Turn Cold Prospecting Warm Through Social Selling with Brandon Lee

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Social prospecting is the activity of becoming familiar and known with your prospects and giving value to and earning the right to a meeting.

Oh, there's so much we can unpack from from that story. So it's kind of break this down. Right? So you mentioned to the key Rs in selling relationships and rapport. So start with rapport because I think this is an area that a lot of sellers get wrong and truthfully it's because they're taught this way of like, how do you actually build rapport? Because rapport comes before the relationship. Everyone just loves to jump to the relationships. You got to build a relationship. Oh yeah, because it's that easy. Let me just go to the relationship tree and just start to to grab something. Or how do you properly build rapport via social platforms?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. And building rapport in social is about consistently showing up in two places. Number one is you have to share. And I like the term professional insight post or a personal insight post. So we call them pips. Right? It's Not a social post. Not a, ooh, social post. Let's go share stuff. Let's, let's go share our marketing brochure. Let's go share our pitch and our value proposition because the data shows no one pays attention to those anyway. So stop posting those.

Right?

But when you share your insights, whether it's, hey, I read this article in my industry and here's some things that I took for it and this is from it and this is why it's important and why you should read it, that is sharing your professional insights. Now I say that one first because it really is a first step in a four step process. We have to open our digital mouth. We have to share what we know, share what we've experienced. And I don't care if you're 3 months, 6 month SDR or BDR or your 40 year AE. We all have experience. And when we authentically share those experiences, hey, I read this and this is what I learned. This is what I thought. What do you guys think? We're opening up those digital conversations now. Why is it so important that we share posts like that? Well, to earn the right to a meeting, our buyers, our prospects need to be able to read and see who we are, what we think and the value we offer before they'll agree to a meeting with us. Because we're out of that stage where people will accept, you know, accept the meeting to learn about you. They don't have time for it and there's so much competition. They don't have to take their time to give you their valuable time for you to be able to prove that you have value. You have to prove it before they're willing to accept the meeting. Yes.

And you nailed something that I've been talking about for a long time where it's like sales used to be about the what, meaning buyers didn't know what was out there without talking to salespeople. So you kind of had to take some of those meetings, like, hey, I'd like to share with you some of the latest developments in your industry. We were about the what. Well, then it moved to the why. The what was kind of out there already. Like what was going on. Right as the Internet starts to come up, it was easy to know what was going on. We started getting to, well, here's why you should use us. Now we're making that final transition into the how. Like, here's how it will actually impact you. And if you can't speak to the how, there's no interest there. Now I actually Want to take a step back here, around how do you build a network of your audience? Because, all right, if right now, for example, if I went and dropped a post on LinkedIn about engineering, it would get crickets because I have not built an audience of engineers. So let's go there and then we can work backwards. I'm entering a new industry or I'm an SDR or an ae. How do I build an audience of my target so that when I post, they actually do see it?

Yeah. Thank you. And that's again, that's step two. Right. So I start with step one of actually publishing, because they've got to start there. And the reason they have to start there is because no matter what else we do, when people get introduced to us or they discover us, they go to our LinkedIn profile and they go and look and see. First of all, our profile better be cleaned up and human and talk about not just, not just your resume, but who you are, what you know, what you're passionate about, and let them get to know you as a human being as well. But they're going to look and say, what do you talk about? What do you share? What do you have to say? What's valuable? So you've got to start posting first. But the second thing is how you build that network. Well, that's where social prospecting comes in. Now, this is when sales teams generally say cold call, cold email. Why do they do that? Well, because you've got prospects that don't know who you are and what you offer. That's why we call it cold, and we cold outreach. But what if we could make ourselves warm and familiar before we ask for anything? You know, that's what LinkedIn and other social networks give us the opportunity to do. So tactically, this is what we do. And here's a cadence that we prescribe to our customers. You go and engage, which is practically you comment on posts that your prospects have engaged with. So they've either liked it, they've commented on it, or they published it themselves. When you go and comment on it, you actually get the power of LinkedIn working for you to meet that person. Because. So KD, let's say you've liked to post or commented on a post, and then I come along afterwards and go, I want to get Katie's attention. So I'm now going to comment on the post that KD commented on and you're going to get a notification from LinkedIn that says, KD, Brandon Lee, they're going to show you my picture. My name and my headline also commented on this post, right? LinkedIn does that because they want you coming back into LinkedIn and doing stuff, spend more time in LinkedIn. So when we actively go and comment, notice real quick too. I haven't said connect with them yet. Don't send connection requests yet.

I'm glad you called it out. Keep going.

We go in and do engage and comment and have them see us. So we move from being cold and unknown to being recognized, familiar, maybe even warm because of the type of comments that you're, that you're making now. The best thing that happens is I come in and follow Katie's comment and I comment and then Katie comes back and comments again and I start developing that network with him there. And maybe I don't have to do this four or five times, but I believe we've got to move ourselves. We have to take the time. I'm a big believer in the, the story of the rabbit and the hare. Right. We gotta go slow to move fast. I'm a big believer in getting ourselves into that familiar territory. They need to know our name, see our face, see us involved in some of the things that they're involved with in online. Before we ask for the connection request and salespeople, we need to, we need to hone our craft, get better at commenting. I, I, when salespeople go, oh, yeah, I don't know how to cry, I don't know how to comment. We'll figure it out. That's your job. You want to build pipeline. You want to book meetings. You need to go and engage and talk with people where they are, not where you want them to be. And if they're not answering their phones, was it 79% of calls that come from an unknown number go straight to voicemail if they're not answering your calls. And we know what's been happening with email since COVID because everybody in the world had the same great idea. Send more emails, right? Email. The efficacy of emails dropped. We got to go where they are, and we have to introduce ourselves in a different way. And social is efficient. If your travel budgets are getting removed or your conferences aren't happening, I can sit at my desk all day long and do this with hundreds of people a week and book new meetings all the time.