#618: LinkedIn Sales Navigator: How I Get Warm Intros Every Week

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.

1:13Sam McKenna: I'm Sam McKenna, and for the last five months, I have been forced to spend time with Nick, one of the co-founders of 30 Minutes to President's Club, while we put together our incredible social selling course. But today, I am going to flip the script on Nick, and I'm going to see, were you actually paying attention? Find out what he learned and if I change his thinking on anything when it comes to social selling. Okay, yes, you did. You did change my thinking on this because I was really skeptical of doing a social selling course. The reason for it is there is so much shitty advice out there about social selling that I think is really freaking dangerous.

1:47I think it is really dangerous and it is causing salespeople to pursue distractions that cause them to miss their quota, miss out on earning potential, and honestly miss out on career growth. What I learned from you, which honestly relieved so much tension for me, is what social selling is not.

2:03Sam McKenna: Yeah. I see so much lies and BS on LinkedIn of people saying social selling is post a bunch of content and the CTOs are going to come running at you saying, I want a demo. That's like, it's a lie. I think there's a lot of advice around social selling, around ask for referrals. Yeah. And when I got this advice as a new salesperson, And I was like, cool, referrals are the best way to get meetings. So I go to my buyers. I go to the prospects I'm talking to. I'm like, hey, Sam, do you happen to know anybody who's looking for a workflow automation tool and struggling with some of the same challenges you are?

2:38If so, I would really appreciate an introduction.

2:40Sam McKenna: And every single customer said, of course, Nick, let me give it some thought and I'll get back to you. And do you know how many people got back to me? Zero. You have a clear structure and system and process for referral prospecting, where you are using your network to gain access to their network. Honestly, if you follow this, you don't really need to do a lot of the classic cold prospecting. What I learned from you is the first thing I'm going to do is there's a series of sales nav reports that will show me the people most likely to help me out. Yeah. These include people that used to work at my current company.

3:21This includes my boss, my boss's boss, my cross-functional leaders. So like my product leader, my engineering leader, our implementation team, our CSM, other reps on the team who have been in our space for a long time. This includes my company's current customers. I can work with my CSM and say, okay, the CFO at this law firm knows all these other CFOs. CSM, can you help me get connected with our current customer and can we make some asks of them and if you do all of this you will be able to come up with a list of like 200 people yeah that are your prospects that people who like you or have a vested interest in you know like actually know and then it's just about going to each of those people that you have direct access to who have a vested interest in saying hey you know these eight or these 12 or these 20 people, I'm trying to get a meeting with them.

4:16I'm wondering who you actually know. If I ghost wrote you something, or if I gave you some more context, would you be open to connecting with me? Biggest takeaway that I've had around like this referral prospecting is that it dramatically expands your field of prospecting to break into any one account. And so it used to be when I was prospecting a law firm, I would cold call the managing partner, the CFO, the COO. But now one example you gave me in the course is you should look for past users of your product who have now changed jobs into your territory. So I'm thinking about a law firm example.

4:54I could have set up a report to see anybody that came from Gibson Dunn, a law firm that was a customer of ours and moved to Jones Day, an account I was trying to break into. And even if it was an associate, a lawyer at the law firm, just like they're not going to have decision-making power, I could still reach out to him and be like, hey, you used our product. I'm now trying to sell to your new company. If you didn't have a horrible experience, would you be willing to just give me a sense of how to get your CFO's attention or get your managing partner's attention? And it is a step slower than just outbounding the CFO, but the conversion is so much higher and you get more juice for your squeeze.

5:34Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

6:01Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. If you are sick of non-actionable takes about AI and sales, you might be interested in attending my live session at Apollo next on September 30th in San Francisco. Come and join if you want to join actionable sessions with teams like yours, if you want first looks at Apollo's biggest launches, and if you want to network with operators who are talking action, not academia. I promise that you are going to walk away with stuff that you can put into action right away, and you can register for free if you use our 30 MPC link or code in the show notes.

6:30I will see you there. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like, typically, when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

7:02There's a link in the show notes. I want to go to something you said, Sam, which was the concept of social selling can feel kind of ambiguous. And one of the things that I think we did a really good job together was like we built an extremely step by step, practical, accessible system for actioning on it together. But one thing that I think you had already baked pretty well was the concept of the social inbound engine. And we spent a lot of the first part of this conversation talking about referrals and going to your immediate network to get access to their network. But the coolest thing is that your network and your network's network, they are changing all the time, right?

7:43People are starting and leaving jobs. They're meeting at conferences and trade shows. They're meeting online. They're interacting with each other. And what that means is like your CFO, she might go speak on a panel in Denver with one of your prospects. And if you're in a big company, you're never going to know that unless you are literally tracking everybody's calendar and agenda. And you taught me this concept of all of these different reports that I can set up in LinkedIn sales. Now you set a report that shows any time a executive on your team connects with someone in your territory. Yeah. Because that means something happened that these people met.

8:23And right when that happens, you can set it up that LinkedIn SalesNab alerts you to this new connection of your CFO. They speak on this panel together and they shake hands and connect afterwards. All of a sudden, there's a warm referral path that you should be taking advantage of. And 99.9 % of sellers are never going to know that.

8:40Sam McKenna: Imagine you're sitting in your company all hands, right? And you've got your executive team, three or four members of your executive team that are on stage. And they say, oh my gosh, well, we were just speaking on this panel. We were in San Francisco doing this. I spoke with the CMO of TransUnion, this and that. And you're like, hello? Like TransUnion is my client. See, you spoke on the panel. You get access to that information just by setting up this report. And you can't do that times a hundred executives. But like, just look, go and see like, who are the people that are actively, who's out there all the time that's going and presenting on your behalf?

9:15Sam McKenna: Who's doing like a tour, a speaking tour? Your chief communications officer probably puts a ton of budget behind certain leaders and getting them to do pay to play. Who are those people? And then who are your like super dynamic, constant networkers? Your Sam and your Nix of the world. Even if they're just director level, if they're going and they're connecting with people left and right, their network is expanding by the day. And you can just save a couple of those searches, monitor it and then capitalize on it. Speed to lead and speed to trust. So some of the reports that you taught me in this social inbound engine, in-network job changers.

9:49These are people that you are first degree connected with, people that you know in real life, who change jobs and move into your territory. Even if they are not a buyer, if they're now at one of your target accounts, don't you want to just like text them and be like, yo, you work at a company I'm trying to sell to, can you help me out?

10:06Sam McKenna: That's the exact script we're going to give you. Yeah, exactly. My favorite, I think, is when a new executive joins your company, you can set it up in sales now that you get alerted when anytime somebody above a certain altitude joins your company. And you might be thinking, why would I want to know this? Well, new executive wants to make an impact quickly. And so you can reach out and say, hey, new head of product. I know you're in New York and I'm in California. So we haven't met in the office, duh. But I'm on the Western regional team. And I'm actually wondering if you might be able to help me out.

10:38Like you're connected with seven people that I'm actually trying to get meetings with. and if you actually know them i'm wondering if you might be able to help me out could i ghost write something for you could you make an intro got another one of like a current customer logo that you didn't personally close changes jobs and moves to a new territory so anyone who used to work at acme and now moves to beta acme is your customer beta is your target account you can get alerted to that even if you didn't close the the customer and it's just like when you set this some social machine up that you taught me about it like it's basically like another mql machine that you are setting up you get all your mql marketing they're actually good here's what i

11:17Sam McKenna: love if you track that at the executive level right and i go let's say i'm selling our sales training i go to the cro from one company to the other they are like yeah that decision's made two or three levels below me it's not my decision also i'm busy onboarding so go down there but potentially the person says, yes, we loved you at Acme. Go ahead. Let me put you in touch with Susan on our enablement team, make that introduction. Guess what? By using that one search, now I have gotten the meeting. I've gotten the introduction. I'm multi-threaded at the CRO level and the enablement level with just one thing.

11:52Sam McKenna: And when I get introduced to the enablement person, I can say, thank you so much for the introduction. Really looking forward to meeting with you, Susan. Sharon, I'm going to keep in touch over time. I'll send you some things, et cetera, et cetera. Basically telling Susan, don't yell at me when I go to your CRO and stay in touch because I'm going to nurture them, I'm going to educate, et cetera. And now I can nurture both sides of it. You don't lose access when you do that. Yeah. That's the last thing I want. I want to get kicked down. I want to talk to the person that's going to help make that decision, but I want the CRO to also know that I'm bringing value, perspective, et cetera, even offer to connect the CRO with other CROs, right?

12:26Sam McKenna: So they can build a network, make new friends and connect them with other customers that we have. So I think there's a couple unintended consequences of social selling. And I say consequences, but they're actually good things. One, you alluded to it earlier, is you're a rep. You go to your leader, your leader's leader. Now you're going to your product team. You're going to the deal desk person. The visibility that you get in your company, people, they see you doing the work of prospecting. And kind of the crappy thing about cold calling, as painful as it is, you're like locked in a booth by yourself or a room by yourself.

13:00And people don't see that effort. And the reality of corporate politics is oftentimes the people that are getting promotions, the people getting visibility are the ones where folks see the work that is being done. And you might, you might spend 10 minutes asking five people for referrals and your peer might spend 10 hours cold calling, but your 10 minutes are more visible. Bingo. And they're also probably going to yield better results. Yeah. And so you're going to move up more. And then just the other thing is like when you start talking to people at other companies, when you talk to people that left your company, when you talk to your investors or board members to ask for referrals, when you go to customer job changes of someone you didn't sell to say you're in my territory now, all of a sudden you start talking to all of these people and your professional network and the career opportunities available to you, the future referrals available to you, they start to they start to compound.

13:51Sam McKenna: You will never be or will rarely be in the position where you have to look for a job. Even if something happens, God forbid you are a rift or something like that, or acquisition happens, etc. You now have an unbelievable network of executives who have seen what you do and what caliber you are who would be lucky to have you. Yeah. So I want to ask you a couple, like, maybe hot takes. So what do you think the most dangerous lie that is spoken about as if it's a truth about social selling is out there? Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal.

14:28When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist. Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. If you are sick of non-actionable takes about AI and sales, you might be interested in attending my live session at Apollo Next on September 30th in San Francisco.

15:01Come and join if you want to join actionable sessions with teams like yours, if you want first looks at Apollo's biggest launches, and if you want to network with operators who are talking action, not academia. I promise that you are going to walk away with stuff that you can put into action right away, and you can register for free if you use our 30MPC link or code in the show notes. I will see you there. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple-choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C.

15:34Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve, because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, PipeDrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub. There's a link in the show notes.

15:53Sam McKenna: I think you nailed it in terms of content. And so I think one of the troubling parts is to say, one, you just need to post, you need to show up daily, every day. And then you need to fill the feed with content that includes pictures of yourself. So selfies all day, every day. And I think the reason that I'm not supposed to. OK, yeah, hurry. Yeah. Make sure you get one of me as well. The thing that's dangerous about that is one, your your selfies may help juice your analytics that are visible to others. But it will 90 percent of the time not help the actual impressions of your post. So if you look at some of the pictures that I post or if they are celebratory or they're talking about something that I'm doing, it's my network that sees it, not the broader network.

16:45Sam McKenna: I think when you hear that advice from people on that being how you social sell, that should be your number one key that this is not an expert in social selling. Because the social selling part is a fraction of the activity. Barely any of it is content. Like we literally put in the course, it is optional to post content. You do not need to do it to take advantage of 99 % of the benefits of social selling. That's exactly right. And so the real plays come in the data and intelligence that you can leverage from LinkedIn and then in Navigator. Maybe one other dangerous part is that there are checklists that you're supposed to do every single day that include comment on two or three influencers' posts.

17:27Sam McKenna: Well, we're not looking for you to comment on influencers' posts. And comment with what? So be weary, right, when you hear that, and when you also hear just comment without direction. So in our course, right, we talk about how to be thoughtful with your commentary, what to write, even like how to use AI to make sure that you write something smart. Let's talk about those. Let's talk about those because some people here might not be sold on buying the course. In my first year as an AE selling ERP software to big law firms, I don't know anything, Sim. I still barely know anything. I see the COO of a 500 attorney law firm posts on LinkedIn.

18:03How do I leave a comment that one doesn't get me made fun of by my team? Because social selling is a very visible thing. I think that's the reason people don't do it. But two doesn't make the buyer be like, who the hell are you?

18:16Sam McKenna: So I think one, you have to look for content where you can reasonably engage. You may have the COO or the managing partner of a law firm posting content habitually, that just isn't something you can comment on and not look like an idiot. Try to be a part of a conversation. If you're BDR and you're commenting on a CRO's content about how to be a CRO, we're probably not going to get very far and you're going to be seen as a fraud. So look for some content where you can genuinely engage or you can say, I think I know what to say here. Now let me figure this out. Now this might be how to run an effective one-on-one.

18:50Sam McKenna: This might be something where they had a team offsite. This might be their partner retreat. This could be maybe something about their merger and acquisition. And you could simply say, this is so inspiring to see. I love the strategy behind it. I love the visibility of it. It's just such a cool, modern, fresh thing to do. Thanks for sharing. You could just write something like that. It doesn't always have to be thought-provoking and very smart, but engage. Show that you made that effort. Now, let's say you're still like, okay, I still don't know what to write, even for something that seems straightforward, what do I do?

19:20Sam McKenna: Drop it in Claude and say, this is my role. This is what I sell. This is my key buyer persona. Is this person? I would love to write something that's thoughtful from somebody with my experience level. What's something I might be able to say? And what's cool is Claude might also say, well, did you see that she posted these three other things? And you could tie it to that. And now you look like a genius. So let's say instead of the people listening to us right now, not our SDRs, not our AEs, But what if you are talking to a senior tenured frontline manager or you are a second line manager? You think about what I want to ask you, Nick, is what are what would you do differently?

19:55Sam McKenna: Like you in your leadership role, even though you don't oversee the sales team, right? That's our on. But what would you do differently from a social selling perspective, given what you know now? Is there a hack? Is there something that that came up where you're like, gosh, we should really be doing this? Or do you even have an example of something you've done that's already helped you win? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just, I think as a sales leader, you have the opportunity to direct where your team puts their limited number of sales calories they can expend in any given day. And if I were a leader and I was skeptical about cold calling, I was skeptical about social selling.

20:31I would probably just test this with one of my reps and I would see that it would work. But if you have a team of eight and you can get those eight people to go out to their network, to get access to their network's network, and you do that across eight sellers, you can, we can't do math. I can't do math here. You can probably get a warm introduction to every account in the region that you oversee. And you can get in fast. While I think other outbound channels work, I think that if I am a leader or I'm a rep who's like, I need to fill my pipeline now. You go run this play, these plays for a week.

21:17Oh, man. We'll see you at President's Club.

21:20Sam McKenna: You just gave me a great idea. So you are a frontline leader that needs to do that exact same thing. We think about this depending on the time of year, right? And depending on your fiscal calendar, run a spiff on it, right? So find discretionary budget or ask for discretionary budget and run a SPF just with your team. Don't tell anybody else that you're doing it. And so you run the SPF, you do the social selling piece, run it for four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks, whatever. Then you've got an unbelievable amount of data of what worked differently. And then you can also go to your enablement team and say, when we run our sales kickoff, I want to do a presentation on this.

21:53Sam McKenna: Here's a tactical advice that we took. Here's what we learned from 30 Minutes to President's Club. Here's how we applied it. And here's how in three weeks, a team of eight booked eight meetings each. Not only is the volume something that just kicked everybody else's ass, but here's the caliber of the level of meetings that we set. So all of a sudden you're crushing it. Your pipeline's full. Your sales team is jazzed. No one's cold calling anymore. And you're getting to present on your national stage for sales kickoff of how you crushed it. And then, so now as a frontline leader, you're getting promoted.

22:24Sam McKenna: You're getting visibility. People are saying, come and teach that to the rest of our teams. and they're like, wish I could. I'm too busy on calls, closing deals with our reps. Sam, this has been a very fun conversation. Thank you for all of the time, effort, energy, focus that you put on building this with us because I know it is going to help a lot of salespeople and a lot of sales teams, which is the reason that we do this at 30MPC. And I'm really excited about what we have built together. Folks, again, in the description of this episode, if you want to go get the entire PDF of all of the warm referral reports and the step-by-step guidance on how to set up your social inbound engine.

22:57It's free. Go grab it. If you want to check out the course, we would really appreciate it. Sam, thank you for your partnership. Thanks, Sam. There's a nice handshake.

23:17Today's show is brought to you by Proposify, the proposal management software designed to make every deal a closed deal. When you send a proposal to a prospect, include a video of yourself walking through the proposal because it's going to be shared with stakeholders beyond just your champion. You want to make it easy for those other people to digest and you want to be able to control the narrative with your presentation. And bonus, Proposify data shows that when buyers watch the video, it increases your chances of winning by over 3x. So do not let your proposals become a disappointing plot twist.

23:43Get our proposal success guide free in the show notes. If you are sick of non-actionable takes about AI and sales, you might be interested in attending my live session at Apollo Next on September 30th in San Francisco. Come and join if you want to join actionable sessions with teams like yours, if you want first looks at Apollo's biggest launches, and if you want to network with operators who are talking action, not academia. I promise that you are going to walk away with stuff that you can put into action right away, and you can register for free if you use our 30MPC link or code in the show notes.

24:13I will see you there. Today's show is brought to you by Pipedrive's easy-to-use and customizable CRM with built-in meeting intelligence. My favorite discovery question is the multiple choice question, which sounds like typically when I'm talking with folks like you, they're focused on A, B, or C. Which is it for you? Now, A, B, and C have to be problems that you can solve because that's how you steer the conversation in the direction of places you can help them. Now, Pipedrive's built-in meeting intelligence helps you focus on your follow-up question, not on scrambling to take live notes. And we built a full discovery toolkit with them free in the 30MPC closers hub.

24:45There's a link in the show notes.