Every day, business development seems to become more and more complex – especially when it comes to prospecting & lead generation efforts. Sales leaders and professionals are finding it difficult to keep up and remain ahead of the curve
There’s now an art to outreach.
There are right and wrong ways to personalize.
There are hundreds of competitors jamming the market from every angle.
What’s known as one of the most important platforms in B2B sales, is also becoming one of the hardest to breakthrough. Yup, you guessed it. LinkedIn.
On this episode of Evolved Sales LIVE, host Jonathan Fischer sits down with Alex Boyd, Founder of RevenueZen, to share his insights into creating a B2B pipeline on LinkedIn and winning new accounts with a lead generation strategy that requires just a few minutes of your time each day.
Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn for more engaging sales insights and discussions! Happy watching!
Jonathan Fischer 0:03
Welcome back. Thanks for joining us. I'm Jonathan Fisher. Today's fast changing business development space has become so multifaceted and seemingly complex. Many business developer professionals are finding it difficult to remain efficient on the most important platform on the world for b2b sales that's linked in. Well, today's guests can help us with that. Alex Boyd is a serial entrepreneur who most recently founded revenue Zen, a b2b services firm helping marketers grow their companies through both paid and organic means. Alex brings a specialists unique insight into creating b2b pipeline and winning new logos from every possible angle. And today, he's going to share exactly how you or your team can crush your LinkedIn lead generation in just a few minutes per day. Alex, what a pleasure to have you on the show with us. Welcome.
Alex Boyd 0:50
Thanks so much, Jonathan. Happy to be here.
Jonathan Fischer 0:53
So just before we get into the topic of the day, would you tell us a little bit more how you arrived at the insights you're going to share with the listener
Alex Boyd 1:01
by accident. So when I left my last job before starting revenues in and aware on the credit companies that I co founded, I was the head of growth and sales as a growing software company that also had 10 A's in the test CRS. And so when I left, I was still a young professional early in my career, and decided to start sharing my learnings on modern sales pros on their forums and on LinkedIn. And what I was trying to do was just test my ideas, I wanted to know if they were any good. I wanted to know if people thought what I had learned and developed at my company was worthwhile to them, too. So I started posting. And when we started getting people saying, I've been reading your posts, you appeared in my newsfeed, I wanted to reach out, I saw the revenue stacking up and I thought, Oh, this is this is a strategy there's there's more to this than I can structure. So I discovered all this really, over the course of last six years, when LinkedIn has really become more popular. And have coalesced. What initially started as just an organic effort to journal in public became more of a structured strategy that I realized I was doing something intentionally. And it was really working well. So here we are. And I'm looking forward to sharing everything that I've learned and developed with everyone else on the show.
Jonathan Fischer 2:18
Well, I love it. And to further set it up. I mean, there are many angles to business development, and you actually work in all of those angles, whether it's paid advertising, whether it's organic search result based lead generation, demand, Gen, all of that. How important would you say LinkedIn outreach really is? Is it becoming so crowded, it's losing relevance? Or what would you say to that?
Alex Boyd 2:40
I think that LinkedIn outreach alone has lost a lot of relevance as already, if it's just LinkedIn outreach paired with nothing else, the response rates not gonna be very good. And you're not going to have a lot of success, merely setting up automated campaigns. So this is really aware of the the closeness of marketing and sales, or really just product and sales, just a different department apart from just the prospecting team has to come into play, whether that's a combination of outreach from the founders profile, as well as the sales team, whether it's really well designing the sales teams, LinkedIn profiles, designing and publishing good collateral, landing pages linked to in your LinkedIn messages, content from the person who's doing the outreach on their profile, so that it really makes the profile more just believable, credible, before you send somebody connect request down to the act of tracking all of your metrics, in CRM, which most people don't do, but is incredibly important to any sales effort. All these things have to work together. So I think the problem is, I'm going to kind of skew your question a little bit. A lot of people think that LinkedIn outreach is by itself a perfectly fine answer. And the problem with that is, it's gotta be combined with the rest of your go to market strategy. It's just one tactic. And it's getting kind of overused. So like any outreach, it's not done, it's not dead, it's never going to be dead. But you have to pair it with more and more, because buyers skepticism filters, their thresholds for what they're gonna believe, really high. So the bar for what you're doing also has to go higher than that as well. And that's where you were the marketing and sales alignment. We talked about this phrase a lot. But it doesn't get executed. It gets talked about more than it gets actually done. So that's really where I see LinkedIn outreach efforts and LinkedIn social selling efforts in general succeeded or failed.
Jonathan Fischer 4:35
Well, and that's, that's often a good thing to look at. What are some of the key areas where companies are missing the mark? So you already alluded to one there's a lack of integration, maybe across the board between the different facets of their business development efforts, certainly between marketing and sales, they're often siloed off and separate from each other. And yeah, they talk and yeah, to hopefully play nice, but that's not the same thing as being integrated. Maybe you could flesh it out even further and share other way. Is that you see companies missing it when it comes to their outreach?
Alex Boyd 5:03
Yes. One of the biggest ones is sending generic outreach. And honestly, you can send in templated outreach, I've seen it work, okay. But if you're sending it to the wrong person, if you're sending it with copywriting, it's less than stellar. But most importantly, if you're just sending the wrong offer to too many of the wrong people, you're burning too much of that market share. One of the things about LinkedIn is you're limited and how much raw outreach you can do kind of like was only a certain amount that you can do per email inbox. It's similar with LinkedIn. So you're gonna maximize that valuable real estate. And I'm actually not a devotee of personalization, for the sake of personalization. What you have to do more than anything is be relevant. I've bought tons of stuff as a company owner from cold outreach, I've spent five figures per month on vendors that reached out to us cold. But the thing that they got right was they had a very relevant offer. And the offer didn't contain anything extraneous, then it was just, it was poetry, not prose, it was extremely well targeted, it came from somebody I saw as credible. And the offer was exactly what I needed. So that's really the fundamentals of it, is you have to be in the right place with the right product at the right time. And just do your best at that. That is more important than, you know, go Colgate Raiders, I saw you went to school in upstate New York, by the way, here's the software like this lady that doesn't actually add anything. So the core of it, the first principle, the first marketing principle have to look at that bleeds into the sales effort is, there's the relevance of your offer to the right person at the right time. And that comes down to honestly just laziness or effort in the list building the setup, and the understanding the persona process. So one example of this is not targeting your titles, right? So you have you want to have two product titles, but then you include Product Marketing titles, and it's totally different have a role, right? Even product growth versus product analytics, totally different roles. So that that hybrid diligence and exactly who you're reaching out to, and then making sure you have the industry knowledge to justify why you're reaching out. Yeah, that's where it starts. There's a bunch of other tactics and tips I can give. But that's where it has to come down to, at the end of the day, if you get that right there get a lot of other things right to
Jonathan Fischer 7:28
well, and there's a lot of the efforts out there that you see that still try to go old school, hey, how you doing? I still get calls on my phone, if I make the mistake of picking up, hey, how you doing today? And they'll maybe not even say my name, right? So there's a lot of a lot of easy mistakes, low hanging fruit to pick on companies, but even companies that are doing other things? Well, I think there's a real nugget you mentioned there, which is they didn't try to overdo it. It was very targeted. And the relevance of their effort was more important than how personalized it was. Is that fair?
Alex Boyd 7:56
Absolutely. I think relevance beats personalization ad.
Jonathan Fischer 7:59
So let's talk a little bit about the coordination piece. Because you've really come kind of come into conversation with that as a very heavy thing. But before we do that, would remind the live audience. One of the great things about doing this live here on LinkedIn is you get to ask your questions and get them answered, right here with our guests. So go ahead and don't wait, put your questions in the chat. And we're gonna bank those for the end of our half hour here together and circle back with Alex and get you some additional insights that way. So when it comes to integrating, and kind of defeating this, it's pretty pretty baked in and a lot of folks that have been in business for a while that you know, marketing is marketing, sales is sales, even though we talk about it, like you said, I think acting on is very different going from abstract to concrete on that. Could you help us with that? What are some tips that can help us make some headway on that?
Alex Boyd 8:45
Yeah, good question. I think that if you are a sales leader, or you're a rep that wants to ask your sales leader for help in this, and you're talking about LinkedIn, one of the best ways to make your outreach better, is actually to like seed the ground with more content and more good brand impressions before you actually reach out. So the first thing I look at when we're helping a company improve their outreach is actually not outreach. It's what else you did around that. Think about it this way, if somebody from a brand you've heard of a lot of times reaches out, their message can be weaker than normal. And I'm still going to respond because I had built up familiarity and impression from them. So don't forget this evolutionary concept that if we are familiar with something, we're more likely to be less skeptical of it. If I have seen that other caveman before, I'm not going to be as freaked out. Same thing with this. If I have senior, your VPS or your CEO, especially posting on LinkedIn, I'm far more likely to respond to your outreach. So that's a big key for when we talk about sales and marketing. Great It's the CEO or a really good CRO, is the person to tie those two things together. So here's an example. Right, one of the most, the best programs for LinkedIn outreach is a combination of the CEO leads with a strategic narrative, meaning What's the story we're telling to the market about? Why this solution at this time for which people, and the CEO is posting about that, at least weekly customer stories, thought leadership concepts, how tos, tips carousels, whatever it is, right, maybe it's produced in house with an agency, like ours doesn't really matter. But the purpose is, people have seen that face name, company brand. And then a lot of good stuff happens. So one of two things can happen. One, you can have all the people who engage with the executive team of the content, log and CRM, which provides a really good call list and outreach list for the sales team. You don't have to mention, Hey, I saw you saw this person's post, because that can feel a little bit invasive, but you can just use it as an indication they're much warmer. The second concept is just if you're reaching out to people in general, but the marketing and executive team has done a good job of setting that ground, the sales outreach will become more effective, if it's the same. So same list, same messaging, same everything. But marketing has done a good job in advance, you're gonna have a better time as a seller. So when we talk about integration, that's a very specific thing you can do is, as the CEO is to help be the bridge between sales and marketing. So you can as the owner, or founder or CEO, tie those two departments together with good strategic narrative, which lets the sales team participate in that they can reference somebody else's content without themselves having to be the expert. Now, if you're a seller thinking, well, that's not good enough, I want to take more on my own my own plate, then great. So my advice to you as the seller, if you're not getting buy in for that type of effort at your company, is to do it yourself. When I was at my last job, when I was a seller, I would count how many times prospects asked me if I was one of the founders, this was before LinkedIn was was super common. They would ask me Oh, so are you one of the founders. And I would say, No, but that's the second time somebody asked me this month, that means I'm doing a good job. And the reason that happened is because I was really curious about the solution about who had helped about why it helped them, but how they felt when they had that solution. This was a small business accounting and tax solution. So I dug into that. And it meant that I didn't need somebody else's thought leadership quite so much, I could leave with that myself. So if you're leading with a good position, right, not a pitch, but an actual understanding real knowledge, which we can get by being curious, then you're less dependent on that. Ideally, the executive team, the marketing team is also seen in the ground in advance. So sales can kind of come in and sweep almost. But if you're a seller, and you like your company, but you're not getting buy in from that for the rest of your team, great way to do it is just to say, I'm gonna roll up my sleeves and get done myself. So I highly recommend that if you are an ambitious seller to take it upon yourself to say, well, if I was the CEO, how would I message this and to just listen to your prospects as best you can. You don't have too many customer conversations, great pull call recordings, do some of your own research, go on Reddit, you can find the information, it's there. So don't rely if your sales training is not good enough. Go into it yourself getting the materials yourself. So that's what I recommend to sellers who are stuck in that position is a try to do an internal sale to get buy in for SEO during choose narrative. And if not, well, it's up to you. What are you gonna do about it? Right, so just take it upon yourself.
Jonathan Fischer 13:52
Right on? Well, I love that advice. A lot of the best voices out there will tell every sales professional, you're a corporation of one. So that definitely rings very true here on our show. So I wonder a lot of what you're saying that's a great segue into the premise, which is that you can crush your LinkedIn, lead gen, in just a few minutes a day. And I gotta be honest, a lot of things you're talking about sound a little, a little bit time involving. So help us out with that. What are some key ways that any business development professional can make a daily commitment? That's not too huge and yield very large results?
Alex Boyd 14:28
Yes, that's a good question. So a lot of sales are spent a lot of time and don't get much results. So there's, there's a couple different visions. One is, I want to be radically more efficient with my time on LinkedIn. I'm gonna spend almost all my time on LinkedIn, I'm gonna get amazing results, in which case that's your your primary method of business development. I saw Evan Patterson in the listeners of this, the show, I know for a fact that when he spent all of his time on LinkedIn as an SDR years ago, he was able to set so 6070 appointments in a month, at least 40. He spent a lot of time on LinkedIn, but not nearly as many as others in his org spent emailing and calling. So that's great. Now, if your primary method of outreach is emails and calls, and LinkedIn is something you do on the side, great, let's talk about optimizing and spending less time and being more efficient. One of the main things you should add to your cadences apart from outreach is commenting. So public outreach is a great way to think about commenting. If you create a list, whether it's in Sales Navigator, or in aware or a bookmarks bar, of your top prospects, and also the other people that sell to your top prospects and have an audience themselves, comment on all their posts, with something more than agreed, good post. Alright, so this tracks back to being curious and understanding the subject matter really well. And once you do that, you can leave good comments that actually show who you are as a human and your understanding of why the solution helps people. If you can do that, adding comments to your sequences, they about just commenting five or 10 comments a day. If you do that your outreach is so much more effective. If you go for three public interactions comments are received or left and then you direct message somebody, you will need so many fewer actual messages sent to get good quality meetings and ops. Now, if you're an SDR setting meaning for somebody else, then you're going to notice something, the meetings you set from this type of higher quality we do not reach are going to be better opportunities. So hopefully you're comped on ops or closed one. If you're only comped on meetings, you might actually lose out a little bit here because you might set fewer meetings that are much better. So our data show that the win rate on opportunities sourced from LinkedIn from social selling are converted a much higher rate than almost anything else, double cold outbound and didn't involve this type of, you know, preceded commenting, first, helping people publicly form of outreach. So be prepared for a higher quality pipeline, not necessarily a greater quantity of meetings, but they'll be better. And those 10 comments a day shouldn't take you more than 10 minutes. The reason we founded aware one of my companies is to make that time required to leave 10 or 20 comments a day, 10 minutes a day. Whereas normally that would take you an hour and a half to if you're just scrolling through the feed. So whether it takes you a bit longer, a bit less introduced commenting into your workflow, and you'll be far more efficient than only doing private one to one outreach, you want to be seen helping other prospects, because that will build a lot of trust. When you reach out to somebody else they'll have they'll have seen before you commented on another guy's post, and that was insightful. And that will be lodged in their subconscious. When you reach out to them. That's going to be another brand impression you make, they'll have seen your face, your name your company, and it'll be a much easier conversation to start.
Jonathan Fischer 17:59
That's a great tip because it integrates well with what you had said previously about making yourself an expert like taking ownership on being super well educated on your solution on the problems that your solution solves for the end user and so forth, so that you're not just randomly commenting and trying to be friendly. This isn't about being affable. This is about really bringing value to the marketplace. If I'm hearing you correctly, would you agree with that?
Alex Boyd 18:20
Yes, you hit the nail on the head that you it's much better to be respected and trusted. And known as somebody insightful than this to be liked. You don't want to be an asshole. But it's better to be thoughtful than to be liked. And one of the problems with this is people will default to reading comments like, I totally agree this rocks, that's awesome, great post, which just makes you sound like an energetic bunny rabbit, not somebody I'm going to spend 10s of 1000s of hundreds of 1000s of dollars with so be somebody that I can spend a lot of money with, right? And what does that entail? You're gonna have to be talking about an expensive problem. So we're not talking about sending more emails, we're talking about restructuring your sales team, we're talking about the, the future of the company, right? So take one tip for that is when you're thinking about what to comment with, take the problem and you're going to talk about, I'll take the thing you're gonna comment related back to the problem and what that probably means. If you're talking about what the problem you're solving means. And that's just an undercurrent of all your comments. They're gonna, you're gonna, as I call it, talk about an expensive problem, which makes you much more trusted, and much more likely for those comments to result in revenue. As you said, it's not about being affable. It's about being credible.
Jonathan Fischer 19:39
Like that. Is is are there some best practices on some of the nuts and bolts here? I mean, can you wax a little bit too verbose? Do you have a rule of thumb keep it to a paragraph or so what would you say about that part?
Alex Boyd 19:51
That's a good question. I've seen some good comments that are very short. It's less about the length and more about adequately addressed thinking the topic authentically, the word authentically is thrown around a lot. But if you have a real reaction that just takes longer to explain, take two paragraphs. If you're writing two paragraphs to say something very brief, that's weird. Without doing an example, it's hard to it's hard to give you one. But if it has to be a reasonable conversation, I think about any other conversation you might have not on LinkedIn just in real life. Would you? would your response be considered droning on and boring? Or would it be considered appropriately concise? That just depends on what the topic is. But think of LinkedIn as your your virtual conference or virtual coffee shop with your buyers in it. That's where just the social skills part of social selling comes into play?
Jonathan Fischer 20:47
Yeah, well, it's interesting, one of my previous guests, we talked about how social skills themselves have become, well, let's just say negatively impacted by us all being locked in for a couple of years. So maybe that's a sidebar skill area to focus on here. Also, if you don't know whether you've been to vote verbose or not, maybe it's time to get dirt honest. And ask some friends that would be be honest with you to let you know. So that that is definitely a great couple of tips here. Make yourself valuable to your marketplace. very pragmatic, what are some additional ways that, again, small commitment of time, I can get some great results on my LinkedIn, prospecting,
Alex Boyd 21:23
post, and also comment and talk about customer stories, specifically, stories of how other customers were successful. And this is another way where if you're a seller, you're gonna have to really take an honest look at your company's glossy website case studies. And ask yourself if you really understand them. Right? So alright, here's this case study of how this company was able to reduce their inventory on hand from $4 million of inventory to 1.5. Okay, take a moment, do you actually understand how the software you are selling? accomplish that? Was it the software? Was it how the software impacted their team? Was it their ability to staff, the same amount of supply chain managers with an extra tech but no increase in hiring, that's how they will reduce inventory, you really have to get in there and be able to talk about the successes your other customers have had, that one thing will shortcut a bunch of stuff, you'll open so many doors by being able to speak to how other people have solved this one most burning problem that other buyers in the space have, right? So maybe for supply chain, that's one of them, right? It's being able to have just the right amount of inventory on hand and less inventory in your stock. So you're not holding too much. But also you're not running out of supply. So you have to be able to no bullshit explain how your solution does that. You brought up another good point earlier, which is find somebody friendly, who's willing to tell you the real truth. I have a buddy of mine from high school who is a senior cloud cost optimization engineer at Square. That's what I do when we're selling cloud cost optimization software. Hey, Eric, does this sound like sales bullshit to you? And he'd be like, that part is that part's good. And I'm like, well, that's convenient. I don't have to actually. And then I might ask him, you know, explain to me like, I'm five, what part of that makes this a good thing, right? And then Well, part of that makes that fluffy. And I ask others who are experts to poke and prod at my stuff until I can refine my own knowledge. And then I leave with just those little sound bites, customer stories. Bite Size, one sentence, customer story. That's a huge way to be efficient. You don't have to beat around the bush and talk about features and benefits. You can just lead with not some ROI step. But like the one sentence they did that got around this and got to there. How are you approaching this? Oh, man hits people ton of bricks, and they just want to know how it works.
Jonathan Fischer 23:47
Yeah, right on. A couple of things that strike me here is that that's another opportunity, perhaps for better integration. Because while we have to be concise in telling the most important nuggets of a case study, it's good to know the long form, maybe you can add a little extra color, when you're in conversation. I've experienced this where it piques their interest, if you're able to say, well, you don't know the best part. And you can share a little bit more is that maybe that's something that there should be more internal conversation about inside companies. Would you agree?
Alex Boyd 24:15
Yes. So a lot of companies, there's only a couple people who, who know the real good stuff, right? There's only a couple of subject matter experts and everyone else is just sort of pitching the pitch. I noticed a lot there's not a lot of distribution and clarification of a subject matter expertise. And if you're in sales, you can kind of say to a rattle for more of that to be done that can be helpful. And it's a good clarification exercise for the whole company. So even long form do you mean more like posting content? Or do you mean more like when you're in a customer conversation?
Jonathan Fischer 24:51
Yeah, like see, I know what it is so that if I'm talking to that prospect, I could actually share a little some additional insights on it. Like it's really it really is part of our stuff. Almost like a tribal thing, right? Where I really know our story very well. Yep.
Alex Boyd 25:03
Okay, good point. So a couple things. One, if you are the seller, so you don't need to pass the appointment off to somebody else, then I would just not worry about the meeting. I actually don't, I'm not a big meetings person, I'd rather just move prospect brains forward towards buying from us. That doesn't have to require a zoom call. I've done tons of that with like a well written two paragraph DM, a voice note, right. So somebody, somebody reaches out and says, Hey, we're thinking of doing this. We don't know if we should hire this type of person. But how would you approach x y&z I pick up my phone, and I go, alright, good question. I only have 60 seconds to explain this. But here's what I would think about, I leave the rest of the voicemail. And if it just doesn't make sense, and we're treating too many voice notes, I'm like, Well, okay, so we do have I'm running out of time I'm writing is something that you have time for resume next week, I can go over more. A similar principle applies if you are the BDR. And you need to pass this off to somebody else. So I really want in those cases to, you have to have a little bit of depth. But you don't have to have a ton of breadth. So if your VDR memorize one or two good stories in some depth, you don't have to be an expert, just get literally memorize a good amount of expertise in one or two cases. Alright, so maybe it's a better understanding you can spit out at any given time, have one customer story, right? How did that one customer realize those results? Again, in that no bullshit type of way. So then you can bring that up, you can really tell it and if somebody keeps peppering you with questions on it, you can say this really good questions like, I don't know, if we have time, or if it makes sense to go through all of those in writing. You know, hey, no pressure, but the, my team or whatever person's name, will be able to go into more of these stories for you, and talk about whether it makes sense. So I really like the I know your quota. If you're a BDR is based on meetings, the more you can pretend like it's not, the better you're going to do. The people who there's an asynchronicity, right? The people who whose time you want, they don't want more meetings, executives want fewer meetings. So you really have to be in this in the same boat as them where you're both just like, Yeah, I mean, do we have to have meaning? If it makes sense, then yes, but let's avoid calendar clutter, right? You even say that, like it's like, look, I don't know if it makes sense to add more clutter to each of our calendars. But I think it would make just be a better discussion to do a zoom that's not terribly lengthy next week, or the week after, I often just say like in the in the weeks or months to come and love that. Would you make sense to meet this quarter next. That's the best way to get somebody to be with you next week, is to say let's meet this quarter. Next. Yeah. So memorize a little bit of deep such expertise. Don't worry about breath, just get one or two stories really, really down, be able to tell those and then casually allude to more knowledge being available. If they do that, you know, no pressure zoom call. That's the best way to create high quality opportunities. Because if you just pretend like they want meetings as much as you do, they're going to miss trust, all that valuable stuff, human expertise that you so time consuming. We gamed and spat out on that bridge cold call or DM or whatever it is.
Jonathan Fischer 28:22
Yeah, I like that. You're subliminally creating a fear of loss. Would you say this quarter though? They're afraid the ball might get dropped? That's I like that. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's been a great conversation. I can't believe how quickly it's blown past Alex, I do say it a lot. But not quite as much as I'm saying it right now. That was a very fast paced conversation. I love it. How can users take next steps? We're talking about taking action on LinkedIn every day, you have a pretty cool platform that can help the listener do that correct?
Alex Boyd 28:48
Yes. So a couple things. If you are on the sales side, and you're looking for a way to be better, faster, stronger, and all these things more efficient, commenting, aware, is a great platform to download. managers and teams can download and track the reps, links activities, so not just connection requests and messages, but comments left comments received, and get a holistic view as a sales manager of was my team doing them LinkedIn. Founders can also reach out to our agency, we do strategic narrative work. We do ghost writing for CEOs, but the average seller or sales manager or sales leader, grab a free trial everywhere, and it's gonna make your legal activity all the better and make it easier to focus on this good stuff versus spending all that time, you could have spent getting expertise on things like list building and scrolling through LinkedIn and getting distracted and looking at ads. So that's a great place. If you want to just chat with me first and figure out where to go or have more questions. LinkedIn profile is a great way to do that, too. I
Jonathan Fischer 29:46
love it. All right, well, very good. Well, we are gonna go ahead and Veer over to q&a with our live audience. And now's the time if you haven't posted yet. Go ahead and do that. At this point. We will pick a few here. I'll go through, I feel like it's some sort of a show. And I'm gonna pick the winner here. So this is a good question from Joshua Bailey. So do you think how do you feel about like the company page? You talked about integration with the, you know, the seller, him or herself? Is that a place where just like, content should live? Maybe that's to say promoting, like to talk a little about how those should integrate? I guess mcklusky? Leave it open ended?
Alex Boyd 30:24
Yeah. So a couple good answers. So one is content. And the second is community involvement. So on the content side, the most typical company paid strategy is reposting company blogs, which sucks, doesn't doesn't do anything at all, you might get a few more clicks, but you're just going to drone on with, here's this new blog post hashtags. Here's those other new blog post hashtags. Then there's a second level, which is more about team advocacy, which you love to judge when you comment. I like that, that doesn't make sense. So So team efficacy, screenshot of your team on Zoom, you get together at the company, party, all wonderful things. The best company pages act more like people. So if the CEO can create thought leadership, but so can the company, you can even go straight for the CEO and just post that on the company's account. And say we instead of I, that's perfectly valid strategy. You can then take that forward, and the company can actually whether by hand, or using aware, comments on posts, so the company's page can itself efficiently leave good comments on other people's posts, prospects, posts, influencers, posts, whichever. And there's this cool role, which is the Community Manager, which is sparking up, which is, it's kind of a tie between sales and marketing, because a community manager through their own profile, and the company page will really flesh out the voice of the company, it'll get more richness, because think about chili peppers, social, Gong social, they're great, they have their own voice, right when these Twitter has a great example of company having its own voice, but not the gardener's is the equivalent of that. But if the company has its own voice, and is interacting a lot, that can help a ton with sales kind of being part of that. So it's less of just this random solo sales rep reaching out with no support. It's the sales rep, in the company of its team, its leadership, its company page, it just looks a lot better. From a buyer perspective, if this isn't just some sort of sales rep. It's it's a team effort that's intentionally made to bring me a specific message, I can really evaluate it on my own time through a number of different angles. So the two takeaways there are, use the company page actively for commenting and outreach. And then to if you're gonna post company blogs, and just repost them on social, just don't do it at all. Right real things, original thought process on the company page, and then do outreach. And then sales has something they can kind of latch on to. And it's more like a beacon for sales. Then this microphone redistribute box.
Jonathan Fischer 33:02
Yeah, I like that a lot. So I didn't really thought about that. Have it act like a real person? That's good stuff. Here's the question from Irina. Irina, and I can't trust her last name. Alex, can you share some success stories of startups that have effectively utilized LinkedIn for lead gen during their go to market phase? It is tougher, then you don't have the momentum. Maybe give us some tips on that if you would?
Alex Boyd 33:25
Yeah, I mean, first one that comes to mind is mine. I started posting on LinkedIn in 2017. And we after the first few months, I've been averaging 66k A month revenue from LinkedIn consistently the whole time. And for the first few years, I posted one, maybe two times a week. Recently, I've been posting a little bit more often, almost twice a week. But that's one. I talked about an expensive problem, which is executive growth, strategy, social selling SEO. And we've brought in 135 closed one from that, I think. So definitely lead generation and also customer generation. There are plenty of others. I mean, think about lavender, right? Lavender is a sales tool helps you write better emails. There social has been a huge, huge driver of Legion. And I didn't know about lavender a couple years ago now everyone has. So that's a great example as well. And you see them doing this in action. You see them doing really creative things on social, they're not you're sharing blogs, you wouldn't catch them dead, saying here's this new blog posts, hashtags done. The people, the founders, and the staff are all posting their own voice. It's all in a way that ties back to what they're doing right, which is helping you communicate better and more efficiently. Nor are they joining gangs a great example, right? There's law firms that have done this. I mean, there's a lawyer in Florida that that has brought in, I don't know how many millions dollars from posting just absolutely aggressive, wonderful, thoughtful stories about his tough upbringing and all the people he's taken to court. So it's not just sales tech that does this. You can, you can do it as, as any vertical. But there's there's tons of success stories of startups. It's the ones that are brave, bold and insightful, that will succeed with this, the ones that are bland, boring and want to remain conservative with their viewpoints, they will fail, it will be a waste of time, they may as well not do it at all. So that's I think what unites success stories in that release stage go to market phase. Because it's almost particularly effective in that phase, once you're bigger, you're probably going to have a lot of decision by committee and not a lot of political ability within your company to be more bold in the way that it requires. So it's especially effective during the initial go to market phase versus the later stage for the market phase.
Jonathan Fischer 36:01
I like that I can guess your answer from what you just said. Would you agree a lot of companies are are overly protective of their brand on this term. Like maybe they should maybe democratize or outreach a lot more than they have so far.
Alex Boyd 36:13
Yeah, I think they're afraid of their brand being too organic, when that's exactly what a brand should be. People don't connect with something bland and boring. I mean, unless you want to be Sears.
Jonathan Fischer 36:26
That's not not the best story at the moment is it?
Alex Boyd 36:29
Many b2b brands want to essentially be Sears, which is pickable. You have to stand out as scary as that might be. You will only have alpha in the finance term for performance above the baseline. You only have social media alpha by standing out, by definition,
Jonathan Fischer 36:49
good stuff. Here's a question from levy PAC, who's asking would you encourage leadership to provide the list of close your last leads for sellers to go after a specifically on LinkedIn? Like, would that work? Well? And if so, can you provide a good model for that type of outreach?
Alex Boyd 37:03
Definitely, I would almost this dish should be the first thing you do. If there are closed loss leads to go after I would approach those first before doing any cold outreach. When I was leading a sales team, in my last company, I was primarily starting people on on those leads. And what I would do is I would have a report in Salesforce of last activity is greater than X number of days, I had adjust it based on how aggressive we need to pipeline, maybe 90 days, maybe 120 days. And then the opportunity status was closed last and there was no closed opportunities on an account. And this list would just auto populate as an account went with that activity and was closed last for a short amount of time, it would pop up so then you can be paying to go after them on LinkedIn. And you could do this with a where you can take all of those leads and just bulk upload them into where and then you have a list for if any of these leads ever writes a post I'm gonna see I'm gonna leave a comment on it. And if you're commenting on all the posts of your close last, they're going to think of you when they need that solution for the first time. So staying top of mind is a great use for LinkedIn and you'll have a ton of you know people call them callbacks sometimes right they they didn't buy from us two years ago and then they came back and finally I want to buy at full price two years later because we stay top of mind we were consistently we're there and that just provides that extra edge of sales results so close Lastly, it should be the absolute first list to go after before doing any any net new cold except maybe one exception which is the customers whose champions change jobs and now a good fit somebody else that's the only better lead source I would say is customer alumni. But second to that as close last leads and Salesforce or CRM right me CRM is can be a great tool to do that. I'm typically a Salesforce junkie so I definitely build it in that form.
Jonathan Fischer 39:09
Understood you're not the only one here's a question from spooky Patel and this kind of gets to the some tactical sort of the maybe the maybe the bottom end of what we've been talking about here today so once you're trying to actually go in and get an appointment can you give some best practices She's asking if you have a CRM is contacting clients how often do you call them or email them to book an appointment? And how long do you keep after I'm assume she's just how do you keep them I assume she means how long do you keep on so when it comes to cadence? Yeah, there's I hear a lot of different opinions on this front. What What would you how would you weigh in?
Alex Boyd 39:40
Um, the way I think about it is not as if there's a defined period of time. I think there's some wisdom that is no longer wisdom. The wisdom used to be read by somebody this many times before you give up on them. You know, A world where sales used to be just if you call them more than once, they would pick up and you'd have a better chance of talking to them. That was great. The problem with we're seeing now is people are very used to that if they don't have a problem that you can help them solve, they're just not going to respond. So you said, Well, I'm gonna give them one month or two months to reach out back to me and respond to my email before I stopped calling them. It's just so self centered, right? That you have no idea what their priorities are. In most cases, right, suddenly, as you can see, you can infer, but they know what their priorities are. So you're much better off being respectfully top of mind. And if you're not interested, now, there's don't break up with them, not send them a last attempt to contact you email. Just remain respectfully top of mind, so that they know who to call when they do have that problem. And you have not just annoyed them so much, they don't want to contact you when they do. So it's it's it's more about just consistently nurturing the entire base of your prospects. LinkedIn is a great way to do that. Because you can have, you can again, use lists and aware. And whenever one of these prospects writes a post or comments on the post, that's a cue to just engage with them publicly, not on a high pressure way. Just you're just being they're being thoughtful, you're being there, you're demonstrating your credibility, you're highlighting your customer results. And if you've asked them a month ago, if they want to take a meeting, and the answer was known, you don't even ask them again. And it should be whatever it makes sense. So if they, let's say you talk to them three months ago, and they weren't ready to have a meeting with you, man, not not a not a priority for us. And then three months later, they comment on a post saying something that implies we've now been struggling with this, you might reach out and say, Hey, about a quarter ago, we talked this wasn't an issue. I happened to see this post in my feed when when you said this. No worries if things are still the same. But if it doesn't make sense to resume our conversation now, given that happy to do so. Alright, that's a very relevant way of staying on top of not yet booked appointments, using LinkedIn using that kind of clever next generation outreach with commenting publicly leading to private impeachment to warm people up, so don't send the breakup email. If you do that, then you're seeing weird if you comment on their posts three months later, didn't you break up with me? Email, don't do that. Like you're really not breaking up with him. And avoid the fact that fake scarcity, right? There's no scarcity anymore. People know that you have data tools, they they know that you're going to follow up with them. They know you that you have your sell software, there's no capacity issue, and they can buy the software whenever they're demo ready. So don't freak out. Just stay top of mind.
Jonathan Fischer 42:51
Well, I love it. Well, a wealth of great insights today, Alex Boyd, I want to thank you for adding so much value to our audience here on the Evolve sales leader.
Alex Boyd 43:00
Thanks so much. It's been a pleasure to be here.
Jonathan Fischer 43:04
Yeah, right on. You're welcome back anytime. Thanks. Well, and thank you to our fantastic audience. It's wonderful to have such a growing show and such a great participation. Continue to spread the word would you tell folks that you know that want to learn more about how they can better sell particularly b2b and bring them back we're gonna be right here at the same time, same station next time. By the way, if you do enjoy the content, want to check out some of our previous guests. Wherever you'd like to get podcast we are known as the evil sales leader. Surprise, surprise, and we are very happy to have as our powering sponsor, Overpass, they are one of the leading solutions for getting talent that can help you on customer service. They can help you on lead gen, Business Development representatives, whatever you need to grow your company quickly. You can hire people in days instead of weeks and an amazingly cost effective manner. So check it out. It's free to open up your account@overpass.com That's gonna do it for today. Jonathan Fisher's signing off. Thanks again for being here, everybody. We'll see you next time.
Meet Alex:
Alex Boyd is a serial entrepreneur, having founded multiple successful companies, all working in the B2B space, and most recently incorporating SaaS and other business development-related services in his company, RevenueZen.
Check out the transcription of this webinar episode below!
