In this Revenue Today podcast episode, host Jared Robin talks with guests Nick Bennett, Christina Nalband, and Jason Vana about how to measure the success of LinkedIn activities for revenue generation. Nick highlights Shield as his go‑to analytics platform, explaining how it helps identify which content formats (pictures, text, personal stories) resonate and warns against over‑self‑promotion. Christina shares the difficulty of proving ROI, noting she currently tracks success through direct messages that lead to demos and wishes for tighter integration with Salesforce to attribute opportunities to LinkedIn touches. Jason and a speaker (referred to as Speaker F) describe a self‑attribution field on discovery calls that captures the source of a lead, allowing their CRM to show that 80‑90% of their annual leads originate from LinkedIn, whether via personal posts, partner posts, or referrals. They also manually track legitimate DMs and their conversion into customers. The conversation touches on the emerging “evangelism” model where companies may pay employees for LinkedIn advocacy, and the need for better KPI frameworks to evaluate social selling effectiveness. The episode ends with a call for feedback and promotion of the Rev Genius community.
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. Okay, so we have some strategies, some ideas of ways to attack it. How do you measure success? What KPIs are you looking
at? I can jump in. So I use Shield from an analytical standpoint, and so I've used Shield for now for probably over 2 years, to be honest with you. Like, it's a go-to for everything that I have, and I have No ties to them. I'm not getting paid to say this, but like, I just love that I can take a lot of the analytical pieces of like what types of content work. Is it pictures that are resonating with the audience? Is it text? Is it personal stories? Is it— I know promotional stuff doesn't do well, but like, is it— are you talking— are you doing too much self-promotion? Like, it's— I've tried to be more purposeful in what I am posting. And so I think that matters. Now, going back to the company that you work for, For me, I'm not bonused on specific pipeline currently that I'm driving for the business. I need to do a better job of tracking it, and it's something I'm working to put in place this year. But I do think that you're going to have more people going down that evangelism path because they're realizing the power that they have, and companies are going to pay people to do that for them. Like, I can tell you, I was talking to a VP of marketing earlier today and he wants to go down the evangelism path. He's like, I see this as a huge piece in 2022 and beyond. And if marketing leaders aren't going down this piece and like LinkedIn and TikTok aren't part of your like strategy, you're already behind like with the times. So
KPIs, Christina, what do you think?
So I think that this inserts a problem, right? That I don't have a good answer to this question because it's hard for me to know what is successful. And I think that that's like what a lot of leaders think about too. It's like, do I want my employees doing this? Like, where's the ROI? It's the same thing of like any software product that you purchase. How do you know if it's working? Right now for me, like I can tell you what I do is like, it's the direct messages I get. It's if we get demos, filled out of people that I know are following me. But it's a good question because I don't think— I know about Shield through Nick, but I don't effectively use it. And it's really hard to know, like, how cool would it be if in Salesforce it said, oh, you won this opportunity because of, like, your first engagement was LinkedIn? I don't— maybe there's a way to do that. I don't know how it is. But I think this is a a good topic and a good conversation to know, like, how do you, how do you track and measure ROI from LinkedIn? Because I think we're going to see that just get— this conversation is just going to continue to be a humongous thing. And I think it's something we need to figure out.
Is that the start of a new business?
I think I just created a company on that answer, you know.
Like, you have your sellers and you have their activities that they do, right? And do you also have their followers on LinkedIn and seeing like, does that drive your inbound for that person and how can you do
that?
Yep. I only assume over time we're gonna get more granular with that. Somebody will start something and that'll be exciting, right? Jason, do you— Yeah. So I'm curious.
Yeah, so I use Shield as well. It kind of helps me understand what's working on the platform and whatnot. But I think the biggest thing for us is in our, on our discovery call, like when you book a discovery call with me or with our team, we have a self-attribution field where you can say like, what caused you, like, where did you hear about us? What actually prompted this? And I know it's not obviously 100% effective to understand exactly the path that they went down. But my— and this is just the attribution kind of mindset that I've had for decades— is if they do self-attribution, it may not be the last touch, it may not be the first touch, but it was the touch that impacted them the most that they remembered. And so For us in our CRM, I actually can see everyone that came through because of them. And so for us, it's anywhere between 80 to 90% of our leads every single year come through LinkedIn, some form or other, whether it was, you know, my post, my partner's, my business partner's post, whether it was— and really a lot of times, even if it's referrals, they tell me their name of the referral. So like Nick sometimes sends us leads and stuff so I can see, hey, Nick's the one that sent that. Well, 9 times out of 10, if Nick sent it, they contacted Nick because of LinkedIn, you know? And so, um, we're— we actually have all that tracking in place in our CRM to see who has come, um, because of our presence on LinkedIn. And for me, it's a no-brainer. Like, You know, why is LinkedIn important? 80% to 90% of my business comes from LinkedIn. So it's important, you know, and, and really, if you, if you do that and you are creating content on the platform, you're doing some social selling and all that kind of other stuff, um, you will see a jump in leads from LinkedIn, whether it's like even when I was head of marketing at Fusion Tech, we had a lot of leads that came through, not my personal LinkedIn, but the corporate page, the owner's page, the head of sales' account. Like we had a lot of leads coming in through LinkedIn and it's just a platform that works. And so if you're trying to track it and see what works, like Do that, that self-reported attribution on demos, on discovery calls, you know, whatever that, that step is. Try to start tracking the DMs that come through. So that's the other thing I do is I track the DMs that I get that are legitimate, you know, like, hey, I'm interested in your services as opposed to, hey, can you, can I just book 5 minutes of your time to pick your brain? No, no, you cannot. You know, but like tracking that kind of information right now is just all by hand. Uh, the how many DMs come through, cuz LinkedIn doesn't let you track that kind of information that well. But yeah, that's, that's what I look for is DMs and then what's come through in way of discovery calls. And then because it's in my CRM, I can see how many of those actually converted into, into customers.
I love that.
We are out of time. Unfortunately, we need to continue this conversation another time. I appreciate y'all so much. Thank you very much for being here. Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, visit revenuetoday.live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like 2 seconds and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it all. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.
