✨ Start Here
Building Credibility
Outbound Prospecting
Building Your Lifeline on Inbound
Breaking into Strategic Accounts
Daily Workflow
Additional Resources
1. Social Selling is a Mix of Direct & Indirect
Prospecting on social isn’t just connect-and-pitches. In fact, you’re going to use a mixture of indirect and direct methods to engage with prospects.
- If you only use direct, you’re just using social as a sales channel. It’s so much more than that.
- If you only use indirect, you’re just becoming a content creator. That’s not the point of this guide.
By using both in equal measure, you’re using LinkedIn to its full potential.
2. Social Selling Starts with Qualified Accounts
If you’re using traditional selling methods, you’re likely spending most of your time doing outreach and follow-up (the left pyramid). Once you get a bite, then you qualify the account.
This is because most of this is automated. It’s not time-intensive to spin up a new sequence in Outreach or Salesloft and run it against your list.
To avoid wasted effort, you will now start with qualified accounts on social. These accounts fit basic targeting criteria (industry, growth, location, etc.).
- Most of your time will be spent warming up qualified accounts.
- Then you’ll construct a set of triggers that indicate you should speed up engagement with leads at those accounts. Those triggers include company-based events (like a new hire of a specific job title, funding round, change in leadership) and intent data triggers (like a profile view from an important lead).
- Then, where appropriate, you run direct outreach in the DMs to leads. As you can see in the right pyramid, this is the activity you will spend the least amount of time on.
🔑 Warming up accounts is a catch-all phrase for engaging with accounts on LinkedIn without ever pitching them. It includes commenting, DMs, creating content for them, etc.
Now that you have this context for how social campaigns work, let’s dive in to preparing for your first campaign.
