6 steps to become a Jedi master at LinkedIn sales
When I started my own company, I had absolutely no clue how to do sales. One of the first methods I looked at in the startup quest for new prospects was cold calling. Traditionally, cold-calling was the way to efficiently approach potential customers. For startups, one of the major benefits from cold-calling is that you get instant feedback about your product. Which is obviously great for customer development. But there are also some drawbacks that might make it less interesting to founders. First of all, cold-calling can be quite scary. If you’re a founder that has no sales manager guiding you from above, this can quickly lead to some form of myopia. I experienced this myself first-hand. Instead of doing sales, I started doing all kind of other irrelevant stuff: Updating our Website and blog too often, tweeting bullshit through our Twitter account in order to “drive marketing”. All just so that I didn’t have to grab that scary phone. Ultimately this kind of behaviour is very dangerous, as finding (new) customers is the only part of starting a company that truly matters (besides the actual product of course).
A second drawback with cold-calling comes with company size. I found that while cold-calling might work pretty well when selling to SME’s, it sucks when you’re selling to to larger corporates. When approaching large enterprises taking the cold-calling route won’t get you anywhere, as you’ll find gatekeeper after gatekeeper.
Luckily for us, cold-calling is no longer the only option to do sales, as we now have access to the golden sales medium called LinkedIn. Over the recent months LinkedIn has been a very efficient route for us to trace prospects and approach them via cold e-mail. So how does this work? Here are some tips and tricks to get your LinkedIn sales party started:
1) Careful preparations
Before you start scouting, think carefully what kind of roles you’re trying to find in the organization. Who is the decision making unit you need to persuade? For my company SNTMNT, I’m usually contacting Business Development, Marketing. From my limited experience, especially Biz Dev people are quite more likely to respond to cold emails.
2) Rocking the LinkedIn search engine
So this is probably the easiest part. Search for the company on Linked in and find out who’s working there. Remember that if you’re planning on getting introduced, you should only search for 2nd degree connections. You can choose this option under advanced search.
One of the things that I found interesting on LinkedIn is that the search results sometimes won’t give back surnames on profiles. This happens usually when profiles are outside your network. This can be quite problematic, as you usually need someone’s surname to send out an e-mail. The good news here though is that it’s quite easy to get around. Rather than upgrading to premium (which I never needed so far), you can click on one of the “People Also Viewed” profiles on the right. You’ll notice that these profiles do give you a surname when you visit them. Now if you’re on a related profile, good chance that your initial target now is listed under “People Also Viewed”.
This process might require some trial-and-error, as not everybody is on each others related list, but you’ll find that the large majority follows this pattern.
Bonus fact: A friend of mine actually found out that this pattern of finding related people back and forth holds especially true for above-average looking women at HR departments. And you were still wondering how the average white corporate male got through their daytime job?! Nice.
3) The epic quest for the e-mail address
Taking from a great post by Dan Shipper, there are basically four options if you were to find for example Darth Vader at company Death Star:
- darth.vader [at] deathstar.com
- d.vader [at] deathstar.com
- dvader [at] deathstar.com
- darth [at] deathstar.com
Now the real fun begins. Because how do you find which e-mail address actually exists? I recently learned about a great tool called Rapportive that does exactly that. It matches your made-up email addresses to the LinkedIn API and checks if any of these addresses matches with a LinkedIn profile.
Of course not every employee has his or her corporate e-mail account connected to LinkedIn, but you’d be surprised how often they actually do. And when you do hit jackpot, this is obviously gold. Not only do you now know the e-mail address of your prospect: You also know the e-mail structure of the entire enterprise you’re trying to get into, which means that you can take an educated guess at each and every e-mail address registered. Sweet.
Important: Don’t forget to connect your LinkedIn account to Rapportive, otherwise you won’t get any results (a time-consuming mistake I once made).
Step 4) Some other options
If none of the above address options match, I’d say that chances are small that any other combinations will. It also means that you’re probably dealing with a smart company that knows dirty sales tricks. Luckily for us, there are a few other options to find about enterprise address (structure):
Data.com (owned by Salesforce) gives you 10 credits for free when you sign up, which is good for two e-mail addresses per account (after which you know the e-mail structure once again).
Another option is of course to skip the e-mail altogether and go for the throat via LinkedIn directly. I personally found that If you decide to go for this option, there’s one interesting thing about Linkedin that you should know. When you’re contacting people who are outside your network there’s no option to send them a message directly (apart from inviting to connect, which is a little weird). So here’s the thing: If you join a LinkedIn Group where this person is also in, you can look him or her up via the group overview and send a direct message anyway. Here’s a short video how that shit is done.
Step 5) The final approach
I believe a good email should have the following attributes:
=> Short and concise.
Above all, it should be short and concise. You’re interrupting people already, and nobody likes to be interrupted with a long dwelling story.
=> A cup of coffee.
Seriously, ask for coffee. How can anyone refuse a cup of coffee? I know I wouldn’t.
=> State the objective early on.
Asking for a cup of coffee is nice because its low risk. But its also low-reward. By not stating the objective in your e-mail, you might give the other person the wrong idea why you’re approaching him or her. This might backfire later on.
This is an example e-mail I’ve been cold-sending recently that worked quite well:
Step 6) Chasers
So you did your homework, validated an e-mail address, wrote a killer e-mail but got no response. What now? I usually send one (and only one!) chaser. I used to send more, but this never really made a big difference in my opinion, and its obviously quite annoying for the receiving end, too.
I used to send stuff like :
“Hi, I was wondering whether you got my last e-mail bla bla”
Don’t. Just copy your previous e-mail, and remove any traces like the old message, subject reply traces (e.g. RE: or Fwd:). From my experience, this is a win-win, as it’s A) much more efficient, and B) gets a much better response rate. People at (large) enterprises are usually really good at reply-all'ing to each other for no reason, so they get a shitload of mail every day. They probably didn’t even see your first e-mail to begin with. So why mention it?
Wrapping up
So these are some tips and tricks that we’ve used at SNTMNT lately to drive initial meetings. What’s important to mention is that you shouldn’t grow anxious when people don’t respond or tell you to fuck off. That’s totally normal. After all, it is you who’s breaking into peoples time, not the other way around. So be patient, young padawan.
I wish you lots of luck. May the force be with you!