Turn Engaging Activity on LinkedIn Into Prospects⎪Predictable Revenue

After sorting through a few technical issues, I welcomed our own Sarah Hicks to the Pod. Sarah is a senior SDR with Predictable Revenue and she’s been crushing quota over the last couple of months. We found an interesting process on the Internet, so we ran an Outbound Lab’s experiment, and she was able to reverse engineer the method. Using this method she was able to CRUSH her quota 130% – I thought what a great opportunity it would be to share her tactics with our listeners on the Podcast.

The topic and content I wanted to focus on was how Sarah reverse engineered a proven process and got outstanding results. Following a model used by Becc Holland, and shared on a recent webinar – Becc developed a strategy for her SDRs who were using an ABM approach. She discovered they could find valuable personalization content based on a prospect’s LinkedIn activity. She took specific snippets from a prospect’s LinkedIn post, a comment or a liked preference – and inputted the content into a first personalized email communication as a template strategy.

Sarah wasn’t doing ABM style at the time so she rejigged the approach to suit her needs. Becc’s approach was to target accounts on LinkedIn, look for signals, see what they were saying and use the signals to engage with the target.

The strategy is great if your accounts are only on LinkedIn

The drawback to Becc’s strategy was – and Sarah explained that not all her accounts were limited to using LinkedIn – she wanted to adjust the strategy to fit her needs. In other words, could she not make the prospects her prospects?

At the time Sarah was going after an audience that wasn’t really super active on LinkedIn, so she came up with the strategy to “reverse engineer” target account activity and open the method up a little bit.

Even if they were active on LinkedIn it didn’t mean that they were posting relevant content…

Rather than limiting the method to her existing targets and then writing the personalization based on their activity, her approach was exploring who was active on LinkedIn and then making these users her prospects. She would canvas LinkedIn for people that were active in a way that was “sort of a potential” trigger event indicating the activity demonstrated something meaningful was occuring.

This is a really effective method, as we have an SDR team of three at Predictable Revenue, but may not be something that would work if you have a hundred SDRs on your team or if everybody is sort of limited geographically. I also thought it was a great way to find the most relevant prospects across a wide range of people and then really narrow it down and get into a really personalized conversation. I asked Sarah to talk to me about what this looks like in the eyes of the prospect.

In the eyes of the prospect

Sarah explained the initial contact email basically “it’s speaking either to the posts that they liked or reacted to” or if they commented something specific then the email is speaking to their comment itself. If that’s something relevant that we can tie into our own value prop for Predictable Revenue, the email is “kind of a short and to the point” shows not only that she’s done the research on them, but she’s pulled something meaningful from that research.

The method also allows her to offer Predictable Revenue as a solution a potential solution to whatever pain point was mentioned in that initial post that they interacted with or commented on and if they mention something valuable in that comment, and tie it back to that comment itself.

I thought using the trigger to tie-in to the value prop in the conversation is like “hey you’re already thinking about this why don’t we continue the conversation.

And although some of Sarah’s emails might have been unsubscribed to and marked as spam, a solid amount of people responded back saying, “hey this is a really great first prospecting email” and that they had never seen one as good as this before. During the early months she hit 130 percent of quota with more meetings coming from this specific type of campaign compared to the number normally being pulled in from a bunch of different campaigns. Overall, the amount of meetings booked from this method shot up and the response rates in general whether positive or negative shot up as well.

The contact/meeting ratio, which is pretty phenomenal and pretty high, is not like a one and done, but rather I think it was super valuable to go back to the account. If you have a very limited number of accounts you can continue to reach out to them finding new things that they’re engaging in. This is not just like a one-and-done, hey I’m trying to sell you some stuff – it’s like hey this is topical, this is relevant, and yeah, that’s super awesome!

This is just a brief snapshot of my interesting discussion with Sarah. You can listen to the full episode on the Predictable Revenue Podcast.