Power Up Your LinkedIn Prospecting with Ads

You're listening to LinkedIn Ads Radio, the podcast dedicated to exploring and mastering LinkedIn advertising with your host, Anthony Blatner from Speedwork.

All right, well, welcome to another episode of LinkedIn Ads Radio. Today we're going to be talking about prospecting on LinkedIn. We do a lot of talk about paid media and paid ads on the show, but there's definitely other ways that I know people are using LinkedIn for marketing and one of those is by going outbound on LinkedIn. So today with us we have Darren Whitmer. He oversees the messaging department at Speedwork. So he has, he's an expert in this area. He also has a sales background. So any questions regarding sales or outbound prospecting, he's definitely the guy to be talking to. Darren, as we dive in today, my first question I'm going to ask you is what's your favorite golf course you've ever played?

Oh, good question. Knowing my golf background there. So first off, thanks so much for having me on the podcast. Appreciate it. Favorite golf course is probably I've played Baltus Troll in New Jersey, which is like a championship course. They've had like US Opens there, PGA Championships there. So I'm lucky that my brother in law is a member there. So I've gotten to play there a few times. That course is phenomenal.

Nice. And then are those championship ones like extra hard to play?

So here's the thing about these championship courses, first off is I don't play from, you know, the tees that the pros play from. So like the teaser the pros play from could add like 100, 150 yards like to a hole like it's substantial how much further back they sit there and play. But what I would say about these championship course, so Baltic Shaw, for example, the course layout isn't that crazy when you play it like off the tee. But the minute you get when you're approaching the green and the greens themselves are bordering on impossible. So you know that that's where like it's all the, you know, everything's, you know, is made or not made like in and around the greens. Like, you know, for example, I remember I was playing there and they had a, we had a caddy, so it's all caddies. And you know, I had a great shot in to the green, but I was probably like 20, 15ft past the hole, you know, and the guy told me I think it was like 170 yards out. It was like a really good shot for me. The, the caddy goes great Shot. He goes. But now he's like, you're totally toast. He goes. Because you're above the hole. He's like. So he's like, that downhill putt. He's like, you're not gonna be able to stop it. And sure enough, when he went to tell me, like, how to putt this putt, he was like, listen. He was like, to illustrate to you how lightly you want to putt this, he goes, you want the ball to rotate once. And literally, I hit it as he's got the ball rolling, and it just slow rolled 15ft, and then 30ft past the hole. The. And it just, like, consistently just went. So it's really the greens on these courses. And then also, you're during the. They usually, you know, they'll grow out the rough. And then, you know, these guys play from 100, 150 yards back, you know, so they have. They have a spot on the 17th hole where Jack Nicholas hit a one iron from about 270 yards in the middle of the fairway onto, like, this elegraded green. And that hole is like 600, 620 yards long or something like that. So he hit. Gosh, he hit, like, driver one iron onto the. And hit it on a par five and two. So, yeah, I mean, it's ridiculously longer. You know how much these guys.

That sounds challenging. I'm an average golfer. Maybe those greens sound frustrating.

Well, I'm an average golfer, too. That's why, you know, it is frustrating. Yeah. But it's just. Yeah. When you go out there with the right mindset and you're just excited to play a nice golf course, it's kind of like, I expect to do poorly. So when, you know, you hit the occasional good shot or good putt, you're just excited that, you know, it kind of worked out that time. Yeah.

So probably, you know, golf is easy to learn, difficult to master. It's a lifetime to master it, and so is prospecting. Let's jump into prospecting and talk about what it's like to do prospecting. I know lots of people use LinkedIn for prospecting, and there's some opportunity to be had there. We know that email prospecting has gotten very difficult in the last couple years. Spam filters have been. They gobble up everything these days, and a lot of the rules around cold email have changed. So you can kind of, like, are just limited a lot on, like, what you can do there. So let's kind of start with, like, who's a good fit for prospecting and like, when does prospecting work best?

Yeah. So, I mean, there's. There's kind of two scenarios. So one is we have a lot of sales reps and sales teams that partner with us to help them run their LinkedIn messaging campaigns and just take it half a step back. But basically, a LinkedIn outbound campaign or outbound messaging campaign really is like an email drip campaign, except you're dripping messages into LinkedIn mailboxes instead of email inboxes. So just so we're kind of setting the stage for what we're talking about. But in general, I would say sales reps, sales teams use this a lot. It's a great tool. It's just a great option. So that's kind of like the demographic, I would say, that uses us the most. And then the other part is what makes, you know, kind of LinkedIn messaging a good fit for that demographic. And there's a couple of things. So one is, you know, anytime you're on LinkedIn, the first thing we always look at is target audience. All right, so is your target audience. I always tell people, you know, two things. One is, can we target your audience effectively using the native filters that LinkedIn gives us? And the filter tool that LinkedIn has that most people are familiar with is Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator attaches to a personal LinkedIn profile, and then it gives you a whole bunch of, like, job title filters, industry filters, size of business filters, things like that. So the first is, can we target your audience effectively on LinkedIn? And I would say most scenarios, you can usually target an audience pretty effectively on LinkedIn. The only times that you can't is, you know, I talk to a lot of people that say, like, hey, listen, I only want to target, like, salesforce.com users or, you know, so any sort of, like, technology that's being used by a particular company, like, that's not something like a. That's not a filter that LinkedIn really offers at all. We also run in some. Some scenarios where, you know, there's some industries have really obscure job titles for, you know, different job functions within their business. You know, we were talking to somebody earlier today, and they were talking. They're in the energy industry. So they're trying to target the energy industry. And they're just like, the energy industry just doesn't use the common job titles like project manager or director of it. They have these really obscure job titles. So using LinkedIn filters to target those. But in general, those are the two biggest things. It's like, can we sit there and target Them effectively for sales reps. And then the last piece of it is how engaged is that audience known to be on LinkedIn? So there are just some audiences that just aren't engaged on LinkedIn. Examples would be like medical professionals, doctors, nurses, you could target them. They're just known to not be on LinkedIn. Small blue collar business owners. So like electricians, plumbers, you know, small construction, stuff like that. And then like I would say like brick and mortar retail, you know, kind of small business brick and mortar retail. Like those owners just, those businesses just aren't on LinkedIn. But on the flip side of that, great audiences on LinkedIn are typically human resources. Anything. HR is LinkedIn's single largest user demographic and single most engaged user demographic, small business owners in B2B industries. Because those business owners are on LinkedIn typically running some sort of messaging campaigns themselves, trying to find prospects for their business. And then sales reps are obviously good target audiences because they're highly active on LinkedIn as well. And then I would say like mid level management, like manager, director, VP level job titles at mid to larger enterprises. Those tend to be sort of like the best industries, I would say, or the best audiences on LinkedIn. But there's a lot of good audiences on LinkedIn kind of beyond those. But those are kind of the big three or four.

Yeah. And like same for ads. I always think about like who are like digitally active people? Like is this industry just one that's like working in the field or like like you said doctors, they're busy doing doctor stuff in like the surgery room. So they're, they're tied up offline. So I think about stuff like that and you know, same thing works with like messaging here. Who's online, who's active. Those are going to be the best people to start with. I'm always like surprised sometimes when we can find a target audience, like a very niche target audience and you find there's a, like a really big group of them. All right, interesting. Maybe you could try it. You do need to then think about the activity level of that interest. Even though you can find a lot of profiles, are they, are they on the platform or not? But just some things that you know, I think are, are interesting to think about and then if you have to like think about, you know, whenever somebody writes. So I think so we should mention there's lots of bad messaging campaigns out there. Or like I get a lot of messages from people. I still get messages from people pitching me software development services and I haven't worked in Software development in like 10 years. So and it's always like we do this language and this language and this language and I'm like, I'm not looking for that. So I still get stuff like that. What are the gotchas that you want to watch out for as you're planning your campaign? What, what doesn't work on LinkedIn messaging?

Yeah, I mean the biggest thing that doesn't work on LinkedIn for LinkedIn messaging, regardless of how you're doing it, is coming right out of the gate, firing with some really long winded sales, pitchy feature, functionality, dropping message. I mean, that's just not what LinkedIn users are, are interested in. I always tell you, I always tell people that LinkedIn users don't want to be sold to. Most people in the world don't. Right. But what LinkedIn users do want to do is they do want to get into discussions with other business professionals if it's on topics that they think could help them in their business. So then it becomes a question of how do you sit there and kind of engage them in that topic of discussion, that conversation. Once they get engaged, then it becomes more appropriate to move down the checklist, introduce maybe a product or service, you know, maybe kind of probe a little bit and understand what they're, you know, what they're looking for, where their challenges are. So then you can kind of craft a message, you know, ideally specifically responding to what, what they're asking or what they want to engage in.

Yeah, I've seen the ones where I click Accept and then like I get a five page message immediately after I click Accept. So it sounds like you're saying, don't do that.

Yeah, you know, it's, it's, you know, one of the most common thing I see is that, because I would say like the, the people that use these campaigns the most are sales reps. And then like small business owners, like a B2B that maybe they don't have sales reps, they sell themselves, stuff like that. And you know, both of those demographics sort of have the same. They just want to get to the point, right? They're like, are you going to be a prospect for me or not? Right. So it's, you know, they think that the way to get to that point is to sort of just come out of the, get out of the gate, spray everything out there. And you know, somebody responds, they're like, all right, this is a prospect for me. But I don't think what a lot of them think about a lot of times, times is they're really alienating a good portion of the people they're really, you know, sending messages out to. And it is sort of a, in most circumstances, I would say it is sort of a, like a broad sort approach. You know, you have to reach out to a lot of people to get responses back and sort of engage with the number of them. And then, you know, kind of you get your prospects or your opportunities to sort of drop out the bottom. But it's not an activity that's going to generate like hundreds of leads or something like that. It's usually, you know, it's more surgical than that.

Right? Yeah, I'd say like ads, like when you're running ads, you're reaching a lot of people with the ad. With messaging, you might, you're going to be a little bit more targeted with that. And some of that comes down to like the limits. Like, I know LinkedIn's like dropped the limits recently. In the last few years, they've reduced the limits. And I think that does kind of make for a better user experience. You know, I don't like getting all those pitch messages, but there's also people I do want to connect with or do want to hear from on LinkedIn. So I think that like makes, forces you to be a little more targeted and be more thoughtful with it when you're, when you're doing it. I've definitely noticed my inbox has gotten a little bit cleaner, thankfully. And then you mentioned Sales Navigator. Is that, do people need that or what are your thoughts on using Sales Nav?

So, I mean, I think Sales Navigator is a useful tool for most if you're going to do any sort of prospecting on LinkedIn. Sales NAV is the best tool to use for that because it offers you kind of those, those target audience filter options that you can't really do. You, you have to kind of manipulate like the search features within just a standard LinkedIn profile to be able to sort of maybe find the people you want to. But Sales Navigator is great because you just say, listen, I want to target, you know, small business owners of software companies that have 50, a couple hundred employees, you know, in the United States or whatever the case might be. And LinkedIn just spits out a big output of people that fits that specific target audience criteria. And, you know, one of the advantages too of Sales Navigator is that you can save lists and save searches on Sales Navigator. So, you know, the ability to sit there, go in there, sort of play around, figure out what your audience is, maybe what best filters to Describe your audience and then be able to save that list so that you can sit there. And regardless of how you're doing it, if it's, you know, manually or whatever, there's a lot of automation tools out there too. But you know, either way, you know, you probably want to start with that list and then sort of work your, your prospecting off of a Sales Navigator list. So I would definitely recommend it. I mean, I think LinkedIn only charges for the base version. You know, it's around a hundred bucks per month, so it's not really that cost prohibitive. I think there's. I don't know how many. I think it's a pretty high percentage of LinkedIn users. Last time I, I heard it was over 50% of LinkedIn users have a premium or kind of Sales Navigator account. So there's a lot of people that are using it for sure. And it's a good tool for that. Yeah.

And then a lot of people talk about, as far as like targeting, I think a lot of companies are like, go with an ABM approach. Or like, they're like, hey, we have our target accounts. We know we want to be targeting these companies. Is that possible with Cell Nav?

You definitely can, sure. You can sit there and, you know, filter by company. Right. So if you wanted to target. I think the biggest place where I see ABM working the best, the biggest, the best scenarios where I see ABM working the best is if you're targeting larger enterprises, you know, and, you know, let's say you're targeting, I don't know, product managers or product development or something like that within a large enterprise. You know, these large enterprises could have hundreds of people that have a, you know, product development job, product development manager, job title. Right. So, you know, and it's really hard for sales reps. You know, going back 15 years when I used to be in sales, you know, this was a huge challenge was like, who is the right product manager that sort of owns the responsibilities I need them to own to be able to buy my products or service. Right. So, you know, when you have those types of scenarios, you know, I would say an ABM approach is highly effective because you can sort of engage a lot of people with that job title at those companies. And then, you know, it becomes kind of like a filter for you. You might get responses from the wrong people, but they might push point you to, I'm not the right person, I'm not the right product owner, but Anthony is. Here's look up Anthony Blattner. He's the product manager that owns this particular piece of the pie. Right. So that's where I've seen ABM sort of work the best. But it would definitely have to be larger enterprise like those types of scenarios where it's difficult is I've had people come to me and say, hey, listen, we only want to work with C suite executives at Fortune 100 companies, right? Well, there's only maybe there's a hundred companies, but there's maybe five contacts, you know, at each. And you know, so that's, that's a total potential prospect universe of 500 prospects. And that becomes very challenging because those, those people are generally not active on LinkedIn. Maybe they have like executives assistants run their LinkedIn profile or maybe even marketing teams are the ones. So they may look like they're active, but in general they're not there. Kind of like scrolling at Lunchtime on their LinkedIn account, you know, looking at who's messaging them. And plus those, I'm assuming those guys also, and women also probably a lot of messages. So there's probably a lot more noise in their LinkedIn mailbox than just the average user like you or I.

A lot of people use those same filters. I want cxo at Fortune 100 and 500 results. Weird.

Yeah. Now, one thing I will say is you mentioned in the beginning sort of email marketing and spam filters and emails become more challenging because of that. And as the spam laws have become more restrictive, a lot more email are getting pushed into spam. The one thing that I always tell people is, you know, where LinkedIn has an advantage is that LinkedIn doesn't have any spam filtering or spam reporting. Right. So, you know, you're getting 100% deliverability where you. I don't know what the current stats are in email, but I know it's not 100%. So you're getting 100% deliverability on LinkedIn. And you know, I always tell people is that, you know, with email, I don't know, I don't know about you, but the, you know, the average business professional typically gets maybe 100, 200 emails a day. Right. It's a, it's very crowded in email inbox, but the average LinkedIn user probably gets one to three messages per day into their LinkedIn mailbox. So not only are you getting 100% deliverability, you're generally getting much higher visibility to the messages that are being sent as well. So just, you know, some other advantages.

Yeah, I just had a post today about like how much Spam has gone up in my email box and how I start my day by deleting about 200 emails every day. And then I get to work.

I don't even know how some of these people find it. I literally my, my, my high school. So by literally my high school from whatever 30 years ago, the. It somehow got my work email and has been like, you know, pushing me. Like the alumni, like you know, make a donation alumni emails to, to my speedwork email. And I'm like, I don't even know how the heck they found the speedwork email to. Somebody must have really put in some effort because it's not something like you can see on my LinkedIn profile or something like that. So I'm like, how the heck did they even find this?

Yeah, but actually you make me think about, I heard you talk about targeting people based on where they went to school before and sometimes that can be effective. Tell me a bit more about like those, like, tell me about some like interesting plays that you've seen work. Whether it's that or like other things, what are some like interesting plays that you have seen work?

Well, so definitely I've seen some interesting college alumni plays before. You know, we have one client that is a, they're an investment fund like a, it's almost like a vc, like a mini VC firm. But they are part of NC State. And you know, basically what they do is they target NC State alumni throughout the country that, you know, maybe want to potentially become investors in startups that are rolling out of NC State. So you know, we see those campaigns perform generally like 2, 3x. I mean the response rates and acceptance rates they get on connection requests and things like that are typically 2.3x because you're mentioning the alumni it's being sent from, you know, sort of within that alumni, you know, school demographic. Even though it's not, it's definitely like a business that's just like sort of semi outside of NC State. But so it's not like an NC State email address or you know, kind of profile that's coming at them. But that alumni play plays really well, I would say. I'm trying to think of some other interesting ones. There are ones a lot of startups sort of use us too to gather market research data, hone in on who are their ideal audiences when they're not totally sure, things like that. So we've seen some startups that sit there and they kind of go to market and then all of a sudden you see this big market pull where you're like, holy cow, this is really getting a massive. They thought they had something big and it looks like they do like those types of scenario because most of the time, you know, with startups, every startup thinks they're going to be something big and then you go out to market and you're surprised when you know your email inbox isn't flooded with purchase orders. So, you know, it's more stuff like that. There's certain industries I've seen that are, I would say there clearly doesn't. There seems to be a major need in the industry and then there just isn't a. There just must be not a large supply of either providers or service providers to provide whatever the market wants. So the best example I would say of that is we have several clients that are in the DEI consulting space and it just must not be that many kind of consultants in that space. I mean, obviously there's a lot of them, but comparative to what the market is beating. So we see campaigns like that perform extremely well. Every single one of them we've ever done. So you know, there's stuff like that. Yeah, I mean it's, you know, it's, you know, using LinkedIn messaging to grow your, your connection base or your follower base from your target audience and then just using that in conjunction with like LinkedIn social posting. So like we see like almost like influencer campaigns where you know, you kind of message initially you sort of makes a connection but then that person now becomes a Follower on your LinkedIn profile and you know that they're pushing out other thought leadership type content and you know, those followers, there's kind of a snowballing effect where over time you're kind of adding more and more followers and you get, you know, next thing you know you have 3,000 followers, 5,000 followers from your, from your ideal target audience. You're producing really high quality content. So those are some of the more interesting things I've seen, you know, sort of people do and some of the Nichier type of categories where I've seen people do really well.

Yeah, and to double tap on a couple of those, like what you said about like testing offers or like, you know, whether it's a startup or whether it's a big company with a new product, I think, you know, from what I've seen, it's like a very high fidelity way to test a message or test a product to a new category because like if you do it over email, like people just aren't gonna respond. You know, they're mark you as spam they're gonna delete it. You just don't get any feedback. If you run it as an ad, you're kind of putting a lot behind it before. You really get a lot, a lot before that's been validated. But with messaging, it starts a conversation so you can hear what people are saying. You can see what they're asking. And that's just. And like you can meet with them and you can talk to them and like just much more in depth data that you're getting. I think you call the market research. Like, I think that's a great way to put it. So like I think that's like a huge benefit of it and then something else I'll throw in there is like Evergreen offers can offer. So, so definitely like, yeah, what's in demand? What's the active demand out there that's in the market? Are you serving that great that you know you're, that'll be a good option for you. But also like sometimes Evergreen offers, it can be hard to break in to a specific industry. But like for example, companies, you know, every business of a certain size probably has business insurance. But can you come in and offer a better business insurance or a better price or like what's your differentiator? I think Evergreen offers are like always in demand offers. Sometimes those can work well, sometimes they can be harder to break into. But if you have a good angle, people are always buying the services, products and services. So like that's another like interesting kind of take to, to take. And there was one more I had in mind and it's like, you know, just, just the benefit of like connecting with your industry or connecting with your market. There might be certain ones where hey, you might have a small niche market, but hey, let's go get you connected with everybody in that niche. You will get you connected to everybody. You'll, you'll know everybody. You'll be connected to everybody that can also work for local campaigns. You know, sometimes you have to worry about scale. But like there was a local company that does serves Austin. So okay, let's go get you connected to every business leader in Austin in certain industries so that you know everyone's going to be connected to you. You're going to meet them in person and they're going to be like, oh yeah, I connected with you on LinkedIn recently and we've heard that that's happened several times. So it's always like funny to get that feedback and you're like, yeah, that works.

So yeah, it's interesting. One of the things you mentioned was, you know, kind of that, you know, sort of that market research piece. So I, you know, I do get a lot of people that come to us and speedwork in general, you know, wanting to run ads, right. And you know, a lot of them, I would say have either never run ads on LinkedIn or maybe haven't done that much in terms of marketing on LinkedIn in general. Or it could be the scenario you said, you know, new product, service launch, new business, something like that. A lot of those scenarios I will generally tell those businesses, unless they're VC funded, typically VC funded startups will say, listen, we know we haven't done this before. We know we're going to waste a lot of money testing with LinkedIn ads, but we're going to do it anyway because our VC fund said to do it right. In which case, as long as they know and everybody's on the same page, then cool. You could definitely test with ads and scale and do all that type of stuff. But for most, it's a relatively expensive endeavor to test and waste money while testing this sort of find out what your market is on LinkedIn. So it's pretty often, I would say I talk to businesses that say they want to get into LinkedIn ads. They've never done LinkedIn before. They don't really know. Maybe they know who their target audience is or they have several different target audiences that they could play within. And it's pretty frequent that I tell people that you're better off with running LinkedIn messaging campaigns for even three, four, five, six months. And with those campaigns you can sit there and split, test different audiences against each other. It could be different functional job roles, job titles, could be different industries, could be different value propositions that you want to test. And you know, those messaging campaigns can really allow you to sit there and figure out like what is your ideal audience on LinkedIn and what is that audience responding best to. And the reason for that is because with LinkedIn messages you have two way communication with your target audience at scale, right? So you could be engaging with tens or hundreds of, you know, potential what could be prospects on a monthly basis, gathering little pieces of market research data and then you start to see where, like the common objections, the common questions that are coming up. And then when you want to scale up, which is something you can't do with LinkedIn messaging because of LinkedIn's, LinkedIn's Got Daily message, daily, weekly and monthly message elements, then you sit there and take all that knowledge that you acquired from Interacting with your audience at scale. And then you sit there and scale up with ad campaigns. You know, that's, that's very common conversation I have with people, people.

It's a good, good testing ground. And then I'll plug conversation ads on LinkedIn which operate similarly, where it'll be a message sent and you can even set list yourself as a message sender and it'll come through in a very similar fashion. So test and refine with messaging and then go crank it up with the.

Ad version of that for sure. And you know, the difference between message ads and LinkedIn messaging is, you know, with LinkedIn messaging you have two way communication. With message ads it's only one way, it's a push message. Right. So even if that prospect has questions or you know, has objections, you're not going to know them. So when you go to get to that point, you're probably going to want to know what those questions and objections are. So you could craft that ad in such a way that you know, it's, you don't have to worry about getting a response back. You already know what the market wants and you can sort of present it to them in that, that type of ad. Type. Yeah.

And then that's a good segue into the ads part here. Or like talking more about ads, what are some ways that ads and prospecting can work together? Or how can your ads support your prospecting? Or how can your prospecting support your ads? Maybe let's start with how can your ads support your prospecting? Or how can they work together?

Yeah, I mean, I think probably the best way for them to work together is understanding the type of leads that you typically get from a messaging campaign or an outbound campaign versus an ad campaign. So messaging tends to be more middle and bottom of the funnel type of leads. Now you don't get them at scale like you do with ads because, you know, typically, you know, Maybe you get 5, 10, 15 leads a month just based on like the messaging, you know, limits that LinkedIn has through a messaging campaign. But typically I would say they're closer to bottom of the funnel. LinkedIn ads are excellent at filling top of the funnel. Right. Getting those prospects into the funnel. You know, maybe people that aren't looking to necessarily buy now, but able to sit there and say they know they have a need that's coming up. So sort of get them into your funnel. Now if you have, usually our clients have pretty extensive email nurturing sequences that get triggered off when the top of the funnel ad lead comes in. Or it triggers off a notification to a sales rep to start putting that prospect on their radar, maybe start reaching out with emails and phone calls. So I think it's really the type of leads you could get pretty fancy with it if you wanted to. I mean, you certainly could sit there and probably do some like ABM type approaches where you're running ads and you're sort of putting this air cover leading up to it. And then you're running a messaging campaign that's now targeting those same people with direct messages and trying to do that. I mean, that's an approach for sure. It's a little more sophisticated and I don't think we have many clients that do that approach, but it's definitely something that could be done. But I would say that's probably the primary difference, I think, and how you sort of can play these things sort of, you know, off of each other.

Yeah, I do like to get fancy sometimes. You mentioned getting fancy. So I'll throw in. Another idea is when you're making connection requests to people, you know those people are going to go research you and research your company. So they're going to go visit your company page, you're going to visit your website, they're going to check you out. You can use the LinkedIn insight tag to retarget people who have been to your website and then also you can retarget people who have been to your company page. And then it's a little funny that you can't retarget your direct connections. You'd think that would be built in. But what you can do is you can export your connections and then import those to ads as a way to retarget them. So as you're making connections, as people are researching you, you can use ads to then retarget those people and you know, you can set up your sequence or like how you're going to be planning to go to market and you know you're going to connect with people and then they're going to enter your target audience. They'll then see a couple ads from you and then from there maybe you follow up afterwards. You know, they then it's more warm. They approach you a couple times or senior company a couple times and you'll have a lot more to talk about once they, you know, once you do set up a call with them or something like that. So. And then something else to make me think about is you mentioned sales teams a couple times. How can like sales teams best take advantage of Sales Navigator or like what, what should sales teams be doing?

Yeah. I mean, here's what it comes down to is that, you know, every sales team I've ever been on and I was in, you know, kind of B2B sales for like mid to larger companies and mostly software and stuff like that is, you know, when you have a sales team, everyone's always got their, you know, it's like your A players, your B players, your C players. Every, you know, major sales organization sort of like does that. And you know, I think the biggest challenge in the salesforce in general is that businesses sort of lump lead generation and running a sales process together in the same job function. And ultimately what happens is that sales reps tend to be, I don't know what percentage, whatever, 70, 80% of sales reps could definitely run an effective sales process and close deals. But what a small percentage I would guess is maybe 10, maybe 20% of sales reps are really good at prospecting. So, you know, the biggest thing that, that and there's, there's a couple reasons for that. One is they're just maybe not good at it. Or the other reason is one of the paradigms that shifts that sort of happens in the sales world is when you're a good sales rep and you're closing deals, you know, you're having a lot of client meetings and you know, getting those, you know, your sales process takes time to run. You got to do proposals and presentations and you know, everything else. Right. And when you have a lot of sales opportunities in process, what happens is it takes up a good chunk of your time. Like it's like that 80, 20 rule, right. So when you don't have a lot of sales opportunities, you have 80% of your time to prospect. You know, when you have a lot of sales opportunities, you have 20% of your time to prospect and. Right. So what a lot of sales teams see even from good reps is there's this very up and down. Like they'll be like three months on, they'll have a lot of opportunities to close a lot of deals and then their pipeline is empty and then they got to sit there and go back to the ground and they got to run, run, run, you know, kind of build up their pipeline again for another month or two and then they sort of just keep going through the cycle. So where I see a lot of sales teams be really interested in LinkedIn, LinkedIn messaging campaigns, just LinkedIn in general ad campaigns too is the same function is to do two things. One is to basically give your sales reps that aren't good at prospecting, a mechanism that allows them to be good at prospecting. And that sort of is like a machine working behind the scenes for them to prospect. And you know, I'm not saying sales reps shouldn't prospect. They should go out and prospect on their own. You know, no sales leader is going to want to hear, like, this is going to be something that my sales reps think that I can prospect. Now, this is to like augment the efforts of whatever your sales reps are currently doing and to, you know, kind of create more of a steady sort of pipeline that's, you know, kind of number one. I sort of lost my thought there. But that's the biggest thing is like that or. And also the sort of flatten out, you know, for the sales reps that are good prospecting, if they get pulled into a lot of sales activities, you know, then all of a sudden it's like, well, this is just that machine working behind the scenes for them. You could be prospecting while you're in team meetings, while you're out on sales calls, while you're on the beach on vacation, like these. It's just that machine that keeps working for you through all those up and down cycles to sort of give your best sales rep more opportunities and your worst sales reps more opportunities so they can be more successful.

Yeah, so that they can go handle the deals that are in the pipeline and then when they're ready, they can jump back to LinkedIn, already have a full inbox of new conversations that have been started and they just start tackling that so they don't have to go think about the list or think about who am I going to reach out to.

Yeah, it's a lot easier. You know, the hardest part about prospecting is the grunt work of having to go through, you know, I don't care if you're a cold caller, if it's an email list, whatever it is, it takes a lot of volume of output, prospecting output to generate one opportunity. Right. You know, I mean, you know, the metrics used to be, you know, if you make $100, you would generate like one to three, like first calls. Right. And the first call is not even an opportunity, is it someone who's willing to sit down and talk to you. And then typically it's like, you know, 25% of those first calls turn into an actual sales opportunity, like where you run your sales process. So I think where the value for the sales reps is, you know, that, that grunt work of that hundred, like every Sales rep. Listen, if you have 10 deals in process and another deal drops in your lap, sales reps will absolutely find the time to work that 11th deal. Right. So it's like that type of a thing. So, you know, sales reps are. If there's opportunities that are being created for them, what they don't have the time for is the grunt work that big, like lift effort to do the heavy lifting to generate those opportunities. So. And I think that's where LinkedIn messaging campaigns really bring the most value is, you know, again, it's that machine working behind the scenes for you. When responses come in, when opportunities start getting generated, your sales reps will be happy to handle those and they'll find the time to do that. It's just all the other stuff that they can't, like that volume, heavy lifting.

Your sales rep says he's busy, but then like a great opportunity drops their lap, they're going to go after it. I love that.

Yeah, it's. Yeah, listen, that's what sales reps want to do, right? I mean, it's even when the, even the sales reps that are greater prospecting, sales reps don't want to prospect. Like, if they could, if they could have a million deals and not prospect, they would totally take that option. Yeah. So, you know, it's. Yeah. And they'll, they'll always find more time even if, you know, listen, when I was in sales, I've closed deals at the beach. It's like, you know, if you're on vacation, you know, I remember my bosses used to sit there and be like, you know, you're, you're going on vacation when you get out there. And I'm like, dude, don't worry about it. There's the deals come in. I was like, I'll take those calls when I'm on vacation. Yeah, I'll spend 20, 30, 40 minutes, you know, to close a deal. It's not like everything goes, you know, white noise for that time frame.

It's always fun to, like, think back. You're like, oh, that one deal, I was on XYB Z Beach when we closed that one.

Oh, yeah, totally. I was, I had a, I didn't deal. I closed on my honeymoon from Greece. Oh, wow. I was. So we went, we went to a. So we went to the Greek Isles for our honeymoon and we were, we went to an Internet cafe because we were looking at all like the, all of our friends were uploading, like all the pictures and stuff. Then they were sort of like sharing them out to Us or whatever. And we logged in at the Internet cafe and I was like, I just gotta check my work email real quick. And I remember there was a deal that came through that I closed while I was on my honeymoon from looking at the Internet cafe. I think at the time I was drinking a Red Bullet vodka overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Mykonos in Greece. And I was like, this is not a bad way to operate here.

This is the life. There you go.

This is the life. Exactly.

Amazing. Well, we've covered a lot today on prospecting on LinkedIn, even a little bit about ads with all that. So if anybody has questions, what's the best way to reach out to you? If they have questions about LinkedIn prospecting or any just like sales process on LinkedIn questions, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?

Yeah, I mean, you can always look me up on LinkedIn. You know, obviously Darren Whitmer says D A R R E N W I T M like Mary E R. I don't think there's a whole lot of other Darren Whitman's out there, so you should be able to find me pretty easy. My email address is darrenpeedworksocial.com or on our website we have a free consultation link. You can feel free to action that link and that books you directly on my calendar. So, you know, you can sit there and talk to me directly that way.

Boom. All right, Darren, well, thanks for being on the show today and sharing some much. We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.

Thanks for having me, man. I appreciate it.

Thanks for listening to LinkedIn ads radio. That's it for this episode. Stay tuned for more.