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Ep. 190: Mastering LinkedIn for sales and marketing ft. Samantha McKenna

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Nội dung được cung cấp bởi Kathleen Booth. Tất cả nội dung podcast bao gồm các tập, đồ họa và mô tả podcast đều được Kathleen Booth hoặc đối tác nền tảng podcast của họ tải lên và cung cấp trực tiếp. Nếu bạn cho rằng ai đó đang sử dụng tác phẩm có bản quyền của bạn mà không có sự cho phép của bạn, bạn có thể làm theo quy trình được nêu ở đây https://vi.player.fm/legal.

How do the world's top LinkedIn power users get the most out of the platform for sales and marketing?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, #samsales Consulting founder Samantha McKenna shares insider tips on using LinkedIn, as well as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for sales prospecting and marketing.

From understanding how LinkedIn's algorithm works, to diving deep into the ways marketers can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of their account-based marketing campaigns, Samantha shares specific, actionable tips and strategies that you can use right away to get better sales and marketing results.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to get all of Samantha's tips.

Resources from this episode:

Transcript

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Samantha McKenna, who is the founder of #samsales consulting. Welcome to the podcast Samantha.

Samantha (01:43): Thank you so much for having me Kathleen. So great to be here.

Kathleen (01:46): I'm really excited about this conversation. So for anybody listening you know, we've talked about LinkedIn a bunch on this podcast and coming at it from different angles every time. And I've always thought of myself as somebody who knows a lot about LinkedIn and is pretty good at it. But it turns out I still have a lot to learn. And how do I know that? I know that because I attended a talk that Samantha did on LinkedIn and all of a sudden I realized that there were massive gaping holes in my knowledge base. So I was like, Oh, I have to have her come on because I learned so much. And every time I feel that way, I really want to share it with my listeners. So with that introduction, Samantha maybe you could tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and specifically, you know, your background and experience and how you came to be doing what you're doing now and what #samsales Consulting is.

Samantha (02:39): Yeah, for sure. You know, I think the one you're not alone in that response, I think there's there's so many little nuances on LinkedIn for everything that you should be doing, not only with the free platform, but then with Navigator, you know, and I think that I've spoken to so many people who think I'm a total pro at this, what else can I learn? But then when we sit down together, they're like, Oh my gosh. So I think what's great to highlight for anybody, whether you're a marketer or your sales person, is there is so much just platform can do that. You might not even know just yet. My own personal background, I've been in enterprise sales for 15, 16 years at this point. I have been an individual contributor, broke a bunch of records while doing that and then convinced my leadership to move me to management.

Samantha (03:22): And I climbed the ladder through there. Having most recently run a line of business at LinkedIn for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where I ran the enterprise sales team there out of the New York city office. And, you know, I think for me, like many of you guys, you probably have these, you know, pie in the sky dream come true companies that you've wanted to work for. And LinkedIn was exactly that for me, I had no plans of ever going there, but after doing a customer testimonial for them about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform, I think I almost fell out of my chair with excitement about what it did for our teams. And they said, we need that energy here. You have to come work for us. So I think for me really where the expertise in LinkedIn came from was just understanding early in my career, the power that I could leverage with the platform, the brand that it could build for me, not only as a sales rep, but as a leader and for the products we sold and frankly where #samsales came from was one my very first post giving a sales tip and then thinking, well, maybe this'll take off.

Samantha (04:25): Maybe there'll be something here. So I want to attach a hashtag to it. But where the first posts actually came from was every single time I gave sales advice to my friends, my bosses, my bosses, bosses, they always said, I've never thought of that. That's so interesting. What a great idea. And I was like, well, dang, like if you guys think this is revolutionary, then maybe I should share it with the world. So we did, I shared it my very first post. I added hashtag Sam sales, not thinking it would really go anywhere. And actually on that first post Sales Hacker reached out and said, this was great. Would you come write for us? And I was like, heck yeah. So excited. So we have a little bit of a, of my background there.

Kathleen (05:04): That's awesome. And I love that LinkedIn hired you because you just such a passionate customer. I think that's honestly, that's, that's such a great way to source sales talent, right?

Samantha (05:15): No kidding. Well, and I I'm lucky enough to still be a brand ambassador for them. You know, one of, I think about 20 people that, that have that role, but you know, who wouldn't want that someone who is excited and can wax poetic about your technology forever. Yeah, definitely got that in me.

Kathleen (05:30): That's great. The thing that I think is really interesting is, is the evolution that LinkedIn has undergone in the last let's call it decade because when I think back on it, and this is just my perception, I'd be curious to hear if you, if you've experienced and seen it the same way. You know, I've been on LinkedIn a long time and for, for a while there, it was literally just your online resume and there wasn't as much interaction. And then it was like the interaction happened in groups. Groups were so big for a while and people's posts in the feed were more broadcasting and less back and forth. And then it seemed that groups kind of, you know, died away a little bit. And now the main action is really happening in the feed. And it's like the last two to three years, I've just absolutely loved it. It has surpassed Facebook, Twitter, everything else as my main platform of choice. It's, it's where I really feel my people are. I don't know what that says about me, maybe. But it's really, truly become more of like what I really think of as a social network than it used to be. So that is my perception of it. I'm curious to hear what you think

Samantha (06:42): I completely agree with you. And I think the way that you articulated, how it's grown, kind of the little roller coasters and dips with groups, and then how it's really become this incredible content sharing platform is dead on Kathleen. I think what's interesting too, is that you think about how many members are on LinkedIn. So we're at about 750 million members on LinkedIn that are globally located. And what's interesting to me about that is that half of those members on average log in once a week onto LinkedIn and stay on at least five minutes on the platform. So what that tells me is that maybe they're coming in to update something on their profile, right. But what I think they're really doing is they're coming to look for content, right? They're coming to read that feed. They're coming to see what the expertise is that is out there to learn something.

Samantha (07:29): And the even more interesting number to me, which I hope will grow is that less than 1% of those members, myself included you, Kathleen, I know you post quite a bit on LinkedIn, but less than 1% of those members are actually posting content at least once a week. So for any marketer out there for anybody in sales out there, that's listening to this. This is a platform where you don't have that much competition to see what it is that you're posting and guess what it's free of charge. So you get to go build a brand, get your content out there and get your subject matter expertise and really use LinkedIn to, in my opinion, what it's built for it to be a demand generation machine, which is exactly what it's been for our business.

Kathleen (08:11): I totally agree. And I always tell people, I get a lot of questions about my LinkedIn presence. People are like, you're really active on there. Why do you post so much? And, and I, part of it is just that I enjoy it. And I am the weirdo who has LinkedIn opened, like all the time, if I'm at my computer, it's opened and I'm looking at it all the time. Both because I learn a lot also because I monitor my company social presence, but, but also because like there's so much great discussion there. I don't want to miss it. But I tell people that I do use LinkedIn kind of as a personal marketing sandbox. And it's an, it's a place for me to experiment and, and figure out what's working and what's not. And so right now, my goal is to post every single business day.

Kathleen (08:58): And then ideally I also post on the weekends, but I'm not like pressuring myself if I don't, I don't get it every Saturday and Sunday. You know, just to see like what will happen in terms of engagement levels. And it's funny, cause I was just this morning looking at shield app, which is a third party platform that helps you kind of like, it's like Google analytics for your LinkedIn account, how I think of it. And it was fascinating because I can see and shield app the moment when I made that decision to post every day and you can see all of my metrics, like go up into the right, the engagement, the number of people viewing my posts, all of it increased. And so that's the thing that I find so fascinating as like the true marketing nerd that I am is I get to like run these experiments. It's things like posting regularly or posting with videos or posts versus posting with texts, putting the link in the post versus not like testing out different topics. And you can really see like what's resonating and there's so much gold in there. So now I'm going to stop going on and on marketing talk.

Samantha (10:01): I love the data as well, because I think, you know, data only gets us so far. We need to know what's behind the data too, but it can be so tremendous in terms of guiding us to future decisions. So if we look right, if you look at your analytics and say, well, I don't seem to get a lot of, of, you know, engagement from this post or when I post on this day or this type of content, it helps you refine how and what you post. I'd be interested to see your, your analytics as paired up to what I'm about to tell you guys, but a couple of different things to think about that the ultimate times to post. So everybody always says like, what time should I do it? Well, guess what if we all told you, well, Tuesday at 11 o'clock in the morning is the right time to post and everybody's going to post them and you're going to be competing for that, those eyeballs, right? Because that's when the platform will be flooded with content. But a couple of things to think about, even if you're just getting started in posting one would actually recommend that you avoid Mondays. So Mondays are the day where everybody wakes up and they're like, this is the week. This is the day that I'm going to post on. Right. They're all energy.

Kathleen (10:58): It's like New Years resolutions.

Samantha (11:01): Exactly. Right. So I would stay actually away from that day. Check out Tuesdays. So to give you a good example, our Tuesday posts are through the roof. Of course, now everybody's going to post onto your site and that's going to go down, but that's all right for the, for the greater good. When we posted this just this week on Tuesday, I posted about the fact that we don't do introductions or set agendas at the beginning of demos and how frustrating that is. You know, we've all gotten on those calls where the sales rep just goes into it about 44 hours after I made that post, of course, you know, knowing some of the algorithm tricks and helping the visibility had 23,000 views at that post. And I think about that, just the difference in posting right on a Tuesday versus a Monday is huge as a game-changer, but also all of those algorithm hacks, right?

Samantha (11:48): That I just talked about those things that I know how to do because I've been inside LinkedIn and I've used this for so long. That's also what helps drive the value. So you don't really need to do this that much. If you get on the platform and post two or three times a week and you learn how to do these things that will help. And the other thing to think about is, think about a weekend post. So I'm with you. I try to post on the weekends. I'm not strict about it. And sometimes frankly, I just need the break from LinkedIn.

Samantha (12:15): Read my book. Yeah. So, but I think about this, if you try and post on a weekend on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, I think what you'll be interested to find is that you get a very different audience. So we tend to have a higher concentration of attendees on LinkedIn that on the weekends that tend to be executives. So we're running, running, running throughout the week. And then once we get to the weekend, we're like, okay, what happened on LinkedIn that we missed? So not only to get a different audience, but you might get to the more senior audience, also one other tip. I love my weekend post to be a little bit more about ourselves. So maybe how we can be better, you know, less multitask, more focused on something, how we can be more disconnected from our technology as I post on LinkedIn. And you know, things that are a little less businessy and maybe more professional businessy like personal businessy. There's some words that don't make any sense that I've used now. So you guys should definitely trust my judgment.

Kathleen (13:07): Oh, that, that makes, I think what you said makes complete sense. And it's funny because I've actually tested the same thing with email newsletters. The traditional marketing guidance is you always send them on like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. And I have found sometimes sending it Saturday morning is incredibly effective for the exact reason you said, because that's when the people who are super busy and have packed calendars, tend to like kick back and go through their inbox.

Samantha (13:35): Yeah, and we, we, we did that same thing. So we have a a newsletter that comes out on Fridays, which is our mail, which is a really short, impactful newsletter actually. Jeff Rosset and he was the CEO of Sales Assembly was nice enough to announce our newsletter. The other day, we got a bunch of signups from him. We send that on out on Friday and our open rate is through the roof. Now I do imagine hopefully that's because some of our content is decent, but also I think it's the timing. And then we also send out some marketing campaigns on Sundays to talk about BDR, best practices for your, your business development reps. And again, open rate through the roof, I think just because we're not doing it when everybody else is competing for those eyeballs. Yeah.

Kathleen (14:15): So true. When they go right. You go left and there's some opportunities to the left. Exactly. So, all right. I have a couple of questions for you. Number one though, before we do this, is if somebody wants to subscribe to your newsletter, where do they do that?

Samantha (14:27): Oh, thanks. Yeah. Pop over to our website, sands sales consulting.com. And we'll, we'll hit you with a, Hey sign up as soon as you hit the website. So pretty, pretty easy to navigate them.

Kathleen (14:38): All right. Perfect. And we are going to be in a minute getting into some stuff about Sales Navigator, because that was what made my eyes pop open when I heard you talk. But before we do, you said the magic that every marketer reacts to, which is LinkedIn hacks algorithm hacks. So maybe we could just have like a little rapid fire. Like, can you share a list of some of the hacks that you are seeing working right now?

Samantha (15:07): For sure. So I'll give you two, let's say three that are really important. So if you are a marketer and you were trying to encourage your salespeople of how to post better, here's a couple of hints. So number one, you want to think about link in comments. I think that this seems pretty table stakes these days, but again, so many people do this the wrong way. If I have a link, let's say to a company event to a data sheet of white paper or webinar or whatever it is that I want to advertise on LinkedIn, if I put the link in my post, what that's going to do is get LinkedIn to say, huh? So what you're trying to do is take our viewers that we've worked so hard to get to linkedin.com and you're going to take them away. He said, no thanks. And so what they're going to do is throttle your post to make sure it doesn't get as much visibility on average.

Samantha (15:52): You'll get about 10 to 15% of the normal visibility that you will. If you had instead talked about the event and then said, link in comments and put the link in the comments. Now, let me also tell you why, because I know everybody's like that that makes no sense, like who cares the link? Is there no matter what let's say, I posted everything according to the LinkedIn algorithm. And then let's say you, Kathleen came along and said, Oh, this is great. This reminds me of an article I just read. And you posted the link in my comment. Linkedin's not going to punish me because you came along to try and get viewers away from LinkedIn, but they will punish me if I do it. Right. Punish is a hard word. You guys get it though. So throw it in the comments.

Kathleen (16:30): No question about that. Quick question. Cause I think a lot of people still hold on to that notion that their posts, like, especially if they're promoting an event, for example, they're like, Oh, but I have this amazing event graphic. Like if they upload an image in place of the, what I call the unfurl, like the preview image that would come with their URL. So if you need to do that as it is it make your post-sale Lincoln comments attach an image that substitutes for what would have been the preview. Does that work just as well?

Samantha (16:58): You nailed it. That's exactly it. So I can do that two ways when I go to the link and I look for an image that's, you know, on the article or already there, or I just post the link, just exactly what you said in my post. I wait for the preview image to come up. I take a little snippet of that. And then I delete the link from the post because yeah, the image, the image also works. People love image. They love being able to say something in front of them instead of just text. So that's a great one, two punch to make sure you're really double playing the algorithm there. Yeah. Think about to the structure of your content. So when you post something on LinkedIn, you've got about five lines of texts that you can have and that's texts. That's hard return, white space, it's five lines.

Samantha (17:40): And those five lines after those timelines, you will get a dot, dot, dot, a little ellipses there. Plus, see more. So what we're actually trying to is your post will get more visibility if you encourage people to see more so, as soon as they click on that LinkedIn perks up and says, Oh wait, there's something interesting here. If we can get a bunch of people to do that, then you're basically telling LinkedIn there's something really interesting here. A bunch of people want to see more. They're so captured by the first five sentences that they want to see more. Think about like clickbait and what we'll see out there. Right?

Kathleen (18:12): The Buzzfeed titles only don't be like disingenuous is what I always tell people. Like channel Buzzfeed but in an honest way,

Samantha (18:20): The one that I always fall for is what, what do eighties celebrities look like now? I'm like, I'm desperate to know. Right. So I think you're, you're absolutely right. Be authentic. So I hate the ones that are like, it was the most dramatic day of my life. I'm like get over it. I hate them. But so if you go back to look at mine, you'll see that where my kind of clickbait comes in and saying, you know, posing a question and then answering that question. Right. And getting people to think like, wait, that's the answer to it. I have to see more of what she says. Think about it that way. How do we just use that space to hook people into whatever it is we're going to talk about in a genuine, authentic, helpful way. Okay.

Kathleen (18:58): And that's like, what do journalists call it? Don't bury the lead. Like pop it up front and then people want to read more.

Samantha (19:04): Nailed it. Exactly. And I think the final thing, and usually the most shocking, especially for marketers that are like, okay, I've got to get my sales team to share our content is, do not use that share button on these LinkedIn posts. If you do nothing else, just create a new post. So let me again, tell you why, what LinkedIn really values is original content. So let's say today I posted on LinkedIn, let's say all three, 1 million members that are posting on, on LinkedIn every day, come in. And the only thing they do is hit share on Sam sales content. Now, to me, that sounds wonderful because LinkedIn is just filled with sound sales. And I'm all excited about that. But LinkedIn is like this isn't riveting. We already saw this, give us something new. So when you hit that share button, when you and man is that hard to get somebody to do, even like that's the Holy grail.

Samantha (19:52): When for me, when somebody says this was motivating enough to me, that I want to share it. But when you do that, what you're actually telling LinkedIn is I'm repurposing old content. There's nothing new to see here. And again, LinkedIn will throttle that post about 10 to 15% of the normal views. Now, two things to think about one, if you love this post, just copy the link to post, right? Copy the link of that post, write a new post originally by yourself, and then just say Lincoln comments, you know, or tag the person that wrote it. If you still want to do that, but you're still lazy hit share. And then in that post tag, the person's name and say, this was so great by Sam McKenna, yada yada, or by Kathleen loved it. Talk that person, that person will hopefully comment on your post. And as long as they do within the first 24 hours, you'll then get about 30 to 40% of the views that you would. So a little lazy route, but guys I'm like, let's get the a hundred percent of the, of the beers that we can get. Right. Let's maximize this out. So three, three little hacks that should help

Kathleen (20:48): There. Yeah, that's great. So marketers, write those down and share them with your sales team or better give them a link to this interview for them to listen to. Okay. So now let's turn to Sales Navigator because I don't know if I'm representative of most marketers or if I'm just particularly ignorant on this, but there was, so I learned so much. I mean, I know that Sales Navigator is it's a premium option. A lot of sales team use teams use it. There are marketers who use it to help their sales teams. I like, I want to start with some of the basics for those who may not have used it, but I don't want to stay on the basics for too long because you have so many good advanced nuggets. So can you just give us a quick overview and then let's dive into some of the really cool things you can do.

Samantha (21:32): Yeah. Let's talk about what the misperception is of Navigator. And that is that it's just linkedin.com on steroids. It can do more searches. You can see a few more things. It's basically the same thing. Just looks a little different. It has more bells and whistles couldn't be more wrong. So what LinkedIn Navigator really is right? The way I've always described it is you take all of the data and intelligence that resides on LinkedIn and you curate that data and intelligence specific to your book of business. So if I'm a salesperson and I'm going after a mid-market commercial territory in the Northeast, and I'm selling to X titles for X company size, I can tell Navigator, tell me everything that's going on. Not only with these types of companies, but with my specific book of 400 accounts that I'm targeting the thing that's really neat about Navigator.

Samantha (22:17): In addition to all the cool bells and whistles is that I can pop in Kathleen, let's say you and I made, and we made it a conference. And you say, I would love to buy Sam sales, but I'm not interested in buying you for six months, but let's stay in touch. What I'm going to do then is obviously I'll connect with you on LinkedIn. But what I'm also going to do is I'm going to go to LinkedIn and I'm going to hit this really cute little button that says save. And I'm going to save you as a potential prospect. I'm also going to save your company now automatically. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to find your other decision makers within the company. You know, your, your CEO, your C-suite, your president, anybody else on your marketing team, and I'm going to hit save on them too.

Samantha (22:54): Why? Because I've made it my mission now to sell to you guys. And what I can do by hitting save is that I can track what you guys are doing. And on LinkedIn, I can track anything where you're mentioned in the press outside of LinkedIn, and I can see what's going on with your company in and outside of LinkedIn. So if you are somebody in your, C-suite just wrote an article, I'll get notified about it. If you guys are sponsoring a conference, if someone on your C-suite speaking at an event, whatever it may be, I now get that in my feed. So I can go and say, what is happening with Kathleen's company all without you guys, knowing that I've saved you attract you anything. It's very big brother and the best.

Kathleen (23:30): Okay. But all marketing sort of is these days. If we're being honest with ourselves you know, I mean, it's, this is the whole conversation, right? I mean, the interwebs know all about us. There's nowhere to hide.

Samantha (23:41): Well, and I'll tell you, this feature is fantastic for ex boyfriends and girlfriends. They won't know you're on their page. So I had it. Right. See what they're doing. Not that I've ever done that. Yeah.

Kathleen (23:52): All right. So if we use our LinkedIn Sales Navigator powers for good and not evil w you know, you, I know you talked about some really specific searches and things like little, let's call them hacks again, but more on the Navigator side. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Samantha (24:07): Yeah. So one of the, I've got a couple of favorite things here. So in your searches, if you guys are Navigator users at the top of your Navigator page, there's a search bar URL. And just to the right of that, there's something that says advanced search. And in that you get 25 different search functions. So you can set all this criteria of who you want to look for now. That's great. But what I find right is that most marketers and most salespeople are just like you, Kathleen are not totally sure of the full power of what can do what can be done here, or frankly, what you even do with that search. So here are two of my absolute favorites. Number one, you've got this really cool thing on the search that says current company and past company for the past company field, I love to put in our top 20, 30, 50 clients in that.

Samantha (24:55): And what I'm doing is I'm saying, tell me anyone, anyone on LinkedIn that used to work for some of our most important clients. And then I'm saying, okay, great. That's a few million people. Boof, what am I going to do there? And I say, okay, now tell me, who's your buyer persona? Who is your drool worthy title, right? That you would pay, I don't know, two, $300 cost per lead to get to a time to a webinar. Well, who are those people? And so put those in your title field, and then second down, further territory North America, whatever it may be and hit search. What you're going to find is a treasure trove of leads that you can reach out to and say, hello, you used to work for one of our current customers, now you work for a prospective customer. We would love to talk to you about what we can do for this current company. Caveat - t doesn't matter when they work there. I don't care if they weren't there in 2006, in 2002, 1998. Who cares? The fact is they worked for a company that trusts us with work. And so perhaps they could also trust us with some work. I have one more, but that's, there are questions there.

Kathleen (25:56): I love that approach. Especially, I mean, yes, hitting people who've worked there ever, but I mean, I feel like especially people who've recently departed, it's such a gold mine of, you know, I'm going to mix metaphors here off low-hanging fruit, because you know, fruit grows in gold mines, but like, really it is it's, it's such, it's such an opportunity that I think not a lot of marketers or sales people take advantage of it's to me, it's the equivalent of when I send out my big email marketing, like newsletters and things, the, the replies I get when it's like, I'm no longer here I always go and like hunt down, where are they now?

Samantha (26:34): Yeah. As you should. And that's exactly, that's what makes you so good at your job, right? Because you put these puzzle pieces together and you're like, well, this is still a quality lead for us. You on that note too, you can set up a search that says, tell me, anytime people change jobs within my accounts, within my territory within anything. And they're say I have all these little recorded videos by the way, you guys on my website, but I've got a video specifically about this that talks about how, when we want to be the first person to congratulate somebody on a job change, especially in our sector. So whoever does, at first, in, in the sector in vertical, that they represent is much more likely exponentially, more likely to get the business. However, we also want some EQ right. So Kathleen, if you changed shops and I'm like, hi, congrats, do you want to buy #samsales?

Samantha (27:19): You're going to be like, know where the bathroom is? Like, slow your roll. So I think there's a, there's a balance to that for sure. But capitalize on those job changes. I think the other piece of the search that I love so much is the idea of, especially if you work for, let's say a company that has I don't know, north of 250 employees let's even get wild. I have a hundred employees. One of the things that I love to look for is the key buyer persona that we're looking for and past company of my company. So let's say when I worked at LinkedIn, if I looked up you know, VP of sales, CRO that used to work at LinkedIn and now works for another company, either in my specific book of business or in the territory of all the people that I managed, I can find people who love LinkedIn and who are enthusiastic about it and who I can be like, you're an alumnus.

Samantha (28:09): And I currently work here and help us out. Yeah. Did me a warm intro? Oh, heck yeah. I mean, it's, it's amazing. So just those two searches. If you, if you spend the weekend doing that in Navigator, you'll be in such great shape. Oh, one more thing. If I can plug one of the great things that I've got as a, as an ambassador pop over to my website, go on the LinkedIn section under solutions. And there's a 60 day free trial at Navigator. You typically get 30 days, but through me you can get 60. So that's great. Yeah. Pop over there and get it, give it a shot and then set a reminder for 59 days to cancel if you're not wowed by it. And if you're not wowed by it, call me.

Kathleen (28:43): So there's, I think there's obviously so much that people who are in a sales role can do with Navigator. A lot of my listeners are marketers. So as a marketer, what should or can you be doing? Should the marketer have a Sales Navigator account?

Samantha (29:00): So I'm going to give you guys one of the biggest benefits that I see here. And hint, hint that I really think LinkedIn should include in their product development. So think about this. This is a little harder if you're a huge company, right? But you can even segment this down every single time you guys close a deal as a marketer. What I would go, especially if you're in demand gen, go to that sales rep and say, Hey, who was responsible? Who was involved in this deal? Tell me all of the players. On the other side of the business, the key decision maker, who was in legal, who was in procurement, who was our champion, our skeptic, who are those people have the sales reps in those names to pop into your Navigator account, find all those people and hit save. If you just do that one thing and go in every day to track job changes, you will open up a massive SQL benefit line of line of leads for yourself that never existed.

Samantha (29:55): So we talked about this as marketers all the time, right? How do we get more leads in the system? How much do I have to spend? What's my cost per lead? You guys, if you spend $900 on an account for Navigator, this will, I mean, your, your CPLs will be cents, like pennies on the dollar. It's what I love about this is that you can pop in every day or you can get the emails delivered directly to you. And every time somebody changes jobs, you, as the marketer can say, fantastic job change. See where they went, send the lead to that person or pop it in Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, put an SLA, obviously around when they should reach out to the lead. And now you have ROI tied to a specific marketing activity that you did, that wouldn't be monitored by sales. I want to just think about the reverse of this. If I'm doing this as a sales rep, or if we teach our sales reps to do this one, we're giving them the responsibility and control of tracking those job changes. And to frankly, most reps, if they see that the person changes into another territory and it's not there, assuming they're bothered to look it up, they're certainly not going to look it up 10 times a day. So you guys can do this. And Holy smokes, does this pay off?

Kathleen (30:58): I love that. May or may not be leaving here today to put that in place.

Samantha (31:05): Oh, I can't wait to hear. We do it at #samsales. It's a, I mean, it's, I can't even say how beneficial it is. Go get it.

Kathleen (31:11): Well, it's like an extension of something I'm already doing in a kind of cheap and, and and less programmatic way, which is that you know, I'm, I'm, I started working at the company I'm at probably five months ago. And one of the audiences we sell into is large online media businesses. And I don't have a lot of contacts in that area. So every time I go to an industry event or I do anything and there's anybody else there, I always reach out to all of them to connect on LinkedIn, because I'm like, then they'll see the content I post, hopefully. Right. But this is even better because it's a way of building a relationship. And we talk about that a lot internally where I work, it's all about building relationships, especially when you're taking like an ABM style approach, et cetera. So awesome tool to add into the arsenal. One, one, maybe this is a dumb question, but does, how does Navigator link at all into your LinkedIn campaign manager?

Samantha (32:08): It doesn't. So they're, they are two separate things, which I know is a, is a hassle, but I think, you know, I'll go on the record there. I think there's so much opportunity to really bridge those gaps for, for LinkedIn one day, again, even just charging on the data that we get from that. And then being able to put those together with campaign managers, you can see like, Hey, these are, these are prospective clients or existing clients that we can target. I mean, there's so much value. They're just not quite there yet.

Kathleen (32:32): There is no current way, if you build like a target list in campaign or sorry, in Navigator, to then target those through Campaign Manager?

Samantha (32:42): Unfortunately, not that there was something that came out quite a while ago called stereo for LinkedIn, that they weren't, they were trying to do that. Exactly. That basically reps would save things out in their Navigator and then marketing could see that and be like, Oh, well, these people are important to you. And maybe they're not in our CRM yet we should start marketing to them. But it just seems like a no brainer. There's so much, it seems like a no brainer listening, we're going on record. If you invent this give Kathleen and I royalties.

Kathleen (33:09): Yes. Or, or at least call me and I'll be in your early private beta. Awesome. So, so when you're, if you're a marketer who is first getting started with Navigator, what are the first kind of most important steps you should take to, to get off and running quickly and see value out of it?

Samantha (33:31): Yeah. So one, I would definitely do the saving of your clients, especially if you guys are doing anything with ABM. If you have tier one accounts, you know, the big boys of the world that you're trying to get into, go in and save them and have somebody that's exclusively responsible for keeping tabs on what's going on with their C-suite, with their executive team. And that the company is mentioning in the press. What I think you'll find is that a lot of the missions that these companies have and the things that they're really focused on achieving come from that. So if you want to even think, how can we market to them? How can we use their vernacular in our marketing campaigns, the content that we send out, easy home run way to aggregate all of that together, directly on LinkedIn, and to see what their executives are using their voices to talk about. I don't think it sounds like you,

Kathleen (34:17): I could use that same approach for competitive research.

Samantha (34:20): Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And we, you know, even on a, on an individualized level, we see tons of marketing teams and then tons of salespeople who track their top competitors. So I work with an unbelievable amount of big law lawyers who say, like, I always lose to Bill. Like I want to keep tabs on Bill, you know? And I'm like, well, let's do it. And you won't know. So it's great. But yeah, it's fantastic for competitive intelligence. And then the other thing I would think about is kind of talking back to that search. So where have our most prestigious clients, right? Where are the people that the buyer personas, where are they now, if they've worked for our most prestigious clients and being able to kind of put together marketing strategy that says, you know, you used to use to work with us.

Samantha (35:02): We'd love to talk to you again and figure out how to do that. If your sales reps aren't doing it. The final thing that I would say is, as a marketer, think of how you can use the search to find people who have used, who have previously worked for again, your biggest clients, but now all work for the same client. So think of it this way. If I can find that there are six people who used to work for Deloitte, and now they all work for Accenture and I don't have Accenture yet, I can, I can pull those people together and I can send a little campaign to them to say, Hey guys, you all used to work for Deloitte. You all have used our technology before. I don't know if you know each other, but maybe as, as Deloitte alumni, you guys should be connected. Also we'd love to just have a group zoom with you and executive round table. How can we help you? You guys can put the pieces together with that as marketers build these campaigns. And again, tie it to ROI for you guys.

Kathleen (35:51): I love all of these ideas. I feel like we could go on and on and on forever, but we don't have forever. I want to shift gears for a minute because there are two questions that I always ask my guests, and I would love to get your take on them. The first is, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing right now?

Samantha (36:19): So I will give a shout out to two different companies. So I think Kyle Coleman at Clari, if I'm sure some of you guys listening know him he, I think has done such a tremendous job of using the LinkedIn platform, building awareness, but the entire Clari team really is on LinkedIn. You see their presence as a whole consistently, they've really mastered it. The other thing that I would say is for the team at Sales Assembly. So this is a company out of Chicago. I'm lucky enough to be on their board of advisors and not only do they use LinkedIn to educate sales reps and leaders about what should be done properly in the market, but I've noticed a trend with them. I actually don't know if this is a fact, but I've noticed a trend where they're really using their voices for the power of promoting other people and finding, you know, really not just, you know, commercial that saying like this isn't really impactful tool. Right. And helping get the word out. So to that together, collectively, those two companies are really on LinkedIn then and on their game.

Kathleen (37:18): Those are great examples. I can't wait to go dig into those a little bit more. Second question is the marketers that listen to this podcast and many of the ones I know in real life, I think one of the biggest challenges I hear them express pretty frequently is that the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. You know, just when you feel like you've mastered something, the platform changes the algorithm or the rules of the game. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Samantha (37:49): Yeah, I think for me, I met I'm bananas reader. I read as much as I possibly can, but I, when I looked at LinkedIn, obviously I like to just see what's being posted there. I also look at some of the more modern publications and see what are people, what are people promoting on Crunchbase, or people talking about on Revenue Collective? What is it that we can ascertain from platforms like that? Where people who are in the thick of it and constantly marketing and doing different things share. And then the other thing that I would say is, I know it seems like it changes so fast, but I think where I could, if I could guide you in one thing is to really focus on, have I mastered the foundations of the job here that I'm doing, whether it's content marketing demand gen, whenever I find this on the sales side too, that people reached out to me and they're like, what's the hack? And I'm like how are your discovery calls? And they're like our discovery calls. They're like, they're not great, but what's, what's the latest hack. And I'm like, well, let's, let's back go back to the, like the basic principles. So thinking about that too, you know, even from, from your perspective, not thinking about all the latest greatest, but have we really mastered the basics and if not, like what a great place to focus,

Kathleen (38:56): I feel like the equivalent of that is when you're trying to lose weight and know that you should just like eat less and exercise more, but you're like, is there a diet pill that would help me lose 20 pounds really fast?

Samantha (39:05): They just want a better body.

Kathleen (39:11): Well, whoever does invent that magic pill will be a billionaire.

Samantha (39:15): Oh my gosh. I can't imagine.

Kathleen (39:17): But it doesn't exist yet. So. All right. Great. Well there are, sounds like there are a lot of resources on your website. So maybe you could share for people who are listening and want to learn a little bit more about you connect with you online a what is the best way for them to do that and be where can they find all these fantastic resources?

Samantha (39:38): Yeah. So there's so much on my website, Samsales consulting.com. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, come on, come on over. I post a lot of content there. I will say, you know, the most cost-effective way to get even more out of what's in my head check out our website, the shorts section. So it's under our solutions. We have 18 different shorts, including a masterclass on discovery calls, but there are three, four or five minute videos to teach you all of these hacks and practical things about sales, marketing, LinkedIn, and Navigator. So if you find yourself, you know, getting some kind of objection in sales, you're like, what was not that she said about Navigator again, it's not there. You can sign up. And this prescription is in my humble opinion, super inexpensive. So come over there. We'd, we'd love to see you.

Kathleen (40:22): That's great. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. So as always head over there to check it out and connect with Sam and find all of her great content. But if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, which I can't imagine you didn't because you have so many good tips. If you're listening and you liked it, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Samantha.

Samantha (40:59): Thanks.

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How do the world's top LinkedIn power users get the most out of the platform for sales and marketing?

This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, #samsales Consulting founder Samantha McKenna shares insider tips on using LinkedIn, as well as LinkedIn Sales Navigator, for sales prospecting and marketing.

From understanding how LinkedIn's algorithm works, to diving deep into the ways marketers can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator as part of their account-based marketing campaigns, Samantha shares specific, actionable tips and strategies that you can use right away to get better sales and marketing results.

Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, to get all of Samantha's tips.

Resources from this episode:

Transcript

Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth and this week, my guest is Samantha McKenna, who is the founder of #samsales consulting. Welcome to the podcast Samantha.

Samantha (01:43): Thank you so much for having me Kathleen. So great to be here.

Kathleen (01:46): I'm really excited about this conversation. So for anybody listening you know, we've talked about LinkedIn a bunch on this podcast and coming at it from different angles every time. And I've always thought of myself as somebody who knows a lot about LinkedIn and is pretty good at it. But it turns out I still have a lot to learn. And how do I know that? I know that because I attended a talk that Samantha did on LinkedIn and all of a sudden I realized that there were massive gaping holes in my knowledge base. So I was like, Oh, I have to have her come on because I learned so much. And every time I feel that way, I really want to share it with my listeners. So with that introduction, Samantha maybe you could tell my listeners a little bit about yourself and specifically, you know, your background and experience and how you came to be doing what you're doing now and what #samsales Consulting is.

Samantha (02:39): Yeah, for sure. You know, I think the one you're not alone in that response, I think there's there's so many little nuances on LinkedIn for everything that you should be doing, not only with the free platform, but then with Navigator, you know, and I think that I've spoken to so many people who think I'm a total pro at this, what else can I learn? But then when we sit down together, they're like, Oh my gosh. So I think what's great to highlight for anybody, whether you're a marketer or your sales person, is there is so much just platform can do that. You might not even know just yet. My own personal background, I've been in enterprise sales for 15, 16 years at this point. I have been an individual contributor, broke a bunch of records while doing that and then convinced my leadership to move me to management.

Samantha (03:22): And I climbed the ladder through there. Having most recently run a line of business at LinkedIn for LinkedIn Sales Navigator, where I ran the enterprise sales team there out of the New York city office. And, you know, I think for me, like many of you guys, you probably have these, you know, pie in the sky dream come true companies that you've wanted to work for. And LinkedIn was exactly that for me, I had no plans of ever going there, but after doing a customer testimonial for them about the LinkedIn Sales Navigator platform, I think I almost fell out of my chair with excitement about what it did for our teams. And they said, we need that energy here. You have to come work for us. So I think for me really where the expertise in LinkedIn came from was just understanding early in my career, the power that I could leverage with the platform, the brand that it could build for me, not only as a sales rep, but as a leader and for the products we sold and frankly where #samsales came from was one my very first post giving a sales tip and then thinking, well, maybe this'll take off.

Samantha (04:25): Maybe there'll be something here. So I want to attach a hashtag to it. But where the first posts actually came from was every single time I gave sales advice to my friends, my bosses, my bosses, bosses, they always said, I've never thought of that. That's so interesting. What a great idea. And I was like, well, dang, like if you guys think this is revolutionary, then maybe I should share it with the world. So we did, I shared it my very first post. I added hashtag Sam sales, not thinking it would really go anywhere. And actually on that first post Sales Hacker reached out and said, this was great. Would you come write for us? And I was like, heck yeah. So excited. So we have a little bit of a, of my background there.

Kathleen (05:04): That's awesome. And I love that LinkedIn hired you because you just such a passionate customer. I think that's honestly, that's, that's such a great way to source sales talent, right?

Samantha (05:15): No kidding. Well, and I I'm lucky enough to still be a brand ambassador for them. You know, one of, I think about 20 people that, that have that role, but you know, who wouldn't want that someone who is excited and can wax poetic about your technology forever. Yeah, definitely got that in me.

Kathleen (05:30): That's great. The thing that I think is really interesting is, is the evolution that LinkedIn has undergone in the last let's call it decade because when I think back on it, and this is just my perception, I'd be curious to hear if you, if you've experienced and seen it the same way. You know, I've been on LinkedIn a long time and for, for a while there, it was literally just your online resume and there wasn't as much interaction. And then it was like the interaction happened in groups. Groups were so big for a while and people's posts in the feed were more broadcasting and less back and forth. And then it seemed that groups kind of, you know, died away a little bit. And now the main action is really happening in the feed. And it's like the last two to three years, I've just absolutely loved it. It has surpassed Facebook, Twitter, everything else as my main platform of choice. It's, it's where I really feel my people are. I don't know what that says about me, maybe. But it's really, truly become more of like what I really think of as a social network than it used to be. So that is my perception of it. I'm curious to hear what you think

Samantha (06:42): I completely agree with you. And I think the way that you articulated, how it's grown, kind of the little roller coasters and dips with groups, and then how it's really become this incredible content sharing platform is dead on Kathleen. I think what's interesting too, is that you think about how many members are on LinkedIn. So we're at about 750 million members on LinkedIn that are globally located. And what's interesting to me about that is that half of those members on average log in once a week onto LinkedIn and stay on at least five minutes on the platform. So what that tells me is that maybe they're coming in to update something on their profile, right. But what I think they're really doing is they're coming to look for content, right? They're coming to read that feed. They're coming to see what the expertise is that is out there to learn something.

Samantha (07:29): And the even more interesting number to me, which I hope will grow is that less than 1% of those members, myself included you, Kathleen, I know you post quite a bit on LinkedIn, but less than 1% of those members are actually posting content at least once a week. So for any marketer out there for anybody in sales out there, that's listening to this. This is a platform where you don't have that much competition to see what it is that you're posting and guess what it's free of charge. So you get to go build a brand, get your content out there and get your subject matter expertise and really use LinkedIn to, in my opinion, what it's built for it to be a demand generation machine, which is exactly what it's been for our business.

Kathleen (08:11): I totally agree. And I always tell people, I get a lot of questions about my LinkedIn presence. People are like, you're really active on there. Why do you post so much? And, and I, part of it is just that I enjoy it. And I am the weirdo who has LinkedIn opened, like all the time, if I'm at my computer, it's opened and I'm looking at it all the time. Both because I learn a lot also because I monitor my company social presence, but, but also because like there's so much great discussion there. I don't want to miss it. But I tell people that I do use LinkedIn kind of as a personal marketing sandbox. And it's an, it's a place for me to experiment and, and figure out what's working and what's not. And so right now, my goal is to post every single business day.

Kathleen (08:58): And then ideally I also post on the weekends, but I'm not like pressuring myself if I don't, I don't get it every Saturday and Sunday. You know, just to see like what will happen in terms of engagement levels. And it's funny, cause I was just this morning looking at shield app, which is a third party platform that helps you kind of like, it's like Google analytics for your LinkedIn account, how I think of it. And it was fascinating because I can see and shield app the moment when I made that decision to post every day and you can see all of my metrics, like go up into the right, the engagement, the number of people viewing my posts, all of it increased. And so that's the thing that I find so fascinating as like the true marketing nerd that I am is I get to like run these experiments. It's things like posting regularly or posting with videos or posts versus posting with texts, putting the link in the post versus not like testing out different topics. And you can really see like what's resonating and there's so much gold in there. So now I'm going to stop going on and on marketing talk.

Samantha (10:01): I love the data as well, because I think, you know, data only gets us so far. We need to know what's behind the data too, but it can be so tremendous in terms of guiding us to future decisions. So if we look right, if you look at your analytics and say, well, I don't seem to get a lot of, of, you know, engagement from this post or when I post on this day or this type of content, it helps you refine how and what you post. I'd be interested to see your, your analytics as paired up to what I'm about to tell you guys, but a couple of different things to think about that the ultimate times to post. So everybody always says like, what time should I do it? Well, guess what if we all told you, well, Tuesday at 11 o'clock in the morning is the right time to post and everybody's going to post them and you're going to be competing for that, those eyeballs, right? Because that's when the platform will be flooded with content. But a couple of things to think about, even if you're just getting started in posting one would actually recommend that you avoid Mondays. So Mondays are the day where everybody wakes up and they're like, this is the week. This is the day that I'm going to post on. Right. They're all energy.

Kathleen (10:58): It's like New Years resolutions.

Samantha (11:01): Exactly. Right. So I would stay actually away from that day. Check out Tuesdays. So to give you a good example, our Tuesday posts are through the roof. Of course, now everybody's going to post onto your site and that's going to go down, but that's all right for the, for the greater good. When we posted this just this week on Tuesday, I posted about the fact that we don't do introductions or set agendas at the beginning of demos and how frustrating that is. You know, we've all gotten on those calls where the sales rep just goes into it about 44 hours after I made that post, of course, you know, knowing some of the algorithm tricks and helping the visibility had 23,000 views at that post. And I think about that, just the difference in posting right on a Tuesday versus a Monday is huge as a game-changer, but also all of those algorithm hacks, right?

Samantha (11:48): That I just talked about those things that I know how to do because I've been inside LinkedIn and I've used this for so long. That's also what helps drive the value. So you don't really need to do this that much. If you get on the platform and post two or three times a week and you learn how to do these things that will help. And the other thing to think about is, think about a weekend post. So I'm with you. I try to post on the weekends. I'm not strict about it. And sometimes frankly, I just need the break from LinkedIn.

Samantha (12:15): Read my book. Yeah. So, but I think about this, if you try and post on a weekend on a Saturday morning or a Sunday morning, I think what you'll be interested to find is that you get a very different audience. So we tend to have a higher concentration of attendees on LinkedIn that on the weekends that tend to be executives. So we're running, running, running throughout the week. And then once we get to the weekend, we're like, okay, what happened on LinkedIn that we missed? So not only to get a different audience, but you might get to the more senior audience, also one other tip. I love my weekend post to be a little bit more about ourselves. So maybe how we can be better, you know, less multitask, more focused on something, how we can be more disconnected from our technology as I post on LinkedIn. And you know, things that are a little less businessy and maybe more professional businessy like personal businessy. There's some words that don't make any sense that I've used now. So you guys should definitely trust my judgment.

Kathleen (13:07): Oh, that, that makes, I think what you said makes complete sense. And it's funny because I've actually tested the same thing with email newsletters. The traditional marketing guidance is you always send them on like Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. And I have found sometimes sending it Saturday morning is incredibly effective for the exact reason you said, because that's when the people who are super busy and have packed calendars, tend to like kick back and go through their inbox.

Samantha (13:35): Yeah, and we, we, we did that same thing. So we have a a newsletter that comes out on Fridays, which is our mail, which is a really short, impactful newsletter actually. Jeff Rosset and he was the CEO of Sales Assembly was nice enough to announce our newsletter. The other day, we got a bunch of signups from him. We send that on out on Friday and our open rate is through the roof. Now I do imagine hopefully that's because some of our content is decent, but also I think it's the timing. And then we also send out some marketing campaigns on Sundays to talk about BDR, best practices for your, your business development reps. And again, open rate through the roof, I think just because we're not doing it when everybody else is competing for those eyeballs. Yeah.

Kathleen (14:15): So true. When they go right. You go left and there's some opportunities to the left. Exactly. So, all right. I have a couple of questions for you. Number one though, before we do this, is if somebody wants to subscribe to your newsletter, where do they do that?

Samantha (14:27): Oh, thanks. Yeah. Pop over to our website, sands sales consulting.com. And we'll, we'll hit you with a, Hey sign up as soon as you hit the website. So pretty, pretty easy to navigate them.

Kathleen (14:38): All right. Perfect. And we are going to be in a minute getting into some stuff about Sales Navigator, because that was what made my eyes pop open when I heard you talk. But before we do, you said the magic that every marketer reacts to, which is LinkedIn hacks algorithm hacks. So maybe we could just have like a little rapid fire. Like, can you share a list of some of the hacks that you are seeing working right now?

Samantha (15:07): For sure. So I'll give you two, let's say three that are really important. So if you are a marketer and you were trying to encourage your salespeople of how to post better, here's a couple of hints. So number one, you want to think about link in comments. I think that this seems pretty table stakes these days, but again, so many people do this the wrong way. If I have a link, let's say to a company event to a data sheet of white paper or webinar or whatever it is that I want to advertise on LinkedIn, if I put the link in my post, what that's going to do is get LinkedIn to say, huh? So what you're trying to do is take our viewers that we've worked so hard to get to linkedin.com and you're going to take them away. He said, no thanks. And so what they're going to do is throttle your post to make sure it doesn't get as much visibility on average.

Samantha (15:52): You'll get about 10 to 15% of the normal visibility that you will. If you had instead talked about the event and then said, link in comments and put the link in the comments. Now, let me also tell you why, because I know everybody's like that that makes no sense, like who cares the link? Is there no matter what let's say, I posted everything according to the LinkedIn algorithm. And then let's say you, Kathleen came along and said, Oh, this is great. This reminds me of an article I just read. And you posted the link in my comment. Linkedin's not going to punish me because you came along to try and get viewers away from LinkedIn, but they will punish me if I do it. Right. Punish is a hard word. You guys get it though. So throw it in the comments.

Kathleen (16:30): No question about that. Quick question. Cause I think a lot of people still hold on to that notion that their posts, like, especially if they're promoting an event, for example, they're like, Oh, but I have this amazing event graphic. Like if they upload an image in place of the, what I call the unfurl, like the preview image that would come with their URL. So if you need to do that as it is it make your post-sale Lincoln comments attach an image that substitutes for what would have been the preview. Does that work just as well?

Samantha (16:58): You nailed it. That's exactly it. So I can do that two ways when I go to the link and I look for an image that's, you know, on the article or already there, or I just post the link, just exactly what you said in my post. I wait for the preview image to come up. I take a little snippet of that. And then I delete the link from the post because yeah, the image, the image also works. People love image. They love being able to say something in front of them instead of just text. So that's a great one, two punch to make sure you're really double playing the algorithm there. Yeah. Think about to the structure of your content. So when you post something on LinkedIn, you've got about five lines of texts that you can have and that's texts. That's hard return, white space, it's five lines.

Samantha (17:40): And those five lines after those timelines, you will get a dot, dot, dot, a little ellipses there. Plus, see more. So what we're actually trying to is your post will get more visibility if you encourage people to see more so, as soon as they click on that LinkedIn perks up and says, Oh wait, there's something interesting here. If we can get a bunch of people to do that, then you're basically telling LinkedIn there's something really interesting here. A bunch of people want to see more. They're so captured by the first five sentences that they want to see more. Think about like clickbait and what we'll see out there. Right?

Kathleen (18:12): The Buzzfeed titles only don't be like disingenuous is what I always tell people. Like channel Buzzfeed but in an honest way,

Samantha (18:20): The one that I always fall for is what, what do eighties celebrities look like now? I'm like, I'm desperate to know. Right. So I think you're, you're absolutely right. Be authentic. So I hate the ones that are like, it was the most dramatic day of my life. I'm like get over it. I hate them. But so if you go back to look at mine, you'll see that where my kind of clickbait comes in and saying, you know, posing a question and then answering that question. Right. And getting people to think like, wait, that's the answer to it. I have to see more of what she says. Think about it that way. How do we just use that space to hook people into whatever it is we're going to talk about in a genuine, authentic, helpful way. Okay.

Kathleen (18:58): And that's like, what do journalists call it? Don't bury the lead. Like pop it up front and then people want to read more.

Samantha (19:04): Nailed it. Exactly. And I think the final thing, and usually the most shocking, especially for marketers that are like, okay, I've got to get my sales team to share our content is, do not use that share button on these LinkedIn posts. If you do nothing else, just create a new post. So let me again, tell you why, what LinkedIn really values is original content. So let's say today I posted on LinkedIn, let's say all three, 1 million members that are posting on, on LinkedIn every day, come in. And the only thing they do is hit share on Sam sales content. Now, to me, that sounds wonderful because LinkedIn is just filled with sound sales. And I'm all excited about that. But LinkedIn is like this isn't riveting. We already saw this, give us something new. So when you hit that share button, when you and man is that hard to get somebody to do, even like that's the Holy grail.

Samantha (19:52): When for me, when somebody says this was motivating enough to me, that I want to share it. But when you do that, what you're actually telling LinkedIn is I'm repurposing old content. There's nothing new to see here. And again, LinkedIn will throttle that post about 10 to 15% of the normal views. Now, two things to think about one, if you love this post, just copy the link to post, right? Copy the link of that post, write a new post originally by yourself, and then just say Lincoln comments, you know, or tag the person that wrote it. If you still want to do that, but you're still lazy hit share. And then in that post tag, the person's name and say, this was so great by Sam McKenna, yada yada, or by Kathleen loved it. Talk that person, that person will hopefully comment on your post. And as long as they do within the first 24 hours, you'll then get about 30 to 40% of the views that you would. So a little lazy route, but guys I'm like, let's get the a hundred percent of the, of the beers that we can get. Right. Let's maximize this out. So three, three little hacks that should help

Kathleen (20:48): There. Yeah, that's great. So marketers, write those down and share them with your sales team or better give them a link to this interview for them to listen to. Okay. So now let's turn to Sales Navigator because I don't know if I'm representative of most marketers or if I'm just particularly ignorant on this, but there was, so I learned so much. I mean, I know that Sales Navigator is it's a premium option. A lot of sales team use teams use it. There are marketers who use it to help their sales teams. I like, I want to start with some of the basics for those who may not have used it, but I don't want to stay on the basics for too long because you have so many good advanced nuggets. So can you just give us a quick overview and then let's dive into some of the really cool things you can do.

Samantha (21:32): Yeah. Let's talk about what the misperception is of Navigator. And that is that it's just linkedin.com on steroids. It can do more searches. You can see a few more things. It's basically the same thing. Just looks a little different. It has more bells and whistles couldn't be more wrong. So what LinkedIn Navigator really is right? The way I've always described it is you take all of the data and intelligence that resides on LinkedIn and you curate that data and intelligence specific to your book of business. So if I'm a salesperson and I'm going after a mid-market commercial territory in the Northeast, and I'm selling to X titles for X company size, I can tell Navigator, tell me everything that's going on. Not only with these types of companies, but with my specific book of 400 accounts that I'm targeting the thing that's really neat about Navigator.

Samantha (22:17): In addition to all the cool bells and whistles is that I can pop in Kathleen, let's say you and I made, and we made it a conference. And you say, I would love to buy Sam sales, but I'm not interested in buying you for six months, but let's stay in touch. What I'm going to do then is obviously I'll connect with you on LinkedIn. But what I'm also going to do is I'm going to go to LinkedIn and I'm going to hit this really cute little button that says save. And I'm going to save you as a potential prospect. I'm also going to save your company now automatically. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to find your other decision makers within the company. You know, your, your CEO, your C-suite, your president, anybody else on your marketing team, and I'm going to hit save on them too.

Samantha (22:54): Why? Because I've made it my mission now to sell to you guys. And what I can do by hitting save is that I can track what you guys are doing. And on LinkedIn, I can track anything where you're mentioned in the press outside of LinkedIn, and I can see what's going on with your company in and outside of LinkedIn. So if you are somebody in your, C-suite just wrote an article, I'll get notified about it. If you guys are sponsoring a conference, if someone on your C-suite speaking at an event, whatever it may be, I now get that in my feed. So I can go and say, what is happening with Kathleen's company all without you guys, knowing that I've saved you attract you anything. It's very big brother and the best.

Kathleen (23:30): Okay. But all marketing sort of is these days. If we're being honest with ourselves you know, I mean, it's, this is the whole conversation, right? I mean, the interwebs know all about us. There's nowhere to hide.

Samantha (23:41): Well, and I'll tell you, this feature is fantastic for ex boyfriends and girlfriends. They won't know you're on their page. So I had it. Right. See what they're doing. Not that I've ever done that. Yeah.

Kathleen (23:52): All right. So if we use our LinkedIn Sales Navigator powers for good and not evil w you know, you, I know you talked about some really specific searches and things like little, let's call them hacks again, but more on the Navigator side. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Samantha (24:07): Yeah. So one of the, I've got a couple of favorite things here. So in your searches, if you guys are Navigator users at the top of your Navigator page, there's a search bar URL. And just to the right of that, there's something that says advanced search. And in that you get 25 different search functions. So you can set all this criteria of who you want to look for now. That's great. But what I find right is that most marketers and most salespeople are just like you, Kathleen are not totally sure of the full power of what can do what can be done here, or frankly, what you even do with that search. So here are two of my absolute favorites. Number one, you've got this really cool thing on the search that says current company and past company for the past company field, I love to put in our top 20, 30, 50 clients in that.

Samantha (24:55): And what I'm doing is I'm saying, tell me anyone, anyone on LinkedIn that used to work for some of our most important clients. And then I'm saying, okay, great. That's a few million people. Boof, what am I going to do there? And I say, okay, now tell me, who's your buyer persona? Who is your drool worthy title, right? That you would pay, I don't know, two, $300 cost per lead to get to a time to a webinar. Well, who are those people? And so put those in your title field, and then second down, further territory North America, whatever it may be and hit search. What you're going to find is a treasure trove of leads that you can reach out to and say, hello, you used to work for one of our current customers, now you work for a prospective customer. We would love to talk to you about what we can do for this current company. Caveat - t doesn't matter when they work there. I don't care if they weren't there in 2006, in 2002, 1998. Who cares? The fact is they worked for a company that trusts us with work. And so perhaps they could also trust us with some work. I have one more, but that's, there are questions there.

Kathleen (25:56): I love that approach. Especially, I mean, yes, hitting people who've worked there ever, but I mean, I feel like especially people who've recently departed, it's such a gold mine of, you know, I'm going to mix metaphors here off low-hanging fruit, because you know, fruit grows in gold mines, but like, really it is it's, it's such, it's such an opportunity that I think not a lot of marketers or sales people take advantage of it's to me, it's the equivalent of when I send out my big email marketing, like newsletters and things, the, the replies I get when it's like, I'm no longer here I always go and like hunt down, where are they now?

Samantha (26:34): Yeah. As you should. And that's exactly, that's what makes you so good at your job, right? Because you put these puzzle pieces together and you're like, well, this is still a quality lead for us. You on that note too, you can set up a search that says, tell me, anytime people change jobs within my accounts, within my territory within anything. And they're say I have all these little recorded videos by the way, you guys on my website, but I've got a video specifically about this that talks about how, when we want to be the first person to congratulate somebody on a job change, especially in our sector. So whoever does, at first, in, in the sector in vertical, that they represent is much more likely exponentially, more likely to get the business. However, we also want some EQ right. So Kathleen, if you changed shops and I'm like, hi, congrats, do you want to buy #samsales?

Samantha (27:19): You're going to be like, know where the bathroom is? Like, slow your roll. So I think there's a, there's a balance to that for sure. But capitalize on those job changes. I think the other piece of the search that I love so much is the idea of, especially if you work for, let's say a company that has I don't know, north of 250 employees let's even get wild. I have a hundred employees. One of the things that I love to look for is the key buyer persona that we're looking for and past company of my company. So let's say when I worked at LinkedIn, if I looked up you know, VP of sales, CRO that used to work at LinkedIn and now works for another company, either in my specific book of business or in the territory of all the people that I managed, I can find people who love LinkedIn and who are enthusiastic about it and who I can be like, you're an alumnus.

Samantha (28:09): And I currently work here and help us out. Yeah. Did me a warm intro? Oh, heck yeah. I mean, it's, it's amazing. So just those two searches. If you, if you spend the weekend doing that in Navigator, you'll be in such great shape. Oh, one more thing. If I can plug one of the great things that I've got as a, as an ambassador pop over to my website, go on the LinkedIn section under solutions. And there's a 60 day free trial at Navigator. You typically get 30 days, but through me you can get 60. So that's great. Yeah. Pop over there and get it, give it a shot and then set a reminder for 59 days to cancel if you're not wowed by it. And if you're not wowed by it, call me.

Kathleen (28:43): So there's, I think there's obviously so much that people who are in a sales role can do with Navigator. A lot of my listeners are marketers. So as a marketer, what should or can you be doing? Should the marketer have a Sales Navigator account?

Samantha (29:00): So I'm going to give you guys one of the biggest benefits that I see here. And hint, hint that I really think LinkedIn should include in their product development. So think about this. This is a little harder if you're a huge company, right? But you can even segment this down every single time you guys close a deal as a marketer. What I would go, especially if you're in demand gen, go to that sales rep and say, Hey, who was responsible? Who was involved in this deal? Tell me all of the players. On the other side of the business, the key decision maker, who was in legal, who was in procurement, who was our champion, our skeptic, who are those people have the sales reps in those names to pop into your Navigator account, find all those people and hit save. If you just do that one thing and go in every day to track job changes, you will open up a massive SQL benefit line of line of leads for yourself that never existed.

Samantha (29:55): So we talked about this as marketers all the time, right? How do we get more leads in the system? How much do I have to spend? What's my cost per lead? You guys, if you spend $900 on an account for Navigator, this will, I mean, your, your CPLs will be cents, like pennies on the dollar. It's what I love about this is that you can pop in every day or you can get the emails delivered directly to you. And every time somebody changes jobs, you, as the marketer can say, fantastic job change. See where they went, send the lead to that person or pop it in Salesforce, HubSpot, whatever, put an SLA, obviously around when they should reach out to the lead. And now you have ROI tied to a specific marketing activity that you did, that wouldn't be monitored by sales. I want to just think about the reverse of this. If I'm doing this as a sales rep, or if we teach our sales reps to do this one, we're giving them the responsibility and control of tracking those job changes. And to frankly, most reps, if they see that the person changes into another territory and it's not there, assuming they're bothered to look it up, they're certainly not going to look it up 10 times a day. So you guys can do this. And Holy smokes, does this pay off?

Kathleen (30:58): I love that. May or may not be leaving here today to put that in place.

Samantha (31:05): Oh, I can't wait to hear. We do it at #samsales. It's a, I mean, it's, I can't even say how beneficial it is. Go get it.

Kathleen (31:11): Well, it's like an extension of something I'm already doing in a kind of cheap and, and and less programmatic way, which is that you know, I'm, I'm, I started working at the company I'm at probably five months ago. And one of the audiences we sell into is large online media businesses. And I don't have a lot of contacts in that area. So every time I go to an industry event or I do anything and there's anybody else there, I always reach out to all of them to connect on LinkedIn, because I'm like, then they'll see the content I post, hopefully. Right. But this is even better because it's a way of building a relationship. And we talk about that a lot internally where I work, it's all about building relationships, especially when you're taking like an ABM style approach, et cetera. So awesome tool to add into the arsenal. One, one, maybe this is a dumb question, but does, how does Navigator link at all into your LinkedIn campaign manager?

Samantha (32:08): It doesn't. So they're, they are two separate things, which I know is a, is a hassle, but I think, you know, I'll go on the record there. I think there's so much opportunity to really bridge those gaps for, for LinkedIn one day, again, even just charging on the data that we get from that. And then being able to put those together with campaign managers, you can see like, Hey, these are, these are prospective clients or existing clients that we can target. I mean, there's so much value. They're just not quite there yet.

Kathleen (32:32): There is no current way, if you build like a target list in campaign or sorry, in Navigator, to then target those through Campaign Manager?

Samantha (32:42): Unfortunately, not that there was something that came out quite a while ago called stereo for LinkedIn, that they weren't, they were trying to do that. Exactly. That basically reps would save things out in their Navigator and then marketing could see that and be like, Oh, well, these people are important to you. And maybe they're not in our CRM yet we should start marketing to them. But it just seems like a no brainer. There's so much, it seems like a no brainer listening, we're going on record. If you invent this give Kathleen and I royalties.

Kathleen (33:09): Yes. Or, or at least call me and I'll be in your early private beta. Awesome. So, so when you're, if you're a marketer who is first getting started with Navigator, what are the first kind of most important steps you should take to, to get off and running quickly and see value out of it?

Samantha (33:31): Yeah. So one, I would definitely do the saving of your clients, especially if you guys are doing anything with ABM. If you have tier one accounts, you know, the big boys of the world that you're trying to get into, go in and save them and have somebody that's exclusively responsible for keeping tabs on what's going on with their C-suite, with their executive team. And that the company is mentioning in the press. What I think you'll find is that a lot of the missions that these companies have and the things that they're really focused on achieving come from that. So if you want to even think, how can we market to them? How can we use their vernacular in our marketing campaigns, the content that we send out, easy home run way to aggregate all of that together, directly on LinkedIn, and to see what their executives are using their voices to talk about. I don't think it sounds like you,

Kathleen (34:17): I could use that same approach for competitive research.

Samantha (34:20): Oh, absolutely. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And we, you know, even on a, on an individualized level, we see tons of marketing teams and then tons of salespeople who track their top competitors. So I work with an unbelievable amount of big law lawyers who say, like, I always lose to Bill. Like I want to keep tabs on Bill, you know? And I'm like, well, let's do it. And you won't know. So it's great. But yeah, it's fantastic for competitive intelligence. And then the other thing I would think about is kind of talking back to that search. So where have our most prestigious clients, right? Where are the people that the buyer personas, where are they now, if they've worked for our most prestigious clients and being able to kind of put together marketing strategy that says, you know, you used to use to work with us.

Samantha (35:02): We'd love to talk to you again and figure out how to do that. If your sales reps aren't doing it. The final thing that I would say is, as a marketer, think of how you can use the search to find people who have used, who have previously worked for again, your biggest clients, but now all work for the same client. So think of it this way. If I can find that there are six people who used to work for Deloitte, and now they all work for Accenture and I don't have Accenture yet, I can, I can pull those people together and I can send a little campaign to them to say, Hey guys, you all used to work for Deloitte. You all have used our technology before. I don't know if you know each other, but maybe as, as Deloitte alumni, you guys should be connected. Also we'd love to just have a group zoom with you and executive round table. How can we help you? You guys can put the pieces together with that as marketers build these campaigns. And again, tie it to ROI for you guys.

Kathleen (35:51): I love all of these ideas. I feel like we could go on and on and on forever, but we don't have forever. I want to shift gears for a minute because there are two questions that I always ask my guests, and I would love to get your take on them. The first is, of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that you think is really knocking it out of the park when it comes to inbound marketing right now?

Samantha (36:19): So I will give a shout out to two different companies. So I think Kyle Coleman at Clari, if I'm sure some of you guys listening know him he, I think has done such a tremendous job of using the LinkedIn platform, building awareness, but the entire Clari team really is on LinkedIn. You see their presence as a whole consistently, they've really mastered it. The other thing that I would say is for the team at Sales Assembly. So this is a company out of Chicago. I'm lucky enough to be on their board of advisors and not only do they use LinkedIn to educate sales reps and leaders about what should be done properly in the market, but I've noticed a trend with them. I actually don't know if this is a fact, but I've noticed a trend where they're really using their voices for the power of promoting other people and finding, you know, really not just, you know, commercial that saying like this isn't really impactful tool. Right. And helping get the word out. So to that together, collectively, those two companies are really on LinkedIn then and on their game.

Kathleen (37:18): Those are great examples. I can't wait to go dig into those a little bit more. Second question is the marketers that listen to this podcast and many of the ones I know in real life, I think one of the biggest challenges I hear them express pretty frequently is that the world of digital marketing is changing so quickly. You know, just when you feel like you've mastered something, the platform changes the algorithm or the rules of the game. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated?

Samantha (37:49): Yeah, I think for me, I met I'm bananas reader. I read as much as I possibly can, but I, when I looked at LinkedIn, obviously I like to just see what's being posted there. I also look at some of the more modern publications and see what are people, what are people promoting on Crunchbase, or people talking about on Revenue Collective? What is it that we can ascertain from platforms like that? Where people who are in the thick of it and constantly marketing and doing different things share. And then the other thing that I would say is, I know it seems like it changes so fast, but I think where I could, if I could guide you in one thing is to really focus on, have I mastered the foundations of the job here that I'm doing, whether it's content marketing demand gen, whenever I find this on the sales side too, that people reached out to me and they're like, what's the hack? And I'm like how are your discovery calls? And they're like our discovery calls. They're like, they're not great, but what's, what's the latest hack. And I'm like, well, let's, let's back go back to the, like the basic principles. So thinking about that too, you know, even from, from your perspective, not thinking about all the latest greatest, but have we really mastered the basics and if not, like what a great place to focus,

Kathleen (38:56): I feel like the equivalent of that is when you're trying to lose weight and know that you should just like eat less and exercise more, but you're like, is there a diet pill that would help me lose 20 pounds really fast?

Samantha (39:05): They just want a better body.

Kathleen (39:11): Well, whoever does invent that magic pill will be a billionaire.

Samantha (39:15): Oh my gosh. I can't imagine.

Kathleen (39:17): But it doesn't exist yet. So. All right. Great. Well there are, sounds like there are a lot of resources on your website. So maybe you could share for people who are listening and want to learn a little bit more about you connect with you online a what is the best way for them to do that and be where can they find all these fantastic resources?

Samantha (39:38): Yeah. So there's so much on my website, Samsales consulting.com. If you want to follow me on LinkedIn, come on, come on over. I post a lot of content there. I will say, you know, the most cost-effective way to get even more out of what's in my head check out our website, the shorts section. So it's under our solutions. We have 18 different shorts, including a masterclass on discovery calls, but there are three, four or five minute videos to teach you all of these hacks and practical things about sales, marketing, LinkedIn, and Navigator. So if you find yourself, you know, getting some kind of objection in sales, you're like, what was not that she said about Navigator again, it's not there. You can sign up. And this prescription is in my humble opinion, super inexpensive. So come over there. We'd, we'd love to see you.

Kathleen (40:22): That's great. I will put links to all of that in the show notes. So as always head over there to check it out and connect with Sam and find all of her great content. But if you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, or you learned something new, which I can't imagine you didn't because you have so many good tips. If you're listening and you liked it, please consider heading to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leaving the podcast a review. And if you know someone else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Samantha.

Samantha (40:59): Thanks.

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