BC Startup Sales Podcast – LinkedIn for Outbound Selling with Tom Abbott (SOCO Sales Training)

This week we were joined by Tom Abbott, Managing Director of SOCO Sales Training to discuss using LinkedIn for outbound selling.

We start off the episode by giving listeners a brief history of social selling with an emphasis on LinkedIn’s transition from being primarily used as a recruitment job seeker site to a hub for B2B sales. Given the global circumstance in 2020 (no in-person events, etc.), the sales world is changing as sales reps are now forced to adopt social selling as part of their toolkit. The effects of this adoption will be seen in the decades to come, and so it is increasingly important for sales leaders to understand how to leverage tools like LinkedIn to close deals.

From there, we discuss two of the most common use cases for LinkedIn as a social selling platform: reaching out cold to a prospect and progressing deals already in the pipeline.

1. Reaching Out Cold To a Prospect: Tom walks listeners through the process of narrowing down an ICP and buyer persona, prospecting, and reaching out to potential leads. While many salespeople may start with sending an InMail, Tom advises the listeners and his own clients to stray away from this “Pay to Play” feature of the messaging platform and go with a personalized connect request instead.

2. Progressing Deals Already in the Pipeline: The key to keeping a relationship warm without being too pushy is engaging with someone’s content on LinkedIn. When it comes to maintaining relationships, Tom lives by the motto, “you should be striving to get the most likes on your comment on someone else’s post.”

To close the podcast, Tom uses three words to summarize the most common mistakes he sees with LinkedIn outbound selling: medium, messages, and momentum. Some key takeaways to maximize the effectiveness of outbound selling on LinkedIn include posting quality content, remaining active on the platform, and contacting leads with the right message at the right time.

Tom Abbott is the founder and Managing Director of SOCO Sales Training. He has delivered hundreds of motivational sales keynotes, kickoffs, presentations and workshops in over 20 countries and is a pioneer of optimizing the sales processes of organizations worldwide. He is the author of the sales books The SOHO Solution and Social Selling, the host of the Selling in Asia podcast and is the architect of SOCO Academy an award winning e-learning platform helping thousands of small business owners and sales professionals optimise their sales performance.

If you liked “Using LinkedIn for Outbound Selling” and want to read more content from the Bowery Capital Team, check out other relevant posts from the Bowery Capital Blog.