080: Generating High Quality Business Prospects from LinkedIn (w/ Sarah Santacroce)

Summary: Sarah Santacroce is an independent LinkedIn Specialist, Online Presence Mentor and founder of Simplicity Small Biz. She helps people convert their presence online into paying customers. She is the creative brain behind the LinkedIn Challenge, an event that has helped 1700+ people so far to improve their knowledge about using LinkedIn for business. She has helped hundreds of clients from all over the world breathe life into their LinkedIn profiles, put together a strategy for their online presence or generated leads for them by using LinkedIn and social selling strategies. <br> <br> She also coaches fellow introverted business owners on how to run an online business, and is the founder of the Introvert Business Podcast. <br> <br> Period in full time business and core revenue streams <br> <br> She has been in full time business for more than 7 years. In her LinkedIn business, she works with corporations where she does trainings for HR departments, sales departments, and the people in marketing. She also works with entrepreneurs through one-on-one coaching and teaches people in transition how to get recruited on LinkedIn. She has a series of products like video trainings that generate revenue for her without having to trade her one-on-one time. <br> <br> She also does affiliate marketing and is planning to host her first retreat for introverted online entrepreneurs. The retreat will be an offline event where they will get together and talk about their businesses, and come up with strategies on how to take it to the next level. <br> <br> The retreat <br> <br> She says it will be a quiet, reflective, and respectful retreat with lots of fun. The link for the event is <a href="http://www.sarahsantacroce.com/retreat/">www.sarahsantacroce.com/retreat/</a>  <br> <br> Starting out in business <br> <br> When she moved to California with her husband and their new second-born, she could consequently not go back to her previous job, and decided to take some time off to spend with her kids. After about a year, she decided to come up with her own business plan and choose to focus on helping business owners with their administrative needs, which was what she was good at. That eventually changed, because with the social media boom at that time, she realised how she was able to use social media to create buzz for her own business. <br> <br> She therefore choose to move away from administrative/virtual assistant work to teaching entrepreneurs/small business owners how to market their businesses through social media. When she moved back to Switzerland with her family in 2010, she decided to start offering the social media training/marketing services. <br> <br> Focusing on LinkedIn <br> <br> She decided to specialise on LinkedIn much later after she discovered that things in Switzerland were very traditional and slow. Most people didn’t use social media for business. The one platform that the Switzerland B2B industry was interested in most, that she was well-versed in, was LinkedIn. After a year of offering her general social media services, she decided to zero-in on LinkedIn. <br> <br> Corporate career Vs. Business <br> <br> Sarah says she would never go back to formal employment. She calls herself unemployable because she creates success on her own terms now. She defines how success should be in her life, which she could not do in a corporate environment. <br> <br> Tip 1: I don’t think business is for everybody. I don’t think everybody should leave their corporate job and become an entrepreneur. Getting side hustles is however a great option for anyone in a corporate job <br> <br> Tip 2: I don’t advice you to just leave your job and focus on your business idea <br> <br> Replacing full time job income in a business <br> <br> Tip 1: If you have a business model that can guarantee to replace your full time income then obviously, go for it!