the top of your head about things that would save people hundreds of hours. That’s the 80% of content—you’re generously adding value. You are not talking about your company, and occasionally you can talk about what you do. Instead, you’re teaching and educating from a selfless standpoint.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, great advice. You know, when I’ve talked to others that specialize in maybe more broadly social media—and I know you’re really focused on LinkedIn, and I agree with you, I think that’s the only place to be for business purposes anyways—I hear them tell me that it’s all about engagement. Just posting and getting followers is not enough. Getting people to like, comment, and repost is the name of the game.
When I see people trying to make that happen, they lose this authenticity, this empathy that you’re talking about, and it becomes nothing short of an advertisement. It just turns me off. So how do you balance authentic communication with the need for it to deliver a business result?
Justin Nassiri: Yeah, so a couple of things there. First, I wholeheartedly believe that authenticity sells. When I talk to our CEO clients, they are already doing something right. They have attracted employees, investors, customers, and partners. They don’t have to be something else. What we need to do is capture them in as high fidelity as possible in LinkedIn posts. So we’re not trying to be anything they’re not. Oftentimes, we’ll use this thing I call the dinner party test, which is like, look, if you’re at a dinner party with clients and prospects, and you’re done talking shop, do you talk about sports? Do you talk about family? If you talk about family in that setting, we’ll talk about family on LinkedIn. If you would never talk about family in that setting, we’ll never talk about it on LinkedIn. It’s about trying to be as authentic as possible on LinkedIn.
The second piece is, I would double-click on business outcomes in two ways. The first way is the first thing that you’re going to see when you start to get active on LinkedIn is you get top-of-mind relevance with your network. Why that’s so important is we’ve spent so much time in the schools we’ve gone to, the places we’ve worked, and the conferences we’ve attended. We’ve spent so much building out these networks, but coffee chats and Christmas cards aren’t going to cut it to keep us top of mind. When you show up on LinkedIn regularly, what you’re going to find, as I’ve found and as our clients have found, is people reaching out to you whom you haven’t thought of in a decade. I had a guy that I went to college with 20 years ago reach out and say, “Hey, I love what you’re doing on LinkedIn. You should talk to my CEO.” They signed up two weeks later. I would have never thought to reach out to that person, but I have a network of people who know me, like me, and trust me—they just don’t think about me often. So we want to activate that network.
That’s the first business outcome. The second one is we want to build up over time. We want you to be the authority in your space, whatever it is, and the more niche, the better. There is a guy on LinkedIn, Chad Gono, who runs Regal Plastics, and he just talks forever about leadership. I love this guy. I’m not in the market for plastics, but if I ever run into someone anywhere, in an airport or whatever, looking for a plastics guy, I’m sending them to Chad because I’m like, “That guy is a good leader.” The things he talks about—team building, culture, and investing in people—that’s what I want to get behind. So I would view it in that way. First, you want to get top of mind with your network. That’s going to lead to great things, whether it’s hiring, fundraising, or customer acquisition. Then we want you to be the go-to authority in your space. We can talk more about measuring all of this, but high level, that’s the way I would think about it.
Greg Alexander: Okay, so I’m not a LinkedIn expert, and I’m about to ask you a very embarrassing question. But I’m throwing myself as a sacrificial lamb here, you know, to the slaughterhouse, because I imagine some of our members want to ask the same question. So, I’m on LinkedIn. I’m looking at my LinkedIn profile right now, and it tells me that I have 500-plus connections and 4,131 followers. My question is, what’s the difference between a connection and a follower? And are those numbers—this is the first time I’ve ever looked at them—good or bad?
Justin Nassiri: So, good. I’ve probably talked to about 570 CEOs in the last year. The average is about 3,500, so 4,100 followers—you are above average, which is great. I wouldn’t really worry about connections versus followers. The difference is, to get really particular, a connection is someone you’ve known. They’ve sent you a connection request, or you’ve sent them a connection request. But anyone can follow you. I can follow you. No one has to know you to actually follow you. So it’s a lighter lift. On my profile, I’ve got my shields up. To become a connection, you have to have my email address, but anyone can follow me. I’m purposely trying to get people to be followers and not connections.
The big thing to think about here is 4,000 followers, in the absolute sense, is good. But what matters is, how relevant are they, and how engaged are they? I talk to CEOs with 30,000 followers, and they post and get two likes. I say, “Look, I’ve got 15,000 followers. I post, and I get 100 people liking it. What’s more important—an engaged audience or an absolute number?” Then the other thing is, how relevant is it? If I’ve got a bunch of job-seeking CEOs in India following me, that doesn’t really help my business. I want to get really precise in getting my target audience following me because that’s all I care about.
Greg Alexander: And I’m assuming that the analytics can answer all these questions. If I know that you’re going to start working with me on my profile, are you going to go into those 4,100 and tell me some type of quality measure?
Justin Nassiri: So I actually had a call with a LinkedIn employee today, and I’m bashing him about how awful LinkedIn’s analytics are. This is a multibillion-dollar company, and they have been around for multiple decades, and their analytics are awful. What we use is a third-party tool. I think it’s less than a hundred bucks a month. It’s called Shield App. It’s a browser extension for Chrome. Basically, what that does is it takes the LinkedIn data and enhances it slightly. To get even more in the weeds, we take the data from Shield, and then we use ChatGPT and a bunch of other things to classify even further. I’m happy to disclose this to people. For followers, I will download and export your follower list. I will put it in a website called clay.com, and I have a bunch of AI enrichments to look at that and say, ‘Okay, based on title and size of company and geography, what’s your ideal client persona?’ I can then tell you, ‘Of that 4,100 followers, X hundred are CEOs, and that’s your sweet spot.’ Then we want to measure and see over time if we can increase that. That’s one metric that we would look at. If you really want to get into the weeds here, I think where everyone is missing the boat on LinkedIn is the metrics. The metrics I would recommend you care about are total impressions a month—that’s just how many people are seeing your posts—and month-over-month follower growth. We’re looking for 0.5% to 2.5% month-over-month growth. Third, I would look at profile views because that’s people saying, ‘Who’s this Greg guy? Let me check him out.’ That’s a good sign that people are interested. Those are the top three metrics for me.
Justin Nassiri: The thing that I think everyone’s missing the boat on LinkedIn is the data. We can go as deep on this as you want, but high level, what we want to do is get a client posting ideally five times a week, even though that seems like a lot. Every 30, 60, 90 days, we’re going to sit down and say, ‘Look, we did all the numbers crunching, and it turns out when you talk about topics A, B, and C, people lean in, people really like that. So the next 90 days, we’re going to go a lot deeper and more nuanced on that. But when you talk about X, Y, and Z, no one cares, let’s stop talking about that.’ What I love about this is the alternative is giving a keynote on stage and looking for when people laugh or applaud or nod their heads. We’re basically atomizing your messaging and giving you discrete data on what works and doesn’t work. Hopefully, that plays into everything—podcasts, newsletters, all of that. We can go really deep about the data, but I just feel like there’s a lot there that people aren’t realizing. I almost view this as a data play where the benefit is content marketing and audience and sales and all these other things. But the data is so rich, and no one’s talking about how much you can pull out of LinkedIn.
Greg Alexander: Interesting. You know, you brought up—this will be my last question, and we’ll save the rest for the member Q&A—you brought up the keynote speech and being in person. It’s funny because you and I just met each other at our in-person event. We knew each other online. I guess we were connected to each other, but we really didn’t know each other. Then our relationship took a hundredfold increase because we happened to meet at a conference. Maybe this is because I’m 53 years old, and I’m an old guy, and I remember life before the Internet. What’s more valuable? Or is that the wrong way to look at it—in person versus LinkedIn? Is it a combination? And what is your recommended balance?
Justin Nassiri: I view this through the lens sometimes because I do a lot—I’m doing all our sales right now. I have a lot of these conversations, and it feels at times like the late nineties, having a conversation with a CEO and them being like, ‘I don’t need one of those websites.’ It’s like, no, this is just kind of an element of business now. People want to know who they’re working for, who they’re working with. This is like the new website. In the nineties, I wouldn’t have told someone, ‘This is it, just do a website, and you’re good.’ You still have to do trade shows and marketing, and you have to go visit—you have to do all the other stuff. But this is a channel that’s here to stay. I’ll give you an example. I was just in Amsterdam for a week doing a think week, unplugged, working on the business. I met up with three people there, all people I know from LinkedIn that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. I’m like, ‘Who do I know in Amsterdam? I’ll hang out with them.’ I just think it complements everything that you’re doing in person. Your event was so exceptional. Everyone I met pulled out their phone. We connected on LinkedIn. They’re seeing my posts. I’m seeing their posts. It’s continuing what would have been like, ‘Oh, that was a great human being to meet that I’ll never see again for another year,’ to, ‘I have these little touchpoints.’ Just view it as another channel. It’s not the end-all, be-all, but I think, pound for pound, it’s the best investment right now.
Greg Alexander: Okay, sounds good. All right, we’re gonna have to end it there. But Justin, on behalf of the members collective, thank you. We’re super happy that you’re involved because I think what you’re doing is very relevant to experts, which is who we are. So thank you for being here.
Justin Nassiri: I’ll just tag on one thing if I can. I love what you are doing. One of my clients told me about Collective 54. I read your book that night, and I signed up the next day. I went to the event three weeks later, and I’m referring people to you because the concentration and density of great people is great. For business development, I go to a lot of CEO groups, and what you have is really special. I’m not just saying that. I’m really grateful for the opportunity.
Greg Alexander: Well, I appreciate you saying that. Okay, so 3 calls to action. If you’re a member, and you’re curious about how to increase your executive presence on LinkedIn, please attend the Q&A session we’ll have with Justin, and you’ll be getting a meeting invite with the logistical details on that, and you can ask your questions directly to him. If you’re not a member, but after listening to this, you think you might want to become one, go to Collective54.com and fill out an application, and someone will get in contact with you. But if you’re not ready for either of those two things, do what Justin did, which is read my book. It’s called *The Boutique: How to Start, Scale, and Sell a Professional Services Firm*. You can find it on Amazon.com, written by yours truly. So those are 3 things to go do. So let’s end it there. I wish you all the best of luck as you try to grow, scale, and sell your firm, and we’ll see you next time.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.