Christina Nalband, Nick Bennett, and Jason Vana explain why LinkedIn is essential for B2B sales in a remote world. Nick's team generated over 30 opportunities and $500K in pipeline in a year through daily LinkedIn activity. Jason's personal content accidentally launched his company, Shift, showing how CEOs can reach ideal customers on the platform.
Chapters
1, 2, 3, 4.
Sales, marketing, and RevOps. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com. We are live. So I'm Jared. I'm moderating this panel, Why LinkedIn Matters. I'm joined by three incredible guests. Let me give a quick introduction: Nick Bennett, Director of Field Community and Partner Marketing at Alice; Christina Nauben, Director of Sales at Alice; and Jason Vanna. Is it Shift Marketing or do you pronounce it? Did you just—
yeah, I was trying to be cool without the I, but it's Shift.
Cool. So what we're talking about today is something we all know is important. LinkedIn, right? And what's interesting is so many times we come at it from the angle of personal branding, which everybody here will speak endless praise about, and it's super important. But often, you know, we don't really put it together for go-to-market strategy, like as part of it. Like it seems to be separate a lot. Like, oh, we have a personal brand. Is our company gonna influence that or impact that or let it be? When in reality it could be harnessed for a lot of good and in the go-to-market motion. So that's what our focus is on today. And I have a few questions and Have an awesome panel of experts to help answer them. So diving in, and y'all could take it any direction, maybe, maybe we'll start with Christina on this. Why do you think LinkedIn is important in a go-to-market strategy?
Yeah, I think, I think it's a good question. And I love your point on the person and the company seem to be a little bit separate at this point, right? And it leaves people questioning, should I do this? Like, is this something that I should actively be doing every day? Is my company going to want me to be doing this? But I think in a GTM strategy, it's, it's simple to me in the sense that it's 2022 and people are buying from people, right? And we now it's a remote world. We're not even able to connect with people. Sometimes we can't even get lunch with people. There are so many restrictions on our lives and it's like, what better place? than social media, but a professional social media to build your brand and build a strategy around like how you can connect with other people, how you can build relationships and other brands. So I think it's the one and only professional network that allows this outlet to be yourself. Right. And if you can have an authentic, genuine brand, whether that's a person or the entire organization working towards that. And you can build relationships on it. Like, I kind of think it's the only way to do it today. So not only is it important, but I think it needs to be an imperative strategy that's in like onboarding these days to make, to make you get closer to your customer.
I love that. Jason, what are your thoughts on that?
So I'm in a little different situation where I actually own the company. I'm not just an employee and it's like, hey, how am I going to grow this company? Like, grow someone else's company. I built my entire company off the back of LinkedIn. Like when I started creating content on LinkedIn, didn't have my own company, had no intentions of starting my own company. It just happened as I built my brand and kind of became a branding and content expert on the platform that the, the, I always call it the side effect of what I was doing was people were coming in like, hey, Can you help me do this as well? And so it, it launched my entire company. And now part of what we do is help other CEOs and other companies like see that same kind of result of let's get your CEO, let's get your C-suite on LinkedIn. So you guys become the experts that people want to go to. And so I would say if you are trying to go to market and you do not have LinkedIn as part of your strategy, You are, especially in the B2B world. Now, if you're B2C, D2C, like completely different story. But if you are B2B and you are trying to grow a company and or launch a company, or you've just been hired in a marketing department and you have to like elevate this company somehow, you, you're not doing a good job if you're not on LinkedIn because it really is the place to connect one-on-one. with your ideal customers. And that's the key thing for me. What I tell my clients is like, your ideal customers are on this platform. So if you're not there, they're connecting with your competition and you're not even a solution. And so LinkedIn has to be part of a go-to-market strategy if you really wanna be successful with it, you know?
I couldn't agree more. Now, Nick, throwing this your way as somebody that reps their own brand, Right. Probably trademarked by now. How can you leverage that for your company's benefit? Right. That's what GTM is. And you undoubtedly believe in both sides of the spectrum. So I'm curious to hear that. Yeah.
I mean, I think it's so important. I wouldn't have been able to drive over 30 opportunities from posting content every day on LinkedIn last year, driving over $500,000 worth of pipeline, multiple closed deals if I wasn't active every single day. And I think that, I think that you're playing the long game. It's, we're not all going to work for the same company that we are working at now for the future. Maybe Jason, because he owns the company, but like, this isn't— and I wrote a post on LinkedIn about this, that like my mom's worked for Raytheon for 42 years now. It's her only job. And like, I've worked so many jobs and I'm only 35. Um, but it's playing the long game. You're setting yourself up for future success and your company is kind of like renting your brand if you think about it, because it's a win-win in the short term. They're gaining benefit of it, but at the end of the day, you're going to go on and you're going to kind of propel, but they'll take advantage of it as long as you are there. And if they don't, then it's, you know, there's bigger red flags.
Nice. And what leaders or companies would you recommend folks follow to learn how to do it the best?
Yeah, I mean, I do have to say Chris Walker and the whole of Refined Labs team is probably some of the best that are doing it out there. Shout out to Devin Rhee in Gong. I feel like they also do a huge job of it. But I think that I think that, and I wrote about this today, that evangelism should be part of your 2022 go-to-market strategy in B2B. And I think that LinkedIn, I think that social media, TikTok, I've started to dabble in that. I think that community, it all plays into the overarching theme that people market and buy differently than they did even a couple of years ago. And if you're not playing into where your prospects are, Like Jason said, your competition will.
Christina, who do you like out there?
So when I think about LinkedIn and companies, I have to go back to Drift. And I, so I worked at Drift when they were just beginning, right? And I have to shout out Dave Gearhart because this guy was walking down the streets of Boston with his phone. I'm sure we all saw it before this was cool. Right before LinkedIn had sessions about it, before people were like, hey, how did you get that many followers? Like he picked up his phone and would walk down the streets of Boston and talk about marketing. And then he got our entire sales team and like, we all kind of collaborated on it at Drift of like, hey, let's start posting videos on LinkedIn. And honestly, I wish I capitalized on it then. like years ago because it just goes to show how important it is. But so I have to say that I think Drift did an amazing job at the beginning in capitalizing on LinkedIn and they still do. They still do a great job.
Jason, anybody to add?
No, they stole my 2 examples. Really like to piggyback off what Nick said, like Chris Walker and the whole Refine Labs team, They really are doing it the best in my opinion. Like, shout out to Drift and Dave Gerhardt. Like, that's how I even knew Drift existed was because of Dave and his videos walking down the streets. Like, I saw that and I was like, that's who I'm gonna be. Yeah. Like, that's how to do it. And, but watching the whole team at Refined Labs, and what's crazy to me is, Somehow I got connected to, to Chris. Don't even know how that happened. But like, the dude doesn't even— he's not even consistent. Like, there's some weeks he posts once a week, there's some weeks it's every, every weekday. And I'm like, he still kills it even when he's not showing up every single day. And they have, uh, they've built a, uh, a culture there where they actually Empower their employees to be on LinkedIn and not a, you have to be, you're an employee here, you have to do it. It is a, we will provide you the training, we will help get you a coach, we will help you walk through this, we'll help you figure out your content. And because of that, like, I probably am connected to almost every employee at Refine Labs at some way or the other, and their content is always showing up in my feed. Like, If I was an ideal, an ideal customer, who am I gonna go with when I'm connected with almost all their employees and I see them in my feed all the time? It is the, the best way to do this, you know.
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