How This AE Built a $1M Pipeline Through LinkedIn (With Laura Erdem)

We've found a salesperson who's successfully sourcing 30% of her pipeline herself. How? Using LinkedIn.

Laura shares her playbook, giving you practical tips to get going and much more.

• (00:00) - Introduction
• (01:27) - Welcome
• (02:53) - Challenges of Traditional Outbound Sales
• (05:07) - The Shift to Social Selling
• (05:57) - "You're not Gartner"
• (10:40) - How much pipeline? And how do you calculate it?
• (16:57) - Building a Social Selling Playbook
• (20:32) - Getting founder support
• (23:19) - Who to get on the team
• (24:42) - How do we get started
• (26:39) - Figure out the who and the what
• (28:41) - Forget the POV
• (31:54) - And now, book a demo!
• (37:06) - But that deal is mine..
• (41:25) - Laura's secret tricks
• (45:54) - Concluding Thoughts and Final Tips

This episode is brought to you by by Everstage - the highest rated Sales Commissions Platform on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, Trustradius with over 2,000+ customer reviews. Some of their customers include leading brands like Diligent, Wiley, Trimble, Postman, Chargebee etc.,

You can go to https://www.everstage.com/revenue-formula to check out Everstage and mention Revenue Formula to unlock a personalized Sales Compensation Strategy Session with Everstage’s RevOps experts—crafted for enterprise teams to maximize performance.

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikkel Plaehn

Marketing leader & b2b saas nerd

Host

Toni Hohlbein

2x exited CRO | 1x Founder | Podcast Host

Guest

Laura Erdem

Revenue Attribution◾️ Dreamdata◾️ Sales leader with a crush on marketing

What is The Revenue Formula?

This podcast is about scaling tech startups.

Hosted by Toni Hohlbein & Mikkel Plaehn, together they look at the full funnel.

With a combined 20 years of experience in B2B SaaS and 3 exits, they discuss growing pains, challenges and opportunities they’ve faced. Whether you're working in RevOps, sales, operations, finance or marketing - if you care about revenue, you'll care about this podcast.

If there’s one thing they hate, it’s talk. We know, it’s a bit of an oxymoron. But execution and focus is the key - that’s why each episode is designed to give 1-2 very concrete takeaways.

[00:00:00] Toni: What if I told you that your sales reps could generate 30 percent of their
[00:00:04] own pipeline By spending 30 spending minutes every day
[00:00:09] on LinkedIn.
[00:00:10] Don't believe me?
[00:00:12] Laura: But if we talk about specific numbers, so Dreamdata last year, I had to write it down because I had to check it in our own tool. this year, our team has created a pipeline of 2.
[00:00:21] 7 million from LinkedIn.
[00:00:25] I sourced around 1 million this year in pipeline, but then again. What was the first touch? Was it just me?
[00:00:34] Toni: That's Laura.
[00:00:36] Not only did we get her share her playbook with you, she's also sharing two secret tricks at the end of the episode.
[00:00:44] Laura: Two things come top of mind. A very usual question I get is like, do you want to go viral? And my dirty trick and answer is no,
[00:00:54] you want to go consistent.
[00:00:56] Toni: Before we jump into the show, today's is to you by EverStage, the top sales commissions platform on G2, Gartner, Peer Insights,
[00:01:06] and Trust Radius with more 2000 reviews from customers like Diligent, Wiley,
[00:01:12] Trimble, and more.
[00:01:13] Visit everstage. com and mention Revenue Formula unlock a personalized sales compensation strategy session with one of EverStage's RevOps
[00:01:24] experts.
[00:01:25] And now, enjoy the show,
[00:01:27] Mikkel: You kind of threw me off now, but anyway, so I invited Laura on to the show and she was like, yeah, I'm your biggest fans. So, you know, probably we need to give her very little preparation for what's happening in the introduction of the episode itself. I mean that
[00:01:42] Toni: we really struggle to
[00:01:43] Mikkel: be funny, but no, exactly.
[00:01:45] And I can tell you today. I was very close to hopping on social media and be the complainer. Oh, because what happened and you probably don't know this yet, but we had one snowflake hit the railroad tracks and all the trains, they stopped working. They could not function anymore. And I was stuck first at a station to just wait for the train and then in a tunnel. in order to, you know, come here to record with you. It almost didn't happen. It almost didn't happen.
[00:02:14] I almost complained on social, but I decided, I decided against it because I wasn't sure. You decided to
[00:02:20] Toni: just be lazy, you
[00:02:21] know or build awareness. Let's not
[00:02:23] Mikkel: do
[00:02:23] Toni: that.
[00:02:24] Mikkel: Yeah.
[00:02:25] Laura: politician in the U. S. who says, I'm not going to say this, but this, this, this, and that. He's like, I'm not going to complain about this, but this happened.
[00:02:33] This
[00:02:34] Mikkel: like Toni. He's like, I don't want to tell you how to do your work, but yeah,
[00:02:38] Laura: could be, you're so great if Yeah,
[00:02:42] Mikkel: But thanks so much for joining us on on this show. You're obviously super active on LinkedIn, unlike one person on this show, and I'm not going to give any more comments away than that.
[00:02:53] What we wanted to talk with you about today specifically is Actually self prospecting and how you've done that as a, as a seller specifically the channels you've used, which is probably, I think when, when we talk about self prospecting, people think, oh, you're cold calling and emailing folks, right? But that's not kind of what you're doing, right? You're doing something very different.
[00:03:14] Laura: um, Thank you for getting me on the show. Also, the reason why I'm on the show is due to what I'm doing. So, which means that self prospecting, after I spoke here as well, well, there very likely are people who would be interested about this, and then they would be thinking, oh, so should we be doing social, so maybe we should ask Laura about some of the questions, because I got questions.
[00:03:35] And the good thing is, all of those people are our buyers as well. So after we spoke about social selling and measurement of that as well, then we can probably uncover some other issues that you're having in your company. And we had the conversation about something totally different. So that type of Selling that is absolutely indirect is the way people buy nowadays.
[00:03:57] It's the community is how you feel about the product that you're buying. How will it be for me to work with that type of a company? And they don't come from cold calling. The likely does. I'm really, really happy to follow companies that claim that that cold calling is working and cold emailing is working because I want to talk more with them.
[00:04:17] To understand how it's working, and that they're not trying to sell that thing to me, but they're just telling me how it's working. But for our buyers who are in marketing and in sales, well, they know how the job is done of outbounding, and they hate it. How often do you respond to a cold message? Like whenever you feel, Oh, it feels like they're pitching me.
[00:04:40] It's like, okay, goodbye. You don't even respond to that and not because you don't like the person or you think that it is Something like I don't know. I will not want the product. It's just I know where it's going and we're not, you're not going to give value to me. You're just going to try to pitch a meeting.
[00:04:56] And it's like 1 percent chance that I will find it relevant because if I knew it was relevant, I would have already investigated your product before. So that type of self prospecting, we're going to talk about that
[00:05:06] today.
[00:05:07] Toni: and can you take us maybe a little bit back in time, right? Because you're working for DreamData. It's revenue attribution. Go check it out if you, if you don't know about them already. But you have also been one of the first employees because it's the first AE joining Dreamdata, right? And I think back then when you joined, I think Outbound was still cool.
[00:05:25] People were still doing it.
[00:05:26] Well, it was working. I don't know if it was cool, but, well, you know, but, but it feels you and the team took a, took a very different stance to the whole thing, which is already there, interesting. What I was always wondering was this born out of like, Oh, you know, we're selling marketing attribution.
[00:05:41] We're doing the social selling. And then, you know, this is how we can start a conversation. Or was it more like this, this necessity thing? It's like, Oh shit, I don't think we want to do cold calling. What else can we do? Let's all go on LinkedIn and start, start pushing content. How did this, how did this evolve in the beginning?
[00:05:57] Laura: Yeah, it starts even before that, because before joining DreamData, I worked at And my outbound sequence took. Three steps. So, they were exactly how you write the email, what you do before you call the executive. I was selling to the CIOs and CTOs in Danish C20 companies. And then you do this email, this email, this email, and then you call.
[00:06:22] And then you book a meeting. Literally, there were more or less no negative effects of that. And people were taking meetings because you're a gardener. Because it's like, Oh, I want to know what they have got to say for me. So to, to start with, I was probably spoiled that outbound really works. It's so good.
[00:06:40] And then I joined Dreamdata and. Nothing worked. We wrote those beautiful emails that I'm used to writing. Gartner, oh, enlightening the problem, coming up with some ideas, and then saying, oh, but that blog post that we're sharing, it's not kind of cheesy anyway, because people know this from some other places as well.
[00:06:58] So like, you're not Gartner. Okay, so, and then we spoke with Steffen, and I think it was not even a big conversation that, We got to be where our buyers are and we sell to marketers and sometimes sales, but most of the times marketers, operations, and those people are on LinkedIn. So we got to be active. And my level of activity at Gartner was whatever marketing team was sharing, please re share that.
[00:07:24] And the little, as little words as possible of your own. Because this is how we frame this. Don't touch it. And that's what we used to do, and that doesn't work.
[00:07:34] So we figured out, okay, we need to do a little bit maybe personal stuff. And at that time I understood, okay, so I'm actually quite creative. So it's not just those frames where you put your email, change the name, change the problem, and then ship it out as a personal email.
[00:07:50] Then you could Change those posts into a bit more personal, a bit more funny and so on. And nothing really worked at that time, but, but slowly we started seeing that people are liking it and commenting on that. Then we started to see, okay, is it the target audience? It is okay. It's marketers, it's operations, it's people in the right sizes of companies we're trying to target.
[00:08:12] The numbers were really low, but it was mostly Steffen and I who were doing the posting. And then we figured out, hmm. So. What can we use LinkedIn for more? There are those LinkedIn lives as well. I say, Steffen, what do you think? So our marketers, they don't want to book a meeting with us to have a demo with us.
[00:08:29] What if I ran a LinkedIn live event and did a demo so anybody could watch it and we don't even ask for an email, so just do it. And it was. Very bad. So nobody could see the screen and it was like nobody cared. And I think we maybe had like three people attending and two of them were Dreamdata. And but then slowly we evolved this.
[00:08:50] Okay, let's try something different. This time I'll try slides just about Dreamdata. Okay, maybe seven people attended. Then the next time I will, I don't know, interview you, Steffen. And then evolving, evolving, evolving. So all that bubble started to figure out, okay, Marketers actually listen to it when it's relevant for them.
[00:09:12] And that's where Word was all born. So Outbound never worked at the beginning of the journey at DreamData. I did a sheer amount of Outbound calls. I love it because I hated at that time. It's just like sports. It's like, you got to do it. And you really, really hate it. A couple of people pick it up. He's like, Oh, my energy levels are higher now because I had a conversation.
[00:09:33] Do you book a meeting? No, but, but it was great. But so it never really worked. And the social selling does. Even yesterday, I had a call with a client who, prospect, who said, well, we chose Dreamdata, now we're going into procurement and we chose you because we like your social presence. It seems like the people that we're going to work with is the group of the people that are both smart, have an amazing product, but the vibe of the company also fits into what we're looking to find in a collaboration with the company.
[00:10:05] Mikkel: Yeah. So what you're saying is even in B2B people buy from people and not locals. So that's awesome. Let's not have a marketing conversation now. We can, we can, we can transition or pivot this episode. So I think before we share obviously we're going to run through the playbook, right? And, and get some of the facts straight.
[00:10:20] I also just want to hear how much pipeline are you actually creating with this play? Is this even going to be remotely interesting to a CRO or VP sales? Are they going to go like, you're doing just what? 5k a month in more pipeline is like, great. Let's
[00:10:35] totally do that. So just to get an idea of the effect, what, what, what are we talking about here?
[00:10:40] Laura: So to get to that fact, you also need to talk about what do you need to measure in order to understand if social selling is working. Because in B2Bs, it's not like you just hired Kim Kardashian to do an advertisement for your bag and in a week you have sold 50, 000 of bags. Very easy, right? Because they bought, we bought this ad, it's very expensive and then a lot of people bought it.
[00:11:02] So easy. But for B2Bs, you can't count it like that. So, okay, Laura, you made a video yesterday, and a week after, somebody booked a demo from direct traffic to your website. But on the call, they said they did it because they saw a video of you. That happens very rarely. And it's very close to impossible to measure that as well, because what it has to happen is you got to know that you did a video.
[00:11:28] You got to know that the person mentioned you, if you have a lot of salespeople, you would not capture that either. And you have to measure where do they come from? They came in direct. Great. How often do people type in your company name that even ends with dot I O. Into their browser and then land on the website, book a demo, and then talk to sales.
[00:11:48] That's like something else is happening. So before getting into the actual pipeline numbers, you've got to know how to measure it. We can talk about that as well. But if we talk about specific numbers, so Dreamdata last year, I had to write it down because I had to check it in our own tool. So this year, our team has created a pipeline of 2.
[00:12:08] 7 million from LinkedIn. Pipeline, okay? And then you're asking me how much did you source yourself? So, and then I said, hmm, so how do I count this? Do I go back and count all of the times that every single AE said, they mentioned Laura on the Dreamdata site on a call that they see our videos? Or they said, oh, we saw your LinkedIn Live event with Steffen.
[00:12:35] So is that because marketing did a good job or is it because we started that with social selling, then did the LinkedIn live events because of this and this and that, so there are so many things hanging together and then you're selling to probably like five people in the customer journey. So how do I attribute that to me?
[00:12:53] If, and I did go into HubSpot and did count the deals where that said, we booked the meeting because we know you, or I self sourced it where I reached out to somebody and said, Isn't it the time we talk about attribution or started a normal conversation and then later said, but wait, how do you do audience building or something like that?
[00:13:12] And then it's like, ah, let's talk and book the meeting. So I sourced around 1 million this year in pipeline, but then again. What was the first touch? Was it just me? Was it because they saw our marketing before and I just was the after fact of picking up some blogs and doing some creative stuff with video?
[00:13:33] So I understand those executives that are saying, Oh, this is just freaking social media. If you sat down, okay, how much time do you use on this? During that time, you could have executed 50 more companies through Apollo to put them in a sequence and maybe you would have made 20 cold calls to those companies as well at that time and then put them into the sequence.
[00:13:58] So what's more worth and If you calculate it all the way down to the pipeline from those sequences, then it's quite easy to say Oh, okay. So you book three meetings, right? You use X amount of time book three meetings But then if you loop all that social selling on top of it It makes it so much easier to do outbound as well.
[00:14:19] So it's so difficult to measure and I understand those executives who don't trust it.
[00:14:26] Toni: So maybe to put it into relation for other folks, right. I would guess that a million is probably higher than your annual quota, right? Obviously there's a, there's a conversion rate and not the whole pipeline converts into close one deals, but let's just say you are able to source a third or 25 percent of the. Pipeline you need to hit your target, your annual target by yourself, right? That's if, if I translate this correctly, that's actually what this is, right?
[00:14:52] Laura: I love this. Now you're translated to the CROs that understand this language. Yes,
[00:14:57] exactly.
[00:14:57] Toni: you go, but so the, and the point being, right. So, I mean, if you have like, if you have an ACV of 500, 000, a million dollars, then like, oh, you solve source one deal, great, great, well done. But that's not the case for DreamData, right. It's a, it's a very different ACV. of, there's lots of volume behind this. And If you, if you take all the money that you need to spend otherwise on outbounds or marketing and, and, and all the other stuff in order to kind of create the equivalent, I mean, that's, that's a lot of money usually that you need to spend to source a million dollars. And I would, I would ask, you know, everyone listening out there, Ops and, and then SIRAs. I mean, who, who is even able to source a million dollars in, in ARR per year in, in pipeline and, and still do the closing, still do all the other stuff. Right. So, and I think there the magnitude kind of kicks in, I think for a bigger organization, a million dollar pipeline, maybe isn't that much, but for an individual rep, I think it's, it's a lot.
[00:15:50] Right. And I think it's also fair to say you're kind of. You know, when, when, when Laura says Steffen, it's actually the CMO. So you work super closely with a CMO and co founder on some of those things. Right. So, and I would even argue it's, it's, it's a little bit much to just say, Hey, Laura is an AE. I think you're also, you know, part of the marketing team to a degree, right? I mean, it's, it's, it's almost, you're part of that, whether or not you're a part of Steffen or not, I'm not sure. But you know what I mean? So it's, it's a little bit much to say that, Hey, you know, one rep you know, sourced a million dollars and, and therefore, and therefore, right.
[00:16:25] So, and, and because of this situation being so special with you, we wanted to kind of drill a little bit deeper into this and try and figure out how you're doing this and and I think that's, that's what this is about today.
[00:16:35] Mikkel: It's also just funny because when you hire. And probably still happening, you would also care about what book of business you can potentially bring.
[00:16:42] Now it's like, well, are you actively posting on LinkedIn and so on? So I think that's, you kind of slowly started talking about the next the next piece of the puzzle, which is. Okay, so a million, but how much time are you actually spending on this?
[00:16:57] Is this you know, almost those I don't wanna say employees, but you know, where they don't spend much time on actual work.
[00:17:03] They just sit on the feed and keep on scrolling and not doing much. So how much time is, is actually spent on this
[00:17:08] Laura: yeah. yeah. So as a salesperson, you have LinkedIn open all the time. So sometimes it is in front of you all the time, but the actual work, if you were to think about it, like when you're not responding to your prospects on LinkedIn or not writing messages and so on, it is around half an hour per day. So what I do every day, and I do batch create content, I can go into tips and tricks.
[00:17:32] What helps to reduce that time as well to it, I create a lot of video. And I got into the speed of creating a video that it takes me around 10 minutes to create it and 5 minutes to edit it, to add subtitles, to cut it out, that it is very punchy and I know what to say and how to say it and so on. And then it takes me around, I timed myself today for the post today, it took me two minutes to write it.
[00:17:57] I don't think about it a lot, because it's the volume game as well. You can recreate your posts that were well successful before, nobody will notice that. The same with video, the same with anything else, it's very much like branding. You can do it over, over and over again, for you to not overspend time. I have colleagues who really, really want to do social selling, Andrea, she posted an amazing video today about our launch in the cinema today.
[00:18:21] But it took her hours to get the video together, to film it, to put up the script. The video is great, amazing. But one thing, when she comes over to me and says, Oh, Laura, what do you think? It's like, well, how is the ending of it? Andrea posted. Andrea, post it and then fix it again and post it again. It's fine.
[00:18:41] And you get into that only by doing it, which means that those types of people that are needed to do it has to find the balance that the time spent on creating that video or creating that post is worth it to be able to execute some other tasks as well. If you brought in a salesperson that is really good at cold calling and is getting those conversations Please don't push them to do social selling if it's uncomfortable.
[00:19:08] You have to ask them to post or repost or maybe to rewrite something and post it as theirs once in a while. Because we all do this, we want to see the traction, we want to see that people are posting at our company, but don't push them to become influencers or go on video that something is uncomfortable and will take a lot of energy from them rather than doing those call calls.
[00:19:28] Because we want to see that working as well. Well.
[00:19:31] Toni: to a degree, this is kind of the crux at the whole thing, you know, at the problem here, because it's, I wonder how how much you can replicate this, right? How much can you replicate a Laura, for example, right? Okay, cool. Everyone listening is like self gen a million dollars in pipeline a year and, you know, posting some stuff on LinkedIn. Cool. Let's, let's have 20 of our reps try and do this right now. It's not going to work out, you know, it's, and I think that's, that's the thing here to kind of unpack and dig into where there's almost a fine line between, you You know, we kind of recently did a an episode on founder brand, right.
[00:20:04] Kind of founder brand is, you know, it's just, it's just the first sales rep really. Right. Let's just, let's just be honest about that. And I think it's I think the social selling kind of what you've done is great as an individual and kind of, you know, with very few, it's going to work out but I think it's, it's really difficult to scale actually.
[00:20:21] Right. So, and I think this is, this is the balance to strike with, you know, with anyone out there that wants to kind of, you know, try and do some of these things and and try and replicate some of the success.
[00:20:31] Laura: Absolutely agree.
[00:20:32] One thing that has to come at the first place before you try to replicate it is you have to have founder support. If you have founders that don't want to be on LinkedIn and does not build that founder brand, big miss. You have to have them do it. But if let's say, well, it's hard and I want somebody to write it for me and it's in genuine, whatever, they have to support the cause that we want to be on LinkedIn.
[00:20:58] And the people that we're putting forward or are saying, okay, that you post like this, nobody has to really approve it, but they have to want to test this. It takes their support to do it. Because if I was just posting on LinkedIn and it was just my own thing, it's like, Oh, look at me. I do this, or I want to be an influencer or whatever that is that I was posting.
[00:21:21] It would be perceived as. Side job, like side gig, scrolling on LinkedIn. But since we started it with Steffen and actually this morning I had a talk with the, with a girl, she was asking, it's like, how do you get to be so genuine? It's like, you seems like it's just matching the, the company brand, what you sell, and at the same time you still do some side stuff and talk about different stuff, but it's all getting together into that one bubble of revenue attribution, talking to marketers and so on.
[00:21:54] And I came to a conclusion that the reason for that is because it started at the company level. It started with a goal of generating revenue at Dreamdata. It did not start with a goal that I want to be that person. I never was. I just figured out that I'm okay good at it. And since we started it together with Steffen, he was supporting it like crazy.
[00:22:15] He had a good personal brand already there where we started it. And then Lars, the CEO, he also joined us once in a while for that. And then some right people joined the team. Who we said, would you like to do a video? It's like, yeah, Ines joined us. Ines is amazing. She came from a video company, so she's great at doing video.
[00:22:32] And then we find some of those tips and people that we can get together to do some of the social selling. And that's where it becomes genuine because I care about the company's revenue and much less about myself of how am I perceived. I want to be perceived like Dreamdata is perceived. When people meet me, they feel like this is how it's going to be to work with Dreamdata as a client.
[00:22:59] Mikkel: So if we, so if we start treating social selling as a motion, Just because you mentioned the people, you mentioned who, who do you bring on the team? If there's a listener out there now, would you perceive it as a strictly a sales initiative? Let's get the sales out there and be active. Or how do you, how, how should someone actually look at this if they want to start implementing this playbook?
[00:23:19] Laura: It's a mix of sales and marketing most of the times. And the reason for that is because of the personalities of people usually having those jobs. Usually those are a bit more outgoing people, quite good at writing, quite creative as well to find their ways of getting to revenue. Marketers in their own way.
[00:23:36] And if we have a couple of people from both teams, then it's much easier. Let's take our content manager, Jeremy. He's amazing at picking up ideas to create videos. And it's very rare that he's on videos himself. He, he's really good at it, but he doesn't love it. So he gets a job. Those videos created for him by a video editor.
[00:23:57] But then I go over to Jeremy and said, Jeremy, there was a great video of Lars on the stage. Can we cut it? I wanna share it, and then we can also share it with the rest of the team. It will be so much easier for the salespeople to share it because he's saying clever stuff that we also say on the sales calls.
[00:24:14] So it kind of gets into that bubble of how we speak as a company, and then we make it easy for people who don't feel like posting on LinkedIn. But company says it's valuable, so I'll do it. But then there are people who get energy from that. Myself, MC, Steffen, we love it. And some people we would just say, please, now it's a release.
[00:24:35] Let's post, or this is a great video. Consider posting this, or at least sharing it with some of your prospects as well.
[00:24:42] Mikkel: Got it. So I think the the next step would kind of be maybe to dive a bit deeper into the playbook. Yeah. We've, I think we've done a great job so far selling it. So also kind of setting the stage for who should be involved. How would, how would we start if there's a listener now who goes, okay, got it. Sales and marketing, this could potentially be a significant source of pipeline. We only need to spend half an hour per, per day. I think it's more,
[00:25:06] Toni: it's more when you're static. I
[00:25:08] Mikkel: know. I know. So how do we start this initiative? How do we go about building up an emotion where it actually starts delivering to what's the goal we have as a company?
[00:25:16] Laura: So before you do that, you have to figure out where your buyers are at. Are they on LinkedIn most of the times? Or are they on some Reddit threads where they're looking for something else and suddenly they find you as a troll, also making jokes over there. So, follow your buyers. Where are they? If they are on LinkedIn some of the time, because if you're selling to sales and marketing, you gotta be on LinkedIn, otherwise you're missing out.
[00:25:42] And if you're selling to, you had an example of finance, They are on LinkedIn too. They don't like any posts. Don't comment, because they know that if they do, they're going to be attacked by sales, very likely. Or maybe, they're even thinking, I don't want to like or comment it because people will see that I'm doing this, and this is social media, and this is unprofessional.
[00:26:06] Mikkel: Hmm.
[00:26:06] Laura: But the thing is, they're there. So, what you need to do is figure out, are they there? What are the reasons for it? What kind of influencers are they following and reading the posts of? For that you'll need to test a lot. But influencers are important because if you start to appear on their comments and their likes and know how they speak, then it will be so much easier for you to speak that language as well.
[00:26:31] The one that they care about. And so, okay, we figured out they're on LinkedIn. Good. What do we do next?
[00:26:39] So the next thing is defining your ICP. What are those ideal customer profiles for you? Important for any type of work at your company, but also for social selling. What type of topics do they care about?
[00:26:53] What don't they care about? When you think about the topics that they care about, it's very likely not your company. Because they care about both payroll or maybe they care about calculating the revenue or making the sheets look, look pretty or whatever. There are things beyond your product that they care about.
[00:27:16] And if you were to remember one thing to tell to your team who's doing social selling, there is that on LinkedIn, nobody, nobody cares about you and your company. What they care about is the problems that they're trying to solve, or they're trying to be a little bit entertained while scrolling through LinkedIn.
[00:27:38] And why are they scroll stopping? At some certain posts, and not doing that at some others. And you'll have to mix that into your strategy of, How am I social selling? So if you remember that they don't care about your company, Then they care about the problem to solve. If you speak about the problem and additional problems that are leading to that problem, so you can start creating a map.
[00:28:01] What is it that I would like to be known for and what kind of problems lead to that as well? Speak about those types of problems. And once in a while, speak about your company as well, because they will start caring about, okay, so it seems like this person knows a little bit about these problems. And they also talk about attribution.
[00:28:19] We don't need an attribution solution right now, but in a year or my friend needs it. So I will be able to refer it because that's how that bubble starts to work off content itself. So forget about yourself. If you do for too much of yourself,
[00:28:36] Toni: so we, we talked about ICP. We talked about the the stuff they care about, the content to maybe write about.
[00:28:41] What is being thrown around a lot in this whole context is, you know, a point of view, like a POV, you as a user company, as a person need to have a perspective on things. Did, do you think that's BS or did you, you know, I'm not saying you sit down and we're thinking about it and, Oh, this is what it is.
[00:28:56] Let's try, but you might've found it over time, right? Is that something that you've used? So do you know what your point of view is? Or do you even, you know, use this concept when you think about social selling?
[00:29:07] Laura: It's, I think it's very fluffy. That's where a lot of companies, I feel, overthink social selling, like, Oh, now we're going to create this. I even mentioned the create this mind map of what we can talk about, what we should not talk about. Just go out and do it. I mean, do it, test it out. It could be that you will start talking a lot about your company.
[00:29:28] Nobody cares. Okay. Then we're going to try something different. And then we'll start to say, okay, look, this post picked up. So what we do to, in order to figure that out, back to your question, we don't have that type of POV of the company. Probably Steffen does, somewhere in their marketing team, but it has never been shared as an, this is our official POV and these are the sub things we should talk about.
[00:29:53] No, we test this out. And then we have a common Slack channel that whenever somebody posts, everybody shares their posts there. Some inspirational posts are shared there. It's like, oh look, this person's posts pick up. Maybe we should talk about the problem like that. So a lot of conversations are starting there.
[00:30:14] Everybody in Dreamdata is in that channel, which means that everybody knows that this is an important topic for us. We do social selling for a reason of revenue. We all share and we all try to find the way that, that it's working. The easiest way to get that POV through is through marketing, creating the content, they create blogs, they create.
[00:30:38] Product releases, they pre create some texts for people who would like to use it. But if you don't, nobody asks you to use what they created and you can recreate your own stuff. So that hard written down stuff, it sounds like Gartner and then people don't want to do
[00:30:55] it because it's just not.
[00:30:57] Toni: exactly. I think it's, I think it's so when when we did this for Growblocks, right, we didn't kind of create a POV, but I think we, what
[00:31:06] POV, sorry. I mean, he's just the marketing guy. I'm not sure what's going on now, but we were like, actually the way we were going about this, we were looking at, you know, the stuff sales ops and marketing ops and revenue ops is talking about. Uh, We kind of had this mind map on the, on this whiteboard and we were Wow, this is all really boring stuff. We don't want to talk about this, like CRM, validation rules, data cleaning and all of that jazz. So then, you know, our POV was like, Hey, you know, Scrap all of that shit. Forget all about that stuff.
[00:31:38] Let's not talk about this. Let's talk about stuff that's interesting. We don't want to talk about it. You don't want to do it. You know, then, you know, strategic RevOps and, you know, make revenue and so forth. But, but anyway, that's maybe, that's maybe a different, different story for another time. And one, one practical advice I wanted to get out of you is someone is starting this out.
[00:31:54] Um, what I've seen people are starting this and then they're like, Oh, and now book a demo. And you know, nothing happens and the, the, the, the post doesn't take off. So, what's your, what's your ratio between. A hard CTA in the end or what's your thinking about a hard CTA versus just posting stuff where people can be like, oh, wow, so happy for you, Laura, like, get promoted, or, you know, this achievement or something, or, this was funny. Because I feel like the, the CTA kills kills the, like count. That's, that's sometimes what I'm thinking.
[00:32:26] Laura: As soon as you open up a post and see a CTA at the end, you, you skim. You never read a post and you see a CTA at the end. So, oh, marketing asked them to do it, or they're driving leads and I don't want to be a lead or something. There are times when CTAs work if it's something really fun or something exciting or let's say we're going to ster, we're doing an event people join our event.
[00:32:50] That works because people want to have fun, and this is free drinks. Fine. But if it's like a white paper or something like that, no. So my posts usually don't have a CTA. None of it. It's like, if you like this, ask me more questions. Yeah, right. I've got so many questions to something else that I'm not gonna ask you any questions.
[00:33:09] So it's the same. Yeah, comment. Comment with your ideas. Or what do you have thoughts? What do you think? Oh my god. I just had one thought. I liked your video. But as soon as you ask thoughts, it's like, okay, goodbye. So It has to be natural, like natural conversation, because social selling does not mean you're doing social and then right after it, you're selling.
[00:33:33] There is no that different of coinage. Like, if you commented on my post and think, Oh, this customer journey looks amazing. Then I go to direct messages and say, Oh, would you like to see it in your company? This is cheesy. You would never do that. Because if you thought a customer journey was cool, well, probably.
[00:33:52] Because it is, and one day you will sell more and more of that, and one day you'll go and book a demo. So it's, I mean, for typical heads of sales, this is a very hard nut to crack. Because like, why wouldn't you go over to this woman, Rebecca, who said the customer journey is amazing? Why wouldn't you ask if she wanted a meeting?
[00:34:11] No, I'd rather wait a bit and then reach out to Rebecca with something totally out of topic. I don't know, she liked something else or I found something that might be exciting, totally different and say, Oh, I found this article as well, maybe you'd like it. This is a very cheesy, another sales tactic, but I would start a conversation like normal conversation.
[00:34:31] And then later that Rebecca, when there is a problem in their company would reach out or I would make it very, very clear. So Rebecca. Two weeks ago you mentioned about this customer journey thing. Is it something that you wanted to do or is it just because you liked it? Like make it so easy for them to say no, I don't want the meeting with you but I think what you're doing is nice.
[00:34:51] Toni: I do. So first of all, the CTA and the post, yeah, that's, you know, it's, it's, it's very difficult to make this work out for, for so many reasons, but but I, I have the experience that it can be helpful to tap someone on the shoulder, right? Kind of, you have like a, a pool of lukewarm folks. That are like, I don't want to say lurking, but consuming your, your content, maybe liking, maybe commenting, and, you know, kind of actually being part of the pack.
[00:35:17] Total ICP, absolutely, totally perfect, perfect for you. But they, they, they would never, you know, get to the point of like, you know, requesting a demo. So what, what I then actually ended up doing is kind of to do a little tap on the shoulder, actually. And it obviously doesn't work out with everyone, but I feel, I feel this is sometimes still necessary for, you know, to, to basically kind of the, I think the, the opinion that we formed is like, if you want something to get done, ask for it, you have to fucking ask for it. And obviously you can't ask all the time and be super aggressive. But whatever you want to achieve, like, don't be a sissy. You need to, you need to ask for it.
[00:35:54] Laura: Agree? Agree. I can take an example, exactly the same example for how I felt about gifting platforms. There was a time I was thinking, oh, gifting platforms sounds exciting. And there are, right now, I could name three companies that are doing it, and I follow them on LinkedIn. I'm almost friends with a lot of people from those companies as well, like LinkedIn friends, and I still didn't crack, like, how Do they actually work and how much does it cost and is it relevant for it?
[00:36:22] Because we do send gifts, but we just literally pack it and then ship it. So would it be relevant for us to do it or not? And if I was not tapped on the shoulder by one of them, I would have never booked the meeting. And now when thinking about it, when we are at this scale that, Oh, we might want to get one.
[00:36:40] Well, I'll reach out to the ones that I've already seen. Probably we'll test the rest out, but top of mind is the one that I saw in action.
[00:36:48] Mikkel: Yeah. It's funny also because in the beginning you talked about who cares about getting that outbound message. I feel like here it's also a little bit different because you earned the right to see whether the person wants to understand more. Not even necessarily going into pitching because there's some kind of relation. I think that's super powerful.
[00:37:06] One thing I do wonder though is, Let's say again, there's a listener out there, followed every single advice up until this point, they actually started getting inbounds. But that's also a bit of a problem because is that my account? Is that, is that my account? Why is that in Laura's name?
[00:37:24] That's, that's why we didn't have so many inbounds. I think, I think God, it's a problem. It's, it's just there, there is something around the whole, I did the work. So obviously I should, I should, you know, How do you manage this internally in terms of, I don't know whether you have rules of engagement or any kind of SLAs, who's allowed to reach out?
[00:37:40] Well, they certainly have a revenue
[00:37:42] Toni: attribution platform. I can tell you that. Yeah, but that's after the deal is done, right? No?
[00:37:47] Laura: Well, while you're at it as well, that works
[00:37:49] Mikkel: yeah, yeah.
[00:37:50] Laura: It's, it's a very good point. And for traditional sales, it is a hard one because there is a revenue attached to you. What did you source? And if you source a deal for somebody else, what does that mean? What am I getting out of it? Fame? No, thank you. I'll take 10, 000 instead.
[00:38:11] Mikkel: Double bubble.
[00:38:12] Laura: Yeah, but I think For us at Dreamdata, it was a bit easier because it all started with demand generation for marketing. We have that many inbounds that we never really kicked off outbound properly. We're every time we're trying this and it's kind of works. It kind of doesn't and so on, but it has never been the thing that is driving our pipeline.
[00:38:36] It always has been inbound. And the social selling has also been driven by marketing. So kind of inbound mindset that we're creating. That's social selling awareness about us from people at our company. That is also the reason why people who do social selling a lot have to really like it. They have to enjoy it this much that it also gives them energy.
[00:39:01] So not 10, 000, but it gives them energy as well. And whenever there are good stories of somebody who mentioned you on a call, we always, always, always share that. So. You would get the fame if somebody mentioned you as well inside of the company, but you would not get the revenue. The rules of engagement at Dreamdata are, now are, it was not like that before, before like sell whoever would buy and then we figured that out at the beginning, but now we've got rules of engagement.
[00:39:31] Which area are you owning for outbound? Inbound, round robin for Europe and the US, but for outbound. We have specific areas that you are responsible for and you try to crack those areas. And if that account falls into yours, try to poke them on the shoulder. In addition to that, if there's somebody in somebody else's area is in my DMs or I know I can get a meeting with them and it's not on somebody's name, but in that area, I can claim it as well.
[00:40:01] But I would reach out to the salesperson in that areas. I have a good contact and I will try to book a meeting. All
[00:40:07] right.
[00:40:08] Well,
[00:40:08] Toni: a, I've a very simple, sorry, I didn't want to,
[00:40:11] Laura: Go, go,
[00:40:11] Toni: I didn't want to I was, I was thinking a very practical kind of question. There's like, I'm not sure if you guys have that, but like a free tax flow in, in the, in the inbound form, if someone mentions your name, are the ROE that, that, that
[00:40:25] Mikkel: then
[00:40:25] Toni: goes to
[00:40:26] Laura: No.
[00:40:27] Toni: Ah, okay.
[00:40:28] Mikkel: So there you have it. If you're inbound with Dreamdata after this episode, you can write Laura all you want, it's not going to matter, it's not going to matter actually.
[00:40:34] So you can, you might as
[00:40:35] Laura: by if you're taking the meeting from the office, and then she will wave and say, Oh, hello, the star is there, and like, where's my money? But no, no, no, it's just round robin and goes to the right people as well. Because, how do I know if I sourced it? They would mention me, but probably they also saw a video of Steffen, of MC, and stuff like that, but they just probably The last thing they ate was lunch.
[00:41:01] And during that lunch, they saw my video and that's when they bought the demo. So it's that, that type of attribution doesn't work is, is still there on social selling for sure. And it's a frustrating part for sales.
[00:41:15] Mikkel: I had so many more questions, but Mikkel is cutting me off, it's like, time is up. No, we need to just progress to the final bits and pieces before, before it's over.
[00:41:25] And I actually just wanted to ask you, what are some of the dirty secrets you haven't shared yet? Some of the tricks that you really will have a hard time now, letting go of and putting out in public.
[00:41:37] Because I think a lot of this stuff has definitely been valuable. But sometimes some of those tricks, they're also just really helpful to get some of those quick points on the board. So the initiative can can continue, right? So if someone is now building this initiative, what would be kind of some of your your dirty secrets secrets to share?
[00:41:53] Laura: Two things come top of mind. A very usual question I get is like, do you want to go viral? And my dirty trick and answer is no, you want to go consistent. Because if you go viral, random people will like it and comment on it and so on, and very likely you won't get enough of the quality that you actually want.
[00:42:14] So you want to be consistent rather than viral. If consistency means slow growth of views and comments and so on, and when you follow the trends we're going the right direction, fine. Virality, I don't care. Steffen cares sometimes about it. He likes it. It's very sad that Sam left our company. He does the memes and he gets viral very often.
[00:42:36] But, but I'm not sure if we're getting the leads out of that. We're just seemed like a funny company, which also nice thing. And the second thing is product videos. So before, at the very beginning of this podcast, I said, people don't care about you, they don't care about your company. There are times when they care.
[00:42:55] So my best performing videos are the ones that get usually the least likes and engagement.
[00:43:01] They get it from the right people. When I share my screen with that round bubble around me, and I talk about something very, very short, like two minutes. It's hard, because you've got to take ten minutes into two, but you're going to talk about one specific thing on the screen.
[00:43:18] This is the best. Because people actually reach out in direct messages themselves and ask, Can I see more?
[00:43:24] Mikkel: I think this is such an important We copied this from you guys, actually. Yeah, and I think and a few others. But I think this is such an important point, because we also fell into the trap of looking at Oh, we used to get like a hundred likes and thousands of impressions. Now we did a product video and we got like 10 likes and Yeah, but two,
[00:43:42] Toni: two inbounds, you know, that's, that's the thing.
[00:43:44] And
[00:43:45] Mikkel: I think that's the difference here. Yeah. It's all about the purpose and how you then judge it. It's very different all of a sudden, to your point. Right. So I think that's that's definitely a good tip. I could see folks almost falling into that trap. And then I'm gonna give you just the last question because you had so many.
[00:43:59] So out of those many, is there one, one you wanna just fire away before we say bye?
[00:44:04] Toni: Yeah, it's just like, of course, you, you said like you were Gartner then Dreamdata, so the setups gonna be 10 minutes, so I'm, I'm not sure if we gonna have time for this. That's fine, but fine. But you said Gartner then Dreamdata, you started out Dreamdata did outbound didn't really work out. But we heard this now from Udi at Gong, we heard it from a couple of other people that Outbound without a brand doesn't, doesn't really work. Kind of, it's really hard to make work. Right. So, now that you put in what, three, four, five years at Dreamdata and building out this brand, not only for yourself, but also for the company. Do you think it's time to revive Outbound and just try this out and see kind of how this is going to work now?
[00:44:38] Laura: We're doing it now, and it's working. So it took some time to do the branding stuff, but we're taking it to another level where like our salespeople are already really, really busy with inbounds, but we have to have more salespeople in order to start doing outbound as well. So we are at a point where it's starting, outbound is starting.
[00:44:58] To make things easy, we start with the signals outbound. So we collect all of the signals that Companies are showing us the strongest single signals. Are they comparing us on G2? Are they consuming our LinkedIn content? Have they been on pricing but have not identified Theirselves on our website? Time to act.
[00:45:17] And that's where Outbound starts. And in addition to that, if you're a salesperson and you feel that I can do even more than that, then define your own companies that you would like to reach out and you can do more of that. But now we're starting with signals. We're putting that into a very structured approach.
[00:45:34] How do we reach out to companies that are showing signals? And also tie LinkedIn into that very, very tightly so we're top of mind Outbound. And well, it sounds like we are top of mind because you're showing signals. And even when you're ready to buy, then you already have been approached by Dreamdata and you probably have already said yes, because of the brand.
[00:45:53] Mikkel: So I just want to say thank you for hopping on, Laura. And I also want to say thank you for my co host for bringing us off topic with the last question. That's always my job.
[00:46:02] Toni: It's always my job. Everyone will walk away by, wow, this Laura lady, she knows everything about outbound.
[00:46:09] Laura: Let me
[00:46:10] Toni: the title was something with social selling, but you know, here we are.
[00:46:13] I was just rounding out the topic. No, exactly. It's
[00:46:16] Laura: Fantastic. Guys, thank you so much. It was a pleasure. I'm watching you all the time. I love your podcast. And when you reached out to me, Mikkel, I was, I was impressed. It's like, okay, something's working. They want to have me besides all of the people that you know in the market. Thank you
[00:46:31] for
[00:46:32] Mikkel: There you go. Thanks for inflating my ego. I really appreciate it. You need it. Yeah, I need it. Thanks. Thanks, Laura. Thanks everyone for
[00:46:38] Toni: listening. Have a good one. Bye bye.