Social Selling

Using a method he’s developed over the years, part art, part science, Alex crafts his post — not the usual, clickbait rubbish you see on LinkedIn, but a real, engaging story.

And when he’s ready to hit that little blue “Post” button, Alex makes $13,000.

Over the last few years, Alex Boyd, Founder of RevenueZen, has built a social selling empire that consistently brings in 34% of his business’s revenue, totaling over $5 million.

According to Alex, you don’t need viral posts, hundreds of thousands of followers, or a big fancy brand to make LinkedIn a legitimate source of generating pipeline. All you need to understand is that social selling is about helping people publicly.

People buy from people they trust, and regular interaction on social networks and visible social proof create that trust. In this section of the book, we’ll cover how to build pipeline from LinkedIn — credibly, authentically, and honestly — and show you exactly how it leads to tangible revenue.

Learn:

• How to build your top of funnel by posting high-value content

• The framework for posting content that speaks directly to each of your buyers

• How to engage your buyers through comments, posts, and messages

• Strategies for snowballing these conversations out of LinkedIn

With over 930 million people on LinkedIn, hundreds of millions of which play a role in decision making, the platform’s pool of prospects is more akin to an ocean. It’s uniquely different from other engagement channels for a few key reasons:

• Professional and personal data. On LinkedIn you can find work history, industry, and company information plus personal interests, opinions, and engagement history. All of this is valuable qualification and personalization data you can use across outbound.
• Business context. People go to LinkedIn for business topics and career development, making them extra receptive to B2B messaging.
• Thought leadership. LinkedIn is a treasure trove of ideas and opinions and 79% of buyers say that thought leadership helps them decide which vendors to research.

LinkedIn is uniquely suited for B2B lead generation but at its core, it’s still a social media platform. What you post and how you present yourself affect the likelihood of your prospects responding.

“I look at posting on LinkedIn as marketing,” says Brendan Short, Head of Product-led Sales at Apollo, “You can connect with people and direct message them, which is essentially cold outbound, but there is a huge outbound play for building an audience and nurturing them through LinkedIn posting.”

Zoe Hartsfield, one of today’s top LinkedIn sales voices, is an example of a self-made salesperson who built a robust network through consistently posting and focusing on personal brand. When she was a quota-carrying rep, Zoe consistently hit 50-60% of her quota through LinkedIn by following a simple posting framework (see figure 5.1).

• She chooses three to five content topics, at least two of which are directly related to the problems her product solved.
• Then, she creates three audience personas that align with her ICP.
• Across these topics and personas, she creates an infinite matrix of relevant things to talk about by switching out what she’s talking about and to whom.

“When I get stuck in a content hole, I’ll go look at those topics and ask myself ‘What ideas, frameworks, or learnings will add value for this specific audience?’” she says.

Building a personal brand like Zoe’s has become table stakes for effectively building pipeline. You’re just one person in an endless sea of options and one of the only things you have at your disposal — that no one else does — is your authentic voice, opinions, and experiences.

People gravitate towards authenticity. Your posts should document your failures and triumphs, what you’ve learned from your company and your prospects, and any tips or tricks that prove your expertise.

Sarah Brazier is an example of someone who publicly documents her process to establish maximum credibility. She built her largest source of closed-won revenue at Gong by telling stories about her day-to-day — everything from a revelation she had over a cup of coffee to a new tool she’s trying at her job.

It humanizes her. She’s made her platform a space for showcasing her expertise and, as a result, her prospect’s don’t have to question that she knows her stuff. Her LinkedIn presence was a driving factor behind her four consecutive years of smashing quota at Gong.

LinkedIn gives you a large reach for sharing real, tangible social proof.

This goes back to Alex’s method of learning to write a real story based around specific, crispy numbers — Increased SQLs by 25%. Slashed costs by 70%. Boosted ARR by 65%. It’s even better if you can include these results with an image.

“Every business has a way to show a customer result chart going up and to the right,” Alex says. “Find it and publish it.”

When you share customer stories and success metrics, tease your audience by leaving something out. Present them with a blurry part of the photograph, a cliffhanger, a gap. In his book Advertising Secrets of the Written Word, legendary copywriter Joseph Sugarman calls this planting “seeds of curiosity.”

When you rush into the DMs of everyone who comments on your post and pitch to them without any context, it breaks a prospect’s sense of psychological safety and instantly creates “a moat around you as a seller that nobody wants to cross,” says Alex.

Instead, slow down your interactions. Zoe has found that consistently posting content that keeps you top-of-mind brings buyers to you at the moment they are ready to have that conversation.

“If people consistently see you as the expert in XYZ topic, then the second they are ready for your product, you’re top of mind,” says Zoe.

When you play the long game, the timing works itself out. Check out an example of a buying conversation that naturally resurfaced — three years later.

So, you’ve started building some kind of brand and your page has at least a couple high-value, credible posts. When you’re brand new to social selling, the next best place to start is simply engaging with other people, primarily by commenting on their posts.

It feels perfunctory, but there’s real opportunity here. Alex recounted a time that a single, well-placed comment that led to a $40,000 purchase order within hours of the prospect seeing his comment.

The reality is: most sellers do this part wrong because they don’t know who they should be engaging with or what to say. Let’s start there.

Think of your LinkedIn network in three groups:

1. Your prospects

2. Your close personal network

3. Your broader audience

Your prospects are the people who fit your target buying persona. They are your primary purpose for using LinkedIn, but they’re also not the only ones you need to engage with — this piece is important.

Your close personal network are the folks that you know personally or have worked with. Contrary to what you might think, these are the people that you should spend most of your time interacting with. You’re not trying to sell to them directly but their connections. These people will see the conversations you’re having with them and you’ll start to build organic name recognition. Don’t ignore this group.

Finally, there’s your broader audience. You don’t know them, they may not be your ideal buyer, but they are still interacting with your posts and boosting engagement. Most people on LinkedIn aren’t going to buy from you, and that’s okay. A relationship is a relationship and the last thing you want to do is treat your personal network or broader audience transactionally and miss out on the benefit from engaging with them, too.

Leaving insightful, slightly clever comments on people’s posts is one of the best ways to help people publicly while also showing folks who you are and what you have to offer.

Most people don’t do this. Most people leave comments that are boring, unprovocative, or unclear in their credibility. You’ve seen this surely:

These comments are just noise and often worse than saying nothing at all, leaving your credibility unclear at best and damaged at worst.

So what does a better comment look like? There’s no script, but it should be thoughtful, not desperate, and of course, show a slice of credibility. Here’s an example:

You can tell how great this comment is by how the author responds. It made them pause and think, “They get it, they understand me,” even if in a small way. And mutual understanding is how relationships are born.

Here’s another example:

By now, you know that asking questions is a powerful way to start new conversations. As you start posting, you will hopefully receive as many questions as you ask. If you write a thought-provoking post, people will often ask you to share more, which is exactly what you want.

When responding to questions on your post, salespeople’s gut reaction is to keep things vague. Why give away your secrets before they show you the money?

But imagine this: you call a lawyer to ask them for some legal advice. You’re new in your search for legal advice and want some basic direction, and they say: “Well I could tell you, but it’ll cost you a $3,000 retainer.” Instantly, you feel you’re being swindled.

On the flip side, if they gave you an insightful, valuable answer before you’ve ever taken out your wallet, they would earn a significant amount of trust and establish themselves as someone you’d realistically do business with. When you have a pressing legal issue that requires real help, you’ll know who to turn to.

It works the same on LinkedIn.

Go above and beyond, be thorough, and give more than expected.

Commenting and posting high-value content creates interest around you, your company, and your solution. This buzz sets the stage for conversations to occur outside of LinkedIn, where you can have more meaningful (and lucrative) conversations.

There are two distinct types of prospects that can fill pipeline through LinkedIn:

1. Inbound leads that come to you from your posts and comments

2. Outbound direct messages you send directly to prospects

Let's look at how to navigate these new relationships in each context.

Your inbound leads are people who see something you posted or a comment you left and decide to reach out to you. What you wrote resonated with them and a problem they’re currently facing.

The interest is there — so don’t sell the meeting.

Instead, this is your opportunity to start the discovery process. From one of his customer success story posts, Alex received this message:

Now, what most sales reps will do at this point is say, “Let’s set up a meeting.” But this is where that third social selling principle comes into play: play the long game. You want to make sure the meeting is going to be productive and that this is a prospect who aligns with your ICP.

Alex responds with:

What Alex is doing here is communicating to the prospect that their time is valuable — and a meeting will be more productive once they’ve set the stage a bit.

At this moment, the time is right to move the conversation off LinkedIn and into the email inbox. You don’t want the prospect to forget about your message in their LinkedIn inbox, and you need to make it as easy as possible to keep the conversation alive.

Alex sends this email, adding more context and introducing the prospect to someone else on his team:

If you want to build legitimate pipeline through LinkedIn, you need to take the initiative and pair inbound efforts with outbound. This means sending connection requests and direct messages to your prospects.

With the right messaging strategy, LinkedIn outreach can streamline the buyer’s journey to closed-won. Apollo survey data shows that 58% of people using LinkedIn as an outbound channel are converting their prospects in five touch points or less — three fewer touchpoints than what studies show to be the average.

The most efficient way to use LinkedIn for outbound isn’t necessarily using the platform as a direct lead source, but layering in LinkedIn touchpoints for your lists of segmented leads.

Chris Cozzolino, Co-Founder at Uptown Creation, recommends you start by sending 200 connection requests per week to the 10-30% most active users in your ICP — your Tier 1s and your top Tier 2s. These are cold connection requests and should always be paired with a message. LinkedIn sales specialist Bruce Johnston ran a small experiment, sending 50 connection requests with a message and 50 without.

Here were his results:

• Invite to connect, no note: 18 out of 50 accepted
• Invite to connect, personalized note: 39 of 50 accepted

Whether you get an accepted connection request with or without an initial message, sending highly-personalized voice notes or videos can be the differentiator you need to expedite these new relationships.

“Go back to voice notes [within LinkedIn], 1:1 videos, things that AI can’t replicate yet. It’s a good way to show that you’re actually human as opposed to an automated message,” says Florin Tatulea, Head of Sales Development at Common Room.

Melissa Gaglione, Head of Sales at Sendspark and founder, gets an 80% positive response rate on average by sending personalized videos to her prospects’ LinkedIn inbox. She has a few tips for replicating her success.

• Insert the video as a raw clip. It shouldn’t be a link that takes your prospect out of their LinkedIn messages. Here’s a helpful video for attaching video files to a LinkedIn message.
• Make the thumbnail personalized. “Make it a mini preview of what you’re going to talk about,” Melissa says, “I’ll do a picture of myself or a picture of the prospect…I always put a banner at the bottom of the time commitment, too.”
• Identify their channel of choice. Maybe, they aren’t that active on LinkedIn. Apply these same principles to Twitter/X, Instagram, or Slack communities to meet your prospects where they’re at.

Social channels are one big interconnected web of connections — dare we say friendships. Sending memorable, relevant outbound messages allows you to break into that web, giving you more access to not only your prospect, but their network, and their network’s network. Karst Kortekaas, Sales Director at Appier, always starts initial LinkedIn conversations with Tier 1 execs.

“What I do is connect with the CEO [or CMO] to become friends with him…not sell to him,” he says.

Then, he goes for the referral. “Once we become friends, I’ll try to get a referral from him to the decision maker I need. With that referral, the people they direct me to always listen. 90 to 95% of all my business comes from that, just referrals.”

When it comes to outbound on LinkedIn, look for opportunities where you or your company has extremely-relevant expertise, a positive track record, or existing relationships. If you spend the majority of your time on opportunities like this, you won’t need nearly as much pipeline in order to hit your goals.

You now have a baseline for creating valuable experiences for both inbound and outbound leads on LinkedIn. But these touchpoints cannot and should not exist in isolation.

Fresh off a $60 million Series B funding, Census is one of the world’s fastest growing data activation companies, serving companies like Figma, Notion, and Orangetheory. They’re heavy hitters — and they are generating more opportunities through LinkedIn than any other channel.

“LinkedIn is our most effective opportunity creator,” says Chris Calkin, VP of Revenue at Census. “But it’s not a one stop shop. I’m also emailing them and calling them. You have to know where your customers actually are, what they’re looking for, and engage with them where they are not expecting.”

Use LinkedIn to warm up your other touchpoints within your targeted sales sequences, weaving together mulichannel interactions that build relationships wherever your prospects are.

So how do you juggle all these interactions and create successful, multichannel outbound strategies? Funny you should ask — this next chapter is about pulling it all together.