#617: Three Steps to Use LinkedIn to Find More Prospects | Charlotte Johnson | 30MPC Hall of Fame

0:00Sellers, cold outbound sucks for both you and your prospect. It takes an insane amount of effort, reply rates are in the tank, and you are fishing in the same pond as everybody else. I literally wrote a book on cold calling, but Sam McKenna, who's the CEO of hashtag SamSales, completely changed my mind about what I thought social selling and great outbound prospecting is. Sam literally has broken 13 national sales records. She was recruited by LinkedIn because because she was so good at LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and she built her business from scratch into a multi-million dollar business using exactly what she teaches in her social selling course that she built in partnership with 30MPC.

0:43Go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam. Her new course teaches you how to use relationship data and your network's network to get warm introductions into your dream accounts that would never answer your cold call, respond to your cold email, or open the gift that you sent to their office. If you go to 30MPC.com forward slash Sam, we are giving away all of Sam's favorite LinkedIn sales nav reports, alerts, and scripts that you can use to break into more accounts with less effort. Over the next few weeks, everything 30MPC is releasing is going to be focused on either social selling or one of our best of our Sam McKenna episodes.

1:20And the reason for that is at the end of October, we are launching our social selling course with Sam. Today, we are doing an episode with Charlie Johnson, where she walks through her process for using LinkedIn to stack her calendar with meetings. By the way, if you want to pre-order Sam's course, you can do it in the show notes, but you don't have to to listen to this episode. Let's go. Let's roll it.

1:46Hey, it's Charlie here. And today I'm going to be sharing a couple of tactics I've been using on LinkedIn to help me book some meetings. And we're going to split this into three sections. Firstly, we're going to look into finding warm prospects on LinkedIn. Then we're going to look over at groundswell slash detective work. And finally, we're going to go over some of the messaging that we can be using. And these three sections will all link together. So buckle up, everyone. But we're going to start with section one, which is finding warm prospects. And I'm a big believer in working smart over hard.

2:18So if there's a way for me to target a prospect or a company who's more likely to respond, then I'm 100 % going to be doing that. And you've probably all used CRM closed lost reports to find quick wins. And in my opinion, what I'm about to share is the closed lost equivalent in LinkedIn. And you'll need to start firstly by getting all of your accounts into Sales Navigator. And I'm not going to bore you with the instructions on how to do this. So in my LinkedIn prospecting playbook with 30 Minutes Presidents Club, it's going to share clear instructions on how to do this, plus additional tips outside of what's shared in the episode today.

2:53So make sure you check that out. But once our list of accounts are in Sales Navigator, you're going to head over to the Lead Filter tab in Sales Nav and create a new lead search. You're going to scroll down and under the heading Workflow, you're going to click Account List and add that account list that you've just uploaded into Sales Nav. We want to only show the stakeholders from our accounts that we're going to be targeting. So then further filter this down to just show specific seniorities that you want to target in your account list. So VPs, CXOs, directors, et cetera. This will now present all of the stakeholders within your accounts that you should be targeting on LinkedIn.

3:32But for the juicy part, we're gonna use the spotlight filter to find some quick wins within this prospect list. The spotlight filter is positioned at the bottom left and there are a lot of filters within this filter section. But the ones that I recommend the most are firstly following your company on LinkedIn, which quite obviously just means people who are following your company. so familiar with your offering already. The second one, probably my favorite, which is TeamLink Intro. And this one has been huge for me getting into my tier ones this year. And TeamLink Intro is just simply people in your company who are connected to stakeholders in your target accounts.

4:10And the final one that I'm going to be using is change jobs in the past 30 days. Now, people usually who have moved to a new company have a specific reason for doing that. So maybe they're targeted with a certain project or maybe with achieving some chunky goals. So this one is a great one to also use. And to re-emphasize the point that a big chunk of my pipeline this quarter has been built using these three filters, in particular the TeamLink intro filter, which I'll share messaging for later. So wrapping up this section one, we should now be able to find from our target list that we've imported into Sales Navigator, some good fit prospects who are more likely to reply.

4:53Now let's head into section two for groundswell and detective work. And one of the challenges we have when we're reaching out to prospects is the fact that we just guess the challenges that they have. This plus the fact them not accepting our connection request on LinkedIn makes it really difficult to refine messaging and engage with them on LinkedIn. So when I say ground swell, I simply mean adding the lower level employees on LinkedIn. For me, as an example, I target revenue leaders. So we'll add all the sales team on LinkedIn and I'll just use a blank invite. And this benefits me in two ways.

5:28Firstly, when I connect with a prospect, I will have mutual connections, which increases the chance of them accepting. And secondly, I can do a little bit of detective work. So let's expand on this detective work part. So once I have some of those reps that I've added on LinkedIn accepting me, I'm going to message them and do a little bit of digging. And I might say something like, hey, can I ask a random question? And the goal for me here is to be asking questions that are going to help me shape my messaging. And the below what I'm about to share is an example that would be relevant for my scenario, but you might have different personas you're targeting.

6:04So depending on the insight you need, you might need to slightly change this. So when they've said yes to my can I ask a random question, I will then say something like, hey, thanks so much for helping me out. When we spoke to your CRO, Dave, last year, the SDRs were all using competitor X. Is this still the case? And they might reply like, yes, this is still the case. We're still using them. Now, at this point, depending on how chatty the person is, I'm either going to stop digging if they're a little bit blunt or I'm going to dig a little bit further if they're quite chatty and open. So as an example, I then might say something like, feel free to tell me to bugger off, but I'm about to send a email to Billy Bob, who's your VP of sales.

6:47My email so far mentions the new leadership changes and the hiring in the SSDR team. With this guessing X, Y, Z might be a focus. Is this completely off or something the team are talking about in your team meetings? And again, digging or detective work to help me then make my message to their leadership as relevant as possible. But you would be surprised at the amount of information and direction I'm able to gather at this stage by simply just asking people for help. And I've even had people go to the extent of introducing me directly to their C-suite. Obviously, not everyone is open and chatty to sharing this kind of information.

7:24So I wouldn't overpepper someone with questions if they're a little bit blunt or standoffish. Just make sure you're reading the room correctly. So to summarize the section, we've now increased our connection rates from adding their team on LinkedIn. And hopefully we've narrowed down the messaging that we can use. Now, section three, final section, messaging. And LinkedIn, in my opinion, should be approached differently to email. So if you're using typical email structures here on LinkedIn, they can look quite long and salesy. So I'm going to be sharing two structure examples here. But if you want to see the other structures, then you can check out my LinkedIn prospecting playbook that is with 30 Minutes to Presidents Club.

8:06But let's get into the messaging. And I'm going to share a nurture approach using LinkedIn. And I'm going to be sharing an approach utilizing DOBs or drafts on behalf. So let's go into the nurture approach first. And this is probably my favorite one to use. I'm not going to go straight in with any kind of sales messaging. My aim here is to get the prospect used to replying. So my structure here is going to be personalization followed by challenge followed by offering value add. And it might sound something like this. Personalization, aggressively building the top of sales funnel, reading your job buyer on LinkedIn Billy.

8:44Sales Loft and Benchmark Kit did a study where 55 % of companies shared that Pipeline Gen was their biggest challenge. Thirdly, offering value add. If it's the same challenge for your team, want me to share the process I've used that's helped me build 200K in pipeline last month. And that's it. I'm personalizing and I'm offering something that's genuinely useful for their team. When I'm offering up this piece of content, whatever it might be, I try to not share internal marketing copy, but focus on external because it adds a little bit more credibility in my opinion. And if they say yes to me saying, do you want me to share this template or process that I'm using?

9:22Then we know that they have the challenge, which we solve for. And if they don't reply, it's then giving me an easy follow up to this message as I can simply say, hey, sharing the doc here in case pipeline, Jen, is also a challenge for the team. It's less of a pestery message, which I personally find works better on LinkedIn, especially when there's so many people who are just going in with a pitch. So it's really helping you to stand out. And once someone replies once, they're then more likely to reply to you when you're asking them other questions or expanding on the challenges that you solve for.

9:55Now let's go into approach two, which is the DOB or draft on behalf. And from section one, we were able to find prospects who have team link intros using those spotlight filters on LinkedIn. So prospects basically being connected to someone at your company. So utilizing this information, we're going to get that person internally at our companies who's connected to our prospect to message them on LinkedIn. And the message will vary depending on how well that person knows them. But let's use the scenario that the person internally knows them ish. So maybe they've met them once at an event or worked at the same company, but didn't cross paths.

10:34And the structure I'll use for this is context and personalization, followed by the challenge and then followed by the call to action. So as an example, context and personalization. Hey, Billy, we crossed paths when working at 30 Minutes of President's Club. Hope everything is well. Your name was brought up by one of our reps, Charlie. She mentioned seeing growth in the SDR team when researching you. Secondly, challenge. We're speaking to a lot of SDR managers at the moment who are looking at ways to decrease the time it takes to get to a meeting or to get to a yes or no call to action. Is this something remotely on your mind right now?

11:11Either way, great to see the growth in the team. Sounds like a really exciting time at 30 Minutes to President's Club. And that's it. Very simple, very concise message. And as mentioned before, you're more likely to get a reply from a prospect when they know the person or know of the person messaging them. And that's a wrap. Hopefully in this section three, you've learned two tactics and structures to help you get replies using the messaging on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for listening.

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