Social Selling on Linkedin is quickly developing a reputation of being a ‘pitch fest’. With connection requests + cold dm’s flying left and right and automation softwares being banned, many social sellers are wondering, “Is Linkedin still a viable channel to generate sales?”
While we understand your frustration, we are here to tell you YES! As we know, however, without process and intention, your efforts will fall flat.
Main highlights:
Prospecting Using Linkedin
Social Cycle’s 3 Step Process
Linkedin has the most robust native search capabilities of all of the major social media platforms. By layering filters such as current company, industry, location, degree of connection and more, social sellers can be effective in finding the right prospects for their business. Here are some of our favorite methods of prospecting on Linkedin:
Spoiler alert: just because you have Linkedin Sales Nav does not mean you can magically make sales. It does give you a leg up, but it is up to you to use your advantage.
Linkedin Sales Navigator can give you a massive head start when it comes to prospecting. Sales nav has sophisticated filters that can help you to identify the exact decision makers to add to your pipeline. Where Linkedin sales nav falls short is on what comes next.
This is where we see most people fall short. They find some great prospects and then do 1 of 3 things:
The problem with all 3 approaches is that the social seller is wearing their motive for connecting on their sleeve. Real business relationships require effort and multiple touchpoints in order to earn the right to schedule a meeting. In the quest for instant gratification, most social sellers seem to value how much interaction can be automated compared to how much interaction can be personalized.
Basic Linkedin is still extremely powerful. Oftentimes when trying to organize social selling, especially without sales navigator, sellers resort to spreadsheets or CRM.
Basic Linkedin is still extremely powerful. Oftentimes when trying to organize social selling, especially without sales navigator, sellers resort to spreadsheets or CRM.
Spreadsheets are easy to customize, but are extremely time consuming to keep track of. Oftentimes, social sellers want to keep track of touchpoints or measure direct messages sent or responded to, but doing that manually requires quite a bit of time.
Many sellers utilize a CRM to manage their sales engagement. Although CRMs are necessary for helping to organize email and cold calling. When it comes to “top of funnel” lead generation on social media, CRM’s are just not geared to coordinate targeted social media outreach.
Whether you use a spreadsheet or a fancy CRM, Linkedin as a lead generation source can be a huge money maker. Especially if you know how to apply your social selling on Linkedin techniques.
In order to generate leads effectively on Linkedin, you need to get out of the headspace of “automation” (a.k.a. throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it sticks).
As long as you have a good social media strategy and a consistent lead management system in place, social selling with Linkedin will help you make more sales in your business.
Measure their engagement to determine which ones are most likely to convert.
Social Cycle is the first sales engagement tool of its kind. Social Cycle is meant to help social sellers to efficiently find qualified leads across Linkedin and create a forecastable sales pipeline.
Using a proprietary algorithm, Social Cycle curates a workflow of stepwise social media engagements for your contacts. These workflow cards are segmented based on the type of person you are speaking with (i.e. Affiliates, Podcast Guests, Prospects) through campaigns.
A Social Cycle user’s job is simple: Find prospects. Complete the Workflow. Set more appointments.
In addition to the three step process, social cycle has a chrome extension to dynamically lead score contacts inside each campaign based on how they react to your engagement. If they connect back or respond to a direct message their lead score advances. This allows Social Cycle users to only spend time in their workflow with contacts that are actively reciprocating engagement.
We believe that social media engagement cannot be and should not be automated. It should be thoughtful and personalized. With that being said, this takes time when done properly. Social Cycle keeps your social media engagement intentional, organized and efficient. We measure the results of your top of funnel engagements and we report on what is working so that you only spend time with people who are interested in building a relationship with you whether it be geared towards business development, recruiting or networking.
find leads who use and engage with specific keywords on Linkedin and Twitter.
easily upload a .csv of your existing leads with field matching.
add these leads to one of our template sales cycles or create your own.