Predictable Prospecting
On Social Selling and Linkedin
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My guest today is Kurt Shaver of The Sales Foundry, an expert on leveraging social selling and using Linkedin as part of the sales process. We discuss how to research and connect with prospects on Linkedin, becoming an business expert on your social media platforms, and the essential skills all new sales development reps need to have. Episode Highlights:
- Why is social selling important?
- The evolution of Linkedin: Outbound prospecting and inbound marketing
- Inbound marketing for the new SDR
- Broadcasting and curating
- Essential outbound marketing skills for the new SDR
- Working in time blocks while prospecting on Linkedin
- Researching and using Linkedin as a disqualification machine
- What does Kurt Shaver do?
Resources: Connect with Kurt Shaver on Linkedin, follow him on Twitter, and visit him on the web at The Sales Foundry
Episode Transcript
Marylou: Hey everybody! It’s Marylou Taylor and today’s guest is someone you’re gonna really wanna listen to. Grab your coffee or whatever you’re doing right now and make sure that you’re leaning in to this podcast. Our guest today is Kurt Shaver; he is by far one of the best known and I think very smart people in the area of leveraging social selling, meaning is it strictly in LinkedIn or are you in other things now, Kurt? Kurt: It’s mostly LinkedIn, we can talk about a couple of other things but mostly LinkedIn. Marylou: I asked Kurt on the show today because many of you know our roles as business developers are changing. Some of you are now known more as account based selling folks where you’re targeting a core number of accounts or an anchor, I have clients that call them anchor accounts. Some of you are still using the more traditional methods described in Predictable Revenue of selling, but all of us are concerned about whether we get a lead from marketing or some other channel of getting that first conversation or follow-up conversation under our belts so that we could move our prospects to a qualified opportunity. Now, Kurt, his area specializes in that very thing; that’s why I asked him to join us today. Welcome to the show. Kurt: Great, Marylou. I am looking forward to our talk. Marylou: Yes, so tell me, I think I last contacted you a couple years ago when I was struggling myself trying to figure out how to leverage LinkedIn. Can you give us an idea of what has changed in the last couple years and where you see this all going with respect to starting conversations with people top of funnel, the right decision makers at the right time leveraging LinkedIn. Kurt: Sure. Well, LinkedIn is 13 ½ years old now so LinkedIn is a teenager, that doesn’t exactly feel like it’s a new thing anymore. If sales leaders or sales people or marketing executives needed any more convincing that this whole social selling technique was not just a fad, I think you only have to look back a couple of months to the world’s biggest software company plunking down $26.2 billion when Microsoft announced it was buying LinkedIn. That’s a real hand riding on the wall kind of phenomena but social networking is just gonna be stitched into every aspect of software and really every aspect of business. I think the 90s were really the ushering in of the internet and the oughts was when kind of everything became web enabled. Since then, social networking as a subset technology of internet has just been huge in the actual interaction and that basically comes down the communication which is what drives people and brings us back to our discussion of lead generation, top of the funnel, connecting with decision makers, all of those things play perfectly into social networking. Marylou: Okay. You know where I’m coming from with our trips over here, we’re process oriented people trying to figure out how to leverage this as one of the key process elements. Can we think of LinkedIn as part of our process or is it something that we manually do, what is it or how does it evolve to the point where we can leverage it as a piece of technology? Kurt: Yeah, so there’s a couple elements to that. I think it would be helpful for everybody to kind of start it this way. I always say the primary function of LinkedIn, primary value really is lead generation, it’s starting that. It will help in other areas as you move along the sales cycle but its main value is getting the sales cycle started top of funnel. In doing that, there’s basically two activities, that really I’ll break down into the two activities. There’s out bound prospecting which salespeople are all very used to. Outbound prospecting is essentially just looking at LinkedIn like a fresh database of 450 million business professionals and being able to slice that and dice it based on your ideal customer profile the same way you would any database with the huge differential advantage that you get to lay your own individual network on top of that database to find out where there’s common connections. As if 450 names wasn’t big enough, and if the fact that this is all fresh and updated because every number maintains their own profile, as if that wasn’t big enough, you also get to overlay your own network on it. From an outbound prospecting role of decks, network, CRM, referral, introduction, all those things that salespeople are used to, it’s unparalleled cause that’s number one, is outbound prospecting. The second activity though which is newer for certainly salespeople is inbound marketing. Inbound marketing has become a very popular method over the last five to eight years as people just turn to the internet to find more information. The marketers realized, “Oh, we need to put information out there so that we can be compositional as thought leaders and subject matter expertise and they come to our websites, webinars, and get our e-books and all these things.” What’s changed in the social selling realm where I focus very much of the salespeople side is that again because everybody has a social network, essentially each person is a mini marketer of one, each sales person becomes a mini marketer one. Individually, they can all take advantage of this inbound marketing idea by sharing content, posting it, engaging it and again, attracting customers to it. It’s essentially the question was how is it been the process? There’s really two processes; outbound prospecting and inbound marketing. Both meant to fill the funnel and the difference is it’s the salespersons doing it, it’s not the marketing department doing it, it’s the sales person. Why is that important, take some company that’s got 500 sales people. Well guess what, they probably have one website and they have one LinkedIn company page, and they one Twitter account. Maybe they got a Facebook page or something like that. That’s like four or five properties that the company marketing department owns but then again if we have 500 salespeople, that’s 500 websites in it of itself in their LinkedIn profiles. If they have Twitter accounts for business, now we got a thousand properties represented really under control of the sales team as opposed to four compared to what marketing announced that’s where the power of social selling comes in. Marylou: When you said that inbound marketing, that got my attention really fast and that is because one of the things that I like to instill in the business developers I work with is a mindset that they are colleagues of their intended target. Whoever their prospecting to like the CEO, COO, whatever, CMO, that they are at the same level colleague wise. If I’m an SDR, what kind of inbound marketing things do you think, starting out, cause these folks might be fresh out of college or just one to two years in sales total. How could they leverage in inbound marketing? What are some of the things that they could do in order to be able to start building awareness around their expertise? Kurt: There’s a couple of things they can do. The simplest step would be to share some of their own company’s content like with their social networks. That’s sort of like the easiest level but you don’t wanna do that too much or you end up basically looking like you’re pirating company information only. What value are you adding at that point because the prospects or your connections could have just subscribed to company blogs? You got to mix in other types of content. Again, you’re doing this very similar to like how a magazine editor thinks of their audience. The magazine editor doesn’t write the articles, the magazine editor just ticks articles because they know their audience interest, they decide I’m going to read 50 things and 6 are going to make the cut this month. The sales person or SDR or whatever role there is, they’re certainly reading things about their industry which are not coming from their company, right? They’re looking at trade magazines or portals or Mashable or cio.com or whatever they happen to be reading. They’re reading stuff about the industry. As they see things like, “Hey, this is news. Oh, this is an article my audience would be interested in,” they can then share that with their social network, they have this content broadcast mechanism now at their disposal. As they do that, the better that they become as a magazine editor or as a curator of that information and they get dialed into the interest of their audience and they know what’s valuable to them. They’re raising their visibility and credibility such that when the need comes around and that prospects company for a particular thing, they sort of jump top of mind and that’s where you’re causing that idea of actually attracting customers to you because you are establishing your reputation by the content you are sharing. Marylou: Are there any other things that people can do to sort of get a toe in the water of inbound marketing? I like the idea of it becoming a broadcast or a curator. Is that done through the update mechanism in LinkedIn that you are doing this or you said that there’s a broadcast mechanism now? Kurt: Yes, you can do a couple of different things in LinkedIn; there is a specific action. You can do an update which an update could or could not have like a piece of content associated with it. You could update and post the link of a blog URL and write your own little comments along with it so that you’re adding value above and beyond just the blog itself. You can also simply share content that could be done through Twitter, you can post it to groups, so if there’s a group that you are involved with and you think, “Wow! This will really be a valuable information with the group, you can share that way, just slightly different because you’re sending it into a targeted group of folks that are already rallied around some particular topic or title or industry or something like that. The other thing that you can do which would still fall under the social engagement umbrella, you can go in and react, you don’t have to be the initiator, you can go in and react to what somebody else has already started. Whether it is a shared post or somebody just started a thread about some topic in your industry, if you’re gonna jump in the conversation just like in the real world if you’re at a networking conference or industry trade show and people were gathered around the bar talking about this topic, same thing’s gonna happen on LinkedIn and on social network where you can weigh in and if you have a valuable opinion you’re gonna raise your feasibility there so that would just be commenting on something that somebody else had started. Marylou: That’s it for inbound marketing in terms of I know we’re just kinda scratching the surface here but essentially getting started as an SDR business developer from an inbound perspective, sharing articles that are of value to your prospect personas is perhaps commenting on existing dialogue that’s happening out there or putting up your own questions if you’re in a group. Let’s switch over to outbound, what are the most impactful? I’m putting you on spot here cause I’m expecting you to know what the SDR does on daily basis but I think you’d know. In your mind, what will be the most impactful tactical actions that an SDR can take from an outbound prospecting point of view? Kurt: If it is an SDR, they are fairly young and they probably don’t have their big business network, I would actually flip the advice of these actions that I usually would give to a more senior sales force. If you’re trying to trigger an initial connection with the prospect. First, it had to be two things; you gotta find them and then you gotta connect with them. The finding them is understanding the search and how it works, what are my filters, how am I gonna use them fully in operator to whittle it down, just the ideal absolute best target. That’s finding the people, you end up with a search results as much as you would in Google except this time it’s people on LinkedIn that fit your search and ideal customer personas, so you found them. Now the question is what strategy are you gonna use to reach out for them that’s better than just cold? Usually, what I say is the number one priority is to leverage a common connection. If you can use either an introduction which will require a proactive action on the part of the common connection or whether you’re just gonna name drop which is usually a little faster because you don’t have to get involved with third party, that’s usually the best way because there is that commonality piece of it, but again that relies on you having a fairly strong network. The bigger the network, usually the more you’ve been in the industry, you’re gonna have a bigger network and so those chances of having a common connection grow, grow and grow. If you’re an SDR you might not have a big network, maybe you have not been in the industry, the technique you’re probably gonna wanna use is research based. You’re gonna be doing your social research, now social research can have a couple different ways on the simplest level particularly if you’re like using the free version of LinkedIn, that’s just gonna be a quick scan of that person’s profile to see what you can pick up. How long have they been at work, where they worked before, like where did they go to school, what’s their industry, have they been posting stuff on LinkedIn or do they have a Twitter account that they use for business. You can go and read, it’s kinda mind reading, like what are their priorities, what are they talking about, what are they posting, so that’s research driven that you’re gonna have to pick up because you’re gonna try again to outreach, you’re gonna try to come up with something of relevance to them to initially gather attention. When you decide what it is, what research you’ve found, now you have a choice of what communication mechanism am I gonna take. If you’re on a premium version of LinkedIn, you can use its internal messaging system which is called InMail. If you’re on a premium version of LinkedIn your choices could be I’m gonna use LinkedIn InMail system, I’m gonna use regular old email if I know where I can get this person’s email, or I’m gonna pick up the telephone. I found the person, I used LinkedIn, don’t forget the telephone, the telephone is still extremely efficient. You might find the person using LinkedIn, it’s awesome search features against 450 million business professionals and you might research the person on LinkedIn, spend 30 seconds looking at their profile to get one or two nuggets that’s gonna help you in the report but at that point you might be done with LinkedIn and you might turn and pickup the phone and call the person now knowing something, knowing that they looked your profile, knowing something about them and weave that into kind of whatever your opening outreach would be. Marylou: This is great. Listening to this, I’m immediately thinking of sales process. Just to fill you in, our goals with the day in the life of the business developer is usually we’re trying to get five meaningful conversations a day and we’ve allocated time blocks for that. What kind of time block are we talking about when we’re engaging using LinkedIn and doing whatever, whether it be inbound marketing or outbound prospecting? Is there a best practice as to how much, I know you can spend eight hours doing it but what is the most meaningful amount of time where you’re gonna get the biggest bang for the buck? Or is there such a thing that we can add to our daily rhythm for LinkedIn. Kurt: That’s obviously going to depend a lot on the sales role, really how much prospecting are they doing. In the case of an SDR, I would say it’s gonna be fairly high. If it is an SDR prospecting into a B2B customer base, then I would expect that they’re probably in LinkedIn some way, shape, or form at least an hour a day, maybe more if it’s a field person and they’ve got a bunch of other stuff to do and they’re running around. It might be 20 minutes a day and all done off their mobile phone. It just depends really on the amount of prospecting activities that they’re gonna be doing. Marylou: I’m sure you’ve heard in the industry now, the best words around personalization meaning that when we’re having an email or phone conversation with the potential prospect, we’re to do some research ahead of time to do what you just said before, to find out what the challenges are, to get an understanding of how they use language to describe their challenge etc. etc. Let’s pretend that we have a calling queue of 20 accounts we’re working on at any given time, we may wanna research 10 of those in LinkedIn. From there, we’re going to be able to have these conversations. From a hyper personalization point of view doing 10 accounts a day, is that still that kind of hour time you think, is that when you’re thinking for the SDR? I’m just trying to get a filler for around time wise because their day is already filled with time blocks for phoning, time blocks for doing any type of discovery calls, from working on the calling list for the next day etc etc. Is an hour reasonable for 10 accounts or do we need more than that, what do you think? Kurt: I think that’s reasonable. I guess the clarification I would make is that, but I don’t see it being like it’s one hour curved out from like 11:00 to noon to do LinkedIn stuff and then you go back to your regular process. It’s rather the situation that the LinkedIn steps that I would suggest are gonna be like four or five minutes, they’re gonna be in the process. The process is identification of the person, LinkedIn can help with that. It’s gonna be research, and LinkedIn can help with that, it’s gonna be the social selling on the LinkedIn, it’s gonna be woven into their normal process anyway, I supposed it’s being this like curved off, stand alone time because it has to be integrated into this process that’s ultimately going to end with the conversation. Marylou: What I like to do though with our folks is there is a habitual day in the life of an SDR so to speak. We do tend to do things in blocks. For example if I am getting ready to call my 10 accounts, the night before or in any dead time when calling is not a good time, any hours of the day were connects are horrible, I’m gonna concentrate and pull my accounts for the next day so that when I go home, I’ve done what I need to do for the next business days so when I come in, I have the best time to call, I’m calling. It means I’m tracking all the personalization ahead of time for that particular prospect. My view is I would go into LinkedIn, I would map out my 10 accounts, I would look up all the information I need one after another during that dead time, and the next day I will come in and as part of my process now I have all the personalization I need to get those emails out, to send voicemails, to do whatever I need. That’s how I see an SDR using LinkedIn from a process standpoint. What you’re saying too is that during the day, if someone were to come inbound for example and they have to handle a call or they get on a call and then they get referred to somebody else, that’s the time to look up LinkedIn information on a real time basis or to be able to get what they need. I think that sometimes the SDRs, when we’re multitasking in real time, they lose sight of their calling list and they don’t get to the end. We wanna make sure that they do get to the end which means rather than real time we do our research in blocks as well. Kurt: The other thing that LinkedIn is good for from a research standpoint is finding other people that might evolve in that purchase decision. It might be these are all the people that came through webinar, these are the people that got the email book. We all know that the number of people that are involved in buying committees and purchasing decisions, that’s growing in the B2B space. One of the things that’s great about LinkedIn is it really gives you that visibility either by searching or using that side bar on the right hand side that says people also viewed, it often times shows you so if you’re targeting the big T of IT, it might show you also there is the CIO and here is the director of information security and here is the director of business applications and things like that. It helps you round out who is around that person on the org chart that you might not have otherwise known and again give you a couple different either more chances to get in the door to start a conversation with somebody else or just get those other influences all on the same page. Marylou: That’s brilliant because we map out as part of not all the clients I worked with, but there are some clients that do what I call an immersion program with their accounts where they run a sequence of emails and they may follow up with a voicemail but then they pick one or two days within that sequence of 22-25 bussiness days where we’re doing immersion calling and that’s where that right sidebar comes into play because we’re actually calling in and around the bull’s eye of direct and indirect influencers. People, if you’re listening to this, that right sidebar that Kurt’s talking about is a great place when we’re doing our research to do an immersion program of the people who are going to most likely influence your target and that’s really what we want because as Kurt said, we want to get a foot in the door. We want to have that first conversation, we want to be invited in so LinkedIn gives us a nice way to atleast get an understanding of the org chart and of the roles people are playing both up and down the actual reporting structure. Kurt: I was just talking about a client a little bit about this kind of idea and you know they were saying what a lot of people think, “Oh, I need to get to the C level, I don’t want to look at all these other people. I need to get to the C level. I need to get to the C level.” I have a couple observations; number one I said is, “Do you really need to get to the C level?” A lot of times, it depends on the size of your product offering and the size of the company. The bigger the company, the smaller I can talk to on the org chart to get them to sign off on what is essentially sales training. If I’m a huge company, the manager can sign off on my budget so I don’t have to talk to the C level in the huge company. The other point is not only might they might have the authority but a lot of times those people, maybe they don’t have the signing authority but a lot of times they can tell you a lot of the information that you’re gonna need, they’re often times much more open to share what’s going on the information that you may need to eventually get up to whatever decision maker it is. Marylou: Because we’re disqualification machines in this top of funnel is really our role is to fast track the ones that we know are going to close with the higher probability and a high lifetime value, we kind of want to be on that mindset of we’re disqualifying many people as possible so that we can get to working on all the meaty ones. This is the way to understand what initiatives are in place, whether or not they’ve already started working on something, and where you fit in that timeline to see whether or not it’s a good use of your time today to go after that or to put it in long term follow up for sometime later on down the road. Kurt: That’s good. I like that term disqualification machines. Marylou: Tell us what it is that you do in the world and how you help people understand this LinkedIn engine better. Kurt: As it says on my LinkedIn profile, I help B2B sellers connect with more decision makers. It’s just part of the endeavor to cut through the clutter right between voicemail and caller ID and overcrowded email inboxes and everything else. It’s how you get a hold of people and social networks obviously is a newer channel, a way for reaching people, so if you know all the tricks and ways to leverage it because they are spending time there you can just use that as communication channel to start that initial conversation. Once you can get that initial conversation going, I usually recommend take it off the social network, move in your email, your telephone conversations and things like that. It’s just another way to reach people again because they are spending time there, they’re either researching things or they’re communicating with their network or they’re using it to read up on the latest things. I worked with corporations to put this in into a systematic way. You don’t like that Marylou. Unlike CRM, at least CRM, the company paid money for so they usually allocate some money for training and they have standards and things like that because the company bought the CRM system, that’s not the case with LinkedIn. Everybody walks in the door with their free LinkedIn account. Everybody is doing something different, totally random. The sales that you’re all think of, well it’s free, they’ve had it for like five years, everyone must be an expert on it. Neither one of those is true, it’s like you got all sorts of people using all sorts of different ways. some great, some not, some don’t use it at all, some are using it incorrectly and damaging themselves and your company. I help raise the skill level and standardize, there is a minimum requirement and their consistencies. Those consistencies then actually in corporate sales organization those consistencies then becomes synergistic, it becomes greater than the sum of all those individual parts because of things that you can do with the marketing department and content to amplify the inbound marketing piece of it so that’s what I do. Marylou: I like that. The other thing you mentioned about the outbound piece is that it helps us leverage a common connection. For those of you who hate the word cold, LinkedIn is a great vehicle to kind of warm up that chill and make it not so cold. What is the best way that someone listening to this call who recognizes that they have a bunch of silos out on their company when it comes to LinkedIn and they want to bring it all in and make it more cohesive and actually create a strategy around it, how do they get a hold of you? Kurt: They can go to LinkedIn and they can find me there, Kurt Shaver same my Twitter handle is the same as well and they can link off either one of those to my website which is thesalesfoundry.com This has been great. A lot of fun, I enjoyed talking to you and how this social aspects fits into your predictive prospecting skills. Marylou: We called something the first in ten which will be the outbound prospecting side which is everyday go in, find ten people who are in your network, already first level connections, and look to see second level wise who are in those accounts you’re trying to reach. Like you said, either name drop person from your first level or ask permission to use their name in an email to connect out to second level. I’ve got my folks doing ten of those in the morning or again those dead hours on the phone and just not a good time to use. Ten connections a day times twenty two business days a month is 220 more connections that they’re requesting. If you do this on a daily basis systematically, you will build your network pretty quickly so that all these other things you are talking about will be leveraged and amplified to the point where some people are gonna respond to your cold/warm email for that first conversation. Kurt, thank you so much for your time and again I’ll put all of this information inside of the show notes and LinkedIn is not going away for us people, the B2B side, it’s a very important tool and it’s getting smarter and smarter to the point where we can’t ignore it any longer. We’ve got to use it to leverage those conversations to get more opportunities to the door. Thanks again, Kurt. Kurt: Great, thanks Marylou!