Social Cycle Academy

Social Selling on Linkedin - How to use Linkedin to make more sales

Social Selling on Linkedin is challenging without a great strategy. This blog discusses the tactics that lead to success.

Author: Chaz Van de Motter - Chief Executive Officer

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 Selling with Linkedin Sales Navigator
Social Cycle’s 3 Step Process

Prospecting Using Linkedin

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:

Commenters on posts with hashtags related to topics your ideal customers are interested in. This shows the account is engaged and active.
Attendees of webinars related to your solution can be a great place to find relevant prospects. This shows that the prospect is actively learning more about a topic related to a solution that you offer. Linkedin allows you to view signed up attendees of events that can be searched and found via keywords.
If you are using Linkedin Sales Navigator consider utilizing the business revenue and number of employees. This will help you to accurately gauge the correct sized businesses to be connecting with.

Social Selling with Linkedin Sales Navigator

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.

So what comes next when social selling on Linkedin?

This is where we see most people fall short. They find some great prospects and then do 1 of 3 things:

Connect & Chill
1. Ask the question, Now that I found these people, what should I do? Should I engage with their posts? How often should I follow up? Should I send a direct message asking for a meeting? Should I wait a few days and then decide? This analysis usually leads to inaction and dust collecting on the lead list
Connect & Pitch
1. The classic connect and pitch. The pitch usually looks something like this: This obviously doesn’t work and after a few rounds of no responses, the strategy is deemed as ineffective and all of the sudden it is back to cold emailing and cold calling
Connect & Pretend
1. Mixing up option 2, instead of connect and pitch it is what I like to call the Connect & Pretend. Similar to number 2 a message is immediately sent with the connection, but instead of a hard pitch is something like this: This is truly a feeble attempt at pretending to care. Do better. Personalize your message.

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.

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Social Selling on Linkedin without Sales Navigator

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.

How to use Linkedin to make more sales

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.

Generate More Targeted Leads on Social Media.

Measure their engagement to determine which ones are most likely to convert.

Social Selling with Social Cycle

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.

How does Social Cycle Work?

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.

Social Cycle’s 3 Step Process

Prospect: Using our social search engine, users can identify quality sales prospects through hashtag search, creator search or keyword search.
Campaign: Once you have found prospects, you can add them to campaigns. Campaigns are built by stringing together multiple engagements such as connections, likes, comments, profile visits and direct messages.
Workflow: Once a contact has been added to a campaign a workflow is created based on the cadence defined in the campaign. Workflow is designed to guide you in how to use social media daily whether you are on desktop or mobile.

Social Cycle Chrome Extension

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.

Conclusion

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.