Do you use LinkedIn for B2B?
Hey, do you use LinkedIn for B2B sales? What is your approach?
Also, if you'd like to connect, drop me your profile and I'll add you :)
Hey, do you use LinkedIn for B2B sales? What is your approach?
Also, if you'd like to connect, drop me your profile and I'll add you :)
Have had zero luck direct selling to 1st level contacts on LI. I messaged/approached about 20% of my connections with 3 tiers of offer after manually reviewing their LI Profiles and seeing they were sub-optimal or down-right horrible. I am a resume / LIP editor so I have years of experience in this area. Offered affordable pricing on: 1. a complete review (they could DIY correct themselves later), 2. a 7+ day course to teach them how to create the best of the best, or a 3. a full edit job. Nada!
Wow, I would assume you'd get one or two leads at least. Then again, maybe you could try offering them some small service for free that you make public, and then figure out a premium upsell.
Honestly I haven't had much luck with LinkedIn either, the two topics I see doing well is marketing and sales. Other than that, I guess cheesy motivational content seems to be popular. And I don't mean all motivational content is cheesy, quite the contrary - but the things I see being shared on LinkedIn are ridiculous.
I use it for branding and networking only. Never sales. Never try to push stuff. Folks who sell stuff to me on LinkedIn get an automatic “ignore” from me.
Hey Gil! Interesting, so how do you go about branding and networking? Do you have any tips and tricks up your sleeve?
I guess networking at a basic level is self-explanatory: add connections, talk to them, interact, comment on with posts. How about the branding aspect?
Most of the time it's less commenting, and more writing content and responding to people asking me questions. I co-authored a book which was published earlier this year in our specific niche (search marketing) and I get a lot of people interacting and asking questions because of it. That, to me, is branding.
It may take years to develop, but the quality of networking that comes from adding value instead of pushing something is much higher. We may only get 3-5 clients a year from branding but those are enough to make it worth it.
Interesting perspective. I was fiddling with the idea of writing content for LinkedIn, but honestly the only topics I see getting attention on the platform are marketing and sales.
Since I'm leaning more towards the technical side, I can't provide any real value to those discussions.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, and congrats on the book!
@andreigaspar there are a lot of technical people on Linkedin, so I think that if you want to write content you should to give it a chance. Maybe you have to find a good tradeoff between go too deep in technical stuff (such as code snippet and so on) and focus on process, methodology and organizational topics
Fair point. I'll try putting together some content related to methodology and best practices, that might work better than raw technical discussions.
Thanks for the input!
Yes. I connect to a lot of people and send them a short one-liner question within the invitation to start a conversation. From there on out it's aiming to figure out whether they've got a need for the product or not. If not, then no need to share a link or pitch the product. Then rather look at ways how you can help them and vice versa with introductions. It's a lot of one on one hustling instead of using automated flows and bots. Not a fan of the fake shizzle.
Great stuff Ruben, and what is your strategy for figuring out whether they do have the need for the product?
Ask about the problem the tool is solving (without mentioning that you've got a solution). Then aim to figure out how frequent and frustrating it is. Some interesting messages can be found here: https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hubfs/315483/downloads/Cold Email Hacks 2.0.pdf?t=1515471147922
Examples:
Hey Andrei,
Thanks for connecting. I'm currently researching fellow X'ers to see how they deal with Y. Is this a common problem for you too?
<% if yes %>
Is this a big issue for you? If so, can I show you what we're working on and see if that would help you achieve xxxx.
Hey thanks dude, that was really insightful. Great resource too!!
yes i do use linkedin but most of the time i use it to find new people and extract their emails with aeroleads.com so i can make a list and use it for marketing
Oh I see, sneaky approach lol
not that much sneaky :P , just generally !
Hey Andrei,
LinkedIn outreach can deliver amazing results if you have a strong value prop and know who's your ideal client. But it is time-consuming and must be done by a human, not a bot or automation.
We actually built a solution for this focused on small / lean teams: a done-for-you social media outreach, Singular Reach. We engage with prospects to build trust and "warm them up", which saves tons of time and improves close rates.
We just "pre-launched" the MVP (https://singularreach.landen.co/) and are now working with our early clients while refining it for the official launch in October.
If you need any help, feel free to connect :)
Thanks for sharing Danilo, you've got an interesting product there. Good luck on the launch!
After 4 years in China, I can say "free" doesn't work unless you are a huge company willing to lose a lot of capital. There is no sense of Cialdini's reciprocity here like I experienced in the US. Only, "how great a deal can I get and walk away regardless of the counter-parties business model?". A service is seen as truly valuable only if you charge.
Interesting insight, I am not at all familiar with the Chinese business culture. How did you end up moving there?