Using LinkedIn Touchpoints to Increase Sales Performance
Becca Eddleman
Incorporating LinkedIn touchpoints into your outbound and inbound sales go-to-market strategy is vital to success.
More and more companies are making the shift to double down on Linkedin sales efforts and are encouraging and teaching reps and AEs to build a digital presence that adds value to the conversation and converts leads.
However, there is still a large chunk of B2B sales organizations that aren’t taking LinkedIn seriously and are still practicing some traditional social selling tactics that are no longer effective.
Over 100 million professionals check their LinkedIn every day.
76% of buyers are ready to have a social media conversation with potential providers.
At this point, refusing to use LinkedIn as part of your strategy is like refusing to use email. This graphic Foundation put out is the perfect representation of the potential reach of the platform.
If you or your team has yet to incorporate LinkedIn into your sales go-to-market strategy – and we mean in a big way – then you’ve got some catching up to do.
The good news is, you also have a lot of untapped business opportunities and the 5 different types of LinkedIn touchpoints we’ll walk through today will get you well on your way to increasing sales team performance.
78% of sellers who incorporate social media into their sales strategy outperform their peers who don’t.
Using LinkedIn as an Additional Touchpoint X5
LinkedIn adds five different touchpoints to your outbound efforts.
- Connections
- Engage & Comment (Prospects’ Posts)
- Engage & Comment (Your Posts)
- Direct Message
- Follow-Up
A couple of these five touchpoints may seem similar, but we’ll get to the differences in just a sec.
You can also download our quick guide on Using LinkedIn as an Additional Touchpoint here to save and skim or share with the team.
Connections
Take a look at your network as it is right now. Is it mostly co-workers and ex co-workers? Family and college friends?
If so, let’s change that.
The easiest way to build a list of prospects and start connecting is to get LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Identify your ICP and buyer personas and create a saved list (or many) in Sales Nav.
Connect with 50-100 people a day from your list. It will take you less than 15 minutes and you can do it in the morning while you’re waiting for the coffee to take effect.
That’s the first touchpoint.
Engage & Connect With (Prospects’ Posts)
Touchpoint two and three listed here are probably the hardest for people. Especially for non-social media users in general. But just think of it as taking your networking and communication skills and applying them virtually.
Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to run a search of your top prospects to determine who’s posted recently.
Engage with their content as often as you can. You should be engaging daily with multiple prospects’ posts, but they won’t all post frequently, or they’ll post too frequently, and you don’t want to come off as a stalker.
LinkedIn Tip: Tag prospects in the comments of a post or article you think they’ll find valuable
Engage & Connect Back (Your Posts)
To engage and comment back to people on your posts does mean you’re going to have to publish a bit of content.
Don’t freak out. We give a few examples of how to source content in the quick guide, and we’ll share a few profiles of sales leaders below that you should start following right now for daily advice.
After you’ve posted a few times, started adding connections daily of people who are actually your buyers, and have started engaging with prospects’ content – you’ll start to see people like and comment on your posts. Make sure to always, ALWAYS like or comment back.
LinkedIn is an online social network. You have to create conversation by posting regularly and further the conversation through comments and messages.
31% of B2B professionals say that social selling has allowed them to build deeper relationships with clients.
Direct Message
When you direct message (DM) a prospect, it should not feel like just another InMail.
By this point you should have added them as a connection, potentially engaged with their content, and they have potentially engaged with yours – depending on your prospects’ own frequency on LinkedIn.
Regardless if you were able to “speak” with them previously through comments and posts, your first DM should not be a pitch. You should:
- continue the conversation from your comments if applicable
- send them a relevant post or article that is relevant to their role, or business, or reference something they posted
Boom. That’s touchpoint four.
When you do gear up for the ask, frame your message thoughtfully, keep it simple, and limit it to one ask or call to action.
LinkedIn Tip: Connect + Engage before calls and DMs
Follow-Up
Unfortunately, it doesn’t go without saying that follow-up should be a separate touchpoint. The tactic may be similar to touchpoints two-four, but one like, one comment, and one message isn’t enough. Your conversion rate will be another one – 1% – if you don’t follow-up.
Keep engaging, keep commenting, and incorporate video as much as you can. Video is an especially powerful tool to put a face to the name, explain difficult concepts, rise above the noise, and it’s fun.
You’ll be amazed by the results of your efforts when combining the reach of LinkedIn and the personalization of video.
LinkedIn Tip: Use the LinkedIn mobile app to send a personalized video message
Experts in Using LinkedIn Touchpoints & Beyond
You won’t be able to see all their tricks and plays, but we highly suggest following these six LinkedIn sales experts to get all of their on-point, tactical advice to your feed. You should also check out their activity feed to get an idea of how they’re engaging.
Jake Dunlap, CEO, Skaled
Kevin Dorsey, VP of Inside Sales, PatientPop
Kyle Coleman, VP Revenue Growth & Enablement, Clari
Scott Barker, Head of Partnerships, Sales Hacker
Justin Welsh, Founder, The Official Justin
Morgan Ingram, Director of Sales Execution & Evolution, JB Sales Training
Not everyone is going to be a JD or KD (Jake Dunlap or Kevin Dorsey, respectively). That’s not the goal of using Linkedin touchpoints to improve your sales performance, book more meetings, and hit quota.
The goal of incorporating LinkedIn heavily into your outbound strategy is to… improve your sales performance, book more meetings, and hit quota.
The potential of this platform in the past couple of years, today, and even as people trickle back to work is almost unreal.
It gets you out of the inbox and it puts you in front of the 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-Level executives who are influenced by social media when making purchasing decisions.
Getting Your Whole Team to Increase Sales Performance
Getting one person to start incorporating these five LinkedIn touchpoints will increase the performance of that one person. Imagine the results you could see if you get your entire team on board.
Skaled specializes in the training, strategy, and execution of modern outbound and sales go-to-market strategies that focuses heavily on LinkedIn and building a digital presence across team members.
LinkedIn Tip: Work with Skaled.
If you’re ready to take the next step, send us a quick message and let us know if you’ve already started using LinkedIn touchpoints in your outbound and aren’t seeing the desired results or if you’d be starting from ground zero.