In this episode, Jose Quiroz joins Donald Kelly to talk about the easy ways to make new LinkedIn connections without sounding spammy.  Jose Quiroz is an immigrant, an entrepreneur, and a business guy. His mentality is always veered into finding opportunities and creating opportunities. For Jose, it’s more about creation than consumption.  He has a lot of experience with the family business and regional operations as his dad started a janitorial company.  After college, he got into the corporate world and fell under the Director of Digital Marketing sphere.  Jose’s unique selling proposition is adapting the digital strategy and the digital language to the overall brand strategy. He helps business owners understand how they can leverage digital strategies to scale up their operations.  Building connections Businesses can find a third party who can do their massive lead generation for them. At that point, connecting isn’t about building relationships. Connecting then becomes a numbers game.  This means that you’re not creating rapport, and you probably won’t see the long same long-term benefits as well, and you’d probably tend to see the quality drop and diminish a little.  This approach is effective if there’s a need for an immediate lead in the business.  The first mistake that salespeople make on LinkedIn is that they try to figuratively get to the wedding chapel right away without doing the first dates and the video calls.  Salespeople cannot pull the trigger way too soon without building the needed rapport first.  Avoid the spammy approach For Jose, it may not be a matter of time but rather a matter of communication.  Based on a stat that Jose read in the past, there’s an average of 10 exchanged messages for most Tinder matches. The messages may have been sent within a day period, a week period, or within an ‘X’ amount of period. The same philosophy can be applied on LinkedIn.  It’s not about waiting for a time frame before you feel the need to nurture the prospects. It’s more of the need to engage the prospects and connect with them as individuals.  You need to build that qualitative feeling and see the communication build-up.  If you sense that the prospect is starting to get a little cold, then back off a little bit. Use the time to research materials and sources that are beneficial for the prospects.  Your goal is to build rapport so that the prospects would trust you, buy into your confidence, your expertise, and eventually do business with you.  LinkedIn today isn’t just about hearing new job openings and other career moves. LinkedIn is now a platform for personal development, identifying concepts, taking in the best practices, and others.  People are now on LinkedIn to consume information that is valuable to them. Salespeople can use this to their advantage so that they can use that intent and give the prospects what they’re looking for.  Determine your goals  People go into LinkedIn to generate sales but aside from that, you need to be specific with your goals - is it to increase connections or is it to move on to direct messaging.  It’s also important to determine the value of direct messaging because that’s what everything is leading towards. If you can get people engaged in your LinkedIn messages then you can bypass the different funnels and you’re able to get them where you need them.  Salespeople are missing the direct message feature because of the shiny syndrome object. Everyone wants to find that funnel that they can automatically turn on and will already do the heavy lifting for them.  They are focused on finding solutions that they miss the opportunity, that is the direct messaging.  Another effective approach is by engaging with prospects first.  Identify your prospects and see what their activities are on LinkedIn. Figure out if they’re posting original content, curate content, and other habits they have on the platform.  Use the available information you gathered in starting a conversation wit