“You need to find those right people who are active on the platform, share relevant content, and engage with them.” – Donald Kelly in today’s Tip 1771
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Donald Kelly. Donald is a Trainer, 4x Author, LinkedIn Influencer, Sales Force Influencer, and host of the popular The Sales Evangelist podcast, a part of the HubSpot podcast network. Donald offer training to help b2b sellers across the globe and loves spending time with his family in South Florida. Here he is:
Donald Kelly: One of the things that we focus a lot on is top of funnel, specifically utilizing platforms unique ways. One of those platforms that we utilize a lot, which many of you utilize, is LinkedIn. The stress that I get from sales professionals or the stress they express to me is that they’re using LinkedIn, but they’re not seeing much success, meaning they’re reaching out to people, they’re sending their offer, they’re telling them about their services, but not many individuals are returning the conversation back or engaging back with them. So I have a formula that I’ve utilized for years and that I recommend to salespeople, and it’s a part of our LinkedIn training program that we do time and time again to help sellers to get engagement. It’s Connect, Share, and Engage. Connect, Share, and Engage.
Connect with your ideal customers, share relevant content, and engage with them. I’m going to share with you some of these factors. The first thing you want to think about when you reach out to a prospect is that many people, and there are different philosophies, different camps on this idea, where you send a connection request to a prospect without a comment. Now, LinkedIn has just changed the game just a tad bit, where now you only get about five connection request messages per month unless you have one of the premium offerings that they produce where you can connect with more people and have more messages.
Now, think about this. LinkedIn, they know the data, they know the algorithm. The fact that you can create a message with their connection request indicate that there’s value in that in the data that they’ve collected over the years. More than likely, some people will accept your connection request, but the majority of people usually like to connect, or especially executives, and depending on the age group, will connect with people who they feel they have some connection to, they know, or have some relevance to. They just want to get some random person with the title Account Executive at XYZ SaaS Company to connect with it. They know that person is going to try to pitch them.
So the first thing that I like to do is to make that connection. How can I grab attention? The way you want to do this with your connection request is to focus on messages that’s going to tie back to that individual. Perhaps you refer back to a post that they have, or maybe you refer to something locally. You see that they’re in Milwaukee, or perhaps you see that they’re in South Florida. Is there a way I can make a connection request to that person? Connect with them on a message. I always ask permission to connect. I might say something to the nature of, Hey, Barbara, I saw that you read your post about the fact that you guys are hiring. I’m sharing this with my network of sales professionals. Hopefully, we can help you fill a couple of those spots. Permission to connect here on LinkedIn. Or I might say something to the nature of, Hey, Jason, saw that you’re in Milwaukee. Is it true that this is the land of breweries? Anyways, permission to connect to her on LinkedIn. Obviously, this is public information on their LinkedIn profile. But the thing is, it just makes a connection, whether it’s something on their banner or whatnot, make that connection with the person. It’s also important that you connect with people who are on LinkedIn. This is why I look at people’s comments or off their posts and see if they’re active on a platform. Only a small percentage of LinkedIn users are posting content on LinkedIn consistently. But I can use tools like Sales Navigator as well to see people who are engaged in the past 30 days. Those are the people I want to connect with.
The second thing is share. You need to share relevant content. Hubspot did a study, and they shared that 44% of executives mentioned that they’d make discoveries for new solutions and offerings on social media. This is crazy. Before, it was totally on search, like searching through Google. But these people are looking for stuff. If you are out there on LinkedIn, I’m not saying you need to be an influencer and post about your coffee, but what you need to do is share content that your ICP would more than likely like. What are the top five questions that you get top of the funnel when you’re reaching out to someone or in your disco? What are some of the things or initial concerns that people bring up? Use that opportunity. Write a post relevant to that particular thing. Don’t pitch your service, but answer that question. For me, maybe somebody will say, cold calling is dead. I don’t believe cold outreach work anymore. That’s a post that I would write. Cold outreach doesn’t work anymore.
Many people that I’ve worked with feel that same exact way. What they found, many people I talk to say the same exact thing and feel the same way. They felt in the past, before they started working with us, they felt that they were wasting their time just doing cold calls or sending out blanketed emails or just doing weird LinkedIn posts or outreach. What they found, however, was that when they target and they did blankety-blank, and I give the tips on that, they found better success. I’m curious, how much outreach do you do, or do you feel that outreach still works in 2024? This is a post that people going to engage with. My ICP will see that because that’s a common question that they bring up. Then now that brings about the engagement.
The last factor is the engagement factor. Engage with people, everyone who comment on your post, who share a emoji or do some a reaction, engage with those individuals. You don’t need thousands. But if you have 10 people who engage on that post, and if there’s 10 people, five of them are your ICP, and you’re able to engage with three of them and start conversation with two of them and land an appointment that turns into a deal, that’s pretty remarkable. And all you did was just share a post on LinkedIn. That took probably 15 minutes, and your engagement probably took another 20 minutes throughout the week.
It’s not complicated when it’s all said and done, but pitching your product or your service to people in a connection request doesn’t work anymore. Just sitting there on the sidelines and just waiting for people to come to you doesn’t work. You need to find those right people who are active on the platform, share relevant content, and engage with them. Hopefully, this helped you. Can’t wait to hear about your success. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, Donald C. Kelly.
For links to connect with Donald and learn more about him, just click over to DailySales.Tips/1771. Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!