In this week’s episode of the Social Selling Show, Daniel and Will talk about how sales leaders can measure the team’s social selling activities and build lucrative side hustles on LinkedIn.
Featured on this episode:
Resources:
- The Daily Sales LinkedIn Page
- The Million Pound LinkedIn Message by Daniel Disney
- Shield App – An analytics dashboard for LinkedIn
Transcript
Will Barron:
This episode of the show is brought to you from the salesman.org HubSpot Studios. Welcome to the Social Selling Show of myself, Will Barron, founder of salesman.org. And the king of social selling, Daniel Disney. Daniel, how’s it going mate?
Daniel Disney:
It’s going very well Will. As I was just saying, I did my first live face-to-face speaker session yesterday, which is the first time in just over a year now. So it was quite a crazy but also an awesome experience.
Will Barron:
Yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited for you to get back to doing some of this stuff. I’m excited to, I won’t be doing any in-person training because I hate travelling, Daniel. I hate being in the car, I hate being on planes. But I like seeing likes of yourself and then watching that back on video after the fact, because you seemingly you’re going to get more impact in the room. Even if I’m consuming the content after the fact, it seems like there’s more Q&A, there’s more opportunity for people to engage reviews. Is that fair?
Daniel Disney:
Yeah, especially one of the key things I certainly enjoy doing is sort of one hour 45 minutes to keynote style talks where the focus is motivation, inspiration, getting them really clued into what LinkedIn and social selling is. And that does have a lot more value and impact when you’re there face-to-face, you can read the room, you can do more interactive Q&As and things like that. So yeah, for me, it works really well. But similar to what you do Will, moving forward, I will now have a virtual online training model as part of the things that I offer because I’ve learned a lot over the last year. How valuable that can be as well across larger teams, multiple countries, et cetera. So, yeah, I think all of this has kind of created this new hybrid model of mixture of in-person and virtual, which I think is going to be perfect.
Will Barron:
And for anyone who’s interested in bringing you in Daniel, let’s just plug it at the top of the show mate. Where can we find out more about you and where can we get contact to hire you and get you in and doing keynotes?
Daniel Disney:
Yeah, so danieldisney.online is my website. Obviously you can find me on LinkedIn and learn about me there and just pop me a message or an email. And I’m always happy to have conversations.
Why Sales Leaders Must Start Paying Attention to LinkedIn · [02:16]
Will Barron:
For sure. Okay, so we have all the plucking out of the way, because today’s episode, we’re going to be speaking more or less directly to sales managers, sales leaders, and people of that kind of elk here. Daniel, we’re going to be talking about how sales leaders, sales managers can use LinkedIn. But I’m going to ask you as open-ended a question as I can here, it’s going to start it and then we’ll go off in multiple pathways perhaps. But why should a sales manager or a sales leader who perhaps has paid no attention to LinkedIn in the past. Why should they be interested in this conversation? What value can they get out of LinkedIn?
Daniel Disney:
Two big reasons, Will. Number one, to lead by example, which should be the aspiration of any good sales leader out there. The other is so that they don’t have the wool pulled over their eyes by their sales team, telling them things they have no idea whether that’s good or not. If you’ve got your sales rep starting to spout out about SSI scores and views and stuff. And you’re like, okay, that sounds great. Good for you, carry on. And the reality is perhaps you’re not measuring the right activities that drive the right results. So yeah, both leading by example and there are lots of benefits that the sales leaders using LinkedIn, for recruitment, the motivation and all those other sort of factors. But then the other bit is when you’re leading your team and having your one-to-ones, looking at their stats and data that’s coming through, you know what you’re looking at. Which you probably do for the fun, but for a lot of sales leaders, LinkedIn is still a bit of a mystery.
Will Barron:
For sure. So we didn’t prep before this conversation, but I had similar thoughts of hiring, measuring, leading by example, I was talking more about kind of doing this yourself so that you could teach internally. And having doughnuts, you can share best practises perhaps that you pick up because maybe this may or may not be true. The sales leaders may have more or less experience than the sales team as well. So they know when something is a waste of time versus a new rapport who’s just new on board, it is excited about social selling. He goes, “Hey, I don’t need to do cold calls if I can make this work.” Perhaps they can again, have you always done your pull the wool over their eyes, sales leader’s eyes a little bit if they are not on board with all this.
Are There Tools For Sales Leaders That Measure Their Team’s Social Selling Activities? · [04:15]
Will Barron:
So where should we start? Let’s start with the more boring stuff. Let’s start with the keeping an eye on your team. And then we’ll get onto how we can lead by example and perhaps get some deals closed and generate leads for our own sales team. If you’re a sales leader by using social selling and LinkedIn. Are there any tools, whether that’s internally within LinkedIn itself for a sales leader, or externally, that’s pulling data perhaps from your sales reps. Are there any tools to help sales leaders measure and understand the activity that their sales teams are doing on LinkedIn on the platform?
Daniel Disney:
There are two tools that I recommend. And then the other, unfortunately, is going to be a bit more manual. The first one is the SSI score, so that’s the Social Selling Index. That’s LinkedIn’s own social selling measurement system. Literally you pull it up on your profile. It gives you a score out of a hundred and you can see it grow as you use social selling more. Now with that, that paint half the picture. So be very clear in understanding all that measures is whether your profile’s optimised, whether you’re using searching on a regular basis, whether you’re connecting with the right people and whether you’re sharing content. What it’s not measuring and what is important for you to measure as a leader is the more tangible stuff. So how many sales were closed this month that came from LinkedIn and social selling. How many opportunities are in the pipeline this month that came from LinkedIn and social selling.
Daniel Disney:
Now those sorts of things are best measured, utilising your CRM and making sure you create options for the sales team to be able to tick, okay, this opportunity came from LinkedIn. It came from a message, it came from a video message. The more you put in, the more data you’re going to get out of it. The last area of soft measurement is sales navigator for large teams and certainly enterprise accounts. There are tools within sales navigator where leaders can then see some of the data, again, that is sort of happening behind the scenes.
Daniel Disney:
But as it stands, there are no real good tools out there that are pulling data from LinkedIn and converting it into insights. The only one that’s come out, we talked about this a bit before is Shield app, which measures content at a slightly deeper scale. But unless you are building a big personal brand and you’re getting tonnes of engagement, this is really not worth the investment. And it’s really not going to give you too much insights that are relevant to the sales. And there are a few potential glitches with it at the moment. LinkedIn is very closed with that data. So stick to SSI, Score Navigator, and then measuring the stuff that happens outside of LinkedIn through your traditional CRM and one-to-ones.
LinkedIn is Relatively Strict With Data From Its Platform. How Can Sales Leaders Decipher Where Most of Their Sales Leads Are Coming From Beyond LinkedIn? · [06:30]
Will Barron:
Who’s to blame Daniel for this being because it seems like it’s relatively complicated. Is it that LinkedIn hasn’t developed the tools and maybe they’ll come in time? Or is it perhaps a failure that we could have dodged slightly here as we were talking to leadership primarily in this episode. Is it the fact that for all the buying cycle is becoming harder and harder to attribute where ownership, where sales leads, where attention is coming from because buyers are doing a lot more research before they even drop you a message on LinkedIn or they call the office or whatever they do to approach you and engage the sales team itself. Is LinkedIn just not doing a good enough job serving sales leaders? Or is it just becoming more and more complex over time with the buying cycle as it is right now?
“The whole buying and selling process is a lot more complex now. And beyond LinkedIn, you’re not just measuring phone calls anymore, you’re measuring emails, you might be measuring video messages. Hopefully, you’re measuring things like text and post and gifts and referrals. And it’s not just a simple make a hundred calls, have 10 conversations, create two opportunities. That’s not sales anymore.” – Daniel Disney · [07:32]
Daniel Disney:
It is both, but it definitely leans heavily on LinkedIn. They just don’t want people accessing that data. And I understand it, that growing fast, I’m sure there’s a whole variety of reasons, but they keep that data very closed. Now, whether or not that changes in the coming months and years, I don’t know, but it does cause some potential challenges, but you are right. The whole buying and selling process is a lot more complex now and beyond LinkedIn, you’re not just measuring phone calls anymore. You’re measuring emails, you might be measuring video messages. Hopefully you’re measuring things like text and post and gifts and referrals. And it’s not just a simple make a hundred calls, have 10 conversations, create two opportunities. That’s not sales anymore. So you as sales leaders, you need to adapt with that and make sure you’ve got the right systems in place. Again, the beauty of it is a lot of CRMs are way more advanced than they used to be. And it is relatively simple to create the right data capture in that. Then your next challenge is making sure your sales team uses it.
Will Barron:
For sure. So I’ll give you an anecdote here from salesman.org, and this is be relevant for small business owners and leadership within perhaps startups versus the enterprise. They use completely different tools. But I will plug it because it’s not worked out very well, it’s a bit crappy the software. It could potentially have all the changes in the future. So we’ll call them out and because they are a startup as well, but we are trying to get more attribute, leads, links, clicks via our paid advertising for our training product over at salesman.org.
Will and Daniel Mourn The Lack of Tools That Succinctly Highlight The Average Sales Pathway Across Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success · [09:31]
Will Barron:
And it seems like on this dashboard, it seems like people see an ad. They go to the webinar, they engage perhaps a few emails with either myself or the support team after the webinar. And then they make a purchase. But now you plug in YouTube’s API and you find that a lot of people are seeing an ad, doing nothing for three weeks, watching three or four podcasts, Social Selling Show, whatever it is on our YouTube channel. Then they go back to the webinar, they sign up, they don’t watch it. They sign up, they don’t watch it. They sign up, they do watch it. They watch a bunch more videos. And then there is some very light integration with Facebook. You can see that some people are integrating or engaging on Facebook, which we barely post comments on. But last week we did a live chat on Facebook as well. And so live chat is now being involved in the sales process. And it’s just a mess.
Will Barron:
Now this company, the promise that they are putting into the marketplace is eventually because they’re not doing it right now, eventually they’re going to be able to succinctly show the average pathway that someone goes down to purchase a product, in our example there, our training product. But it’s so scattered. It’s so all over the place that I feel like by the time someone’s engaged with a sales person on Facebook, they’re probably been on the brand’s blog. They might have consumed white papers. They might signed up other things. This might be something that they were thinking about 12 months ago. With COVID, they put it on the back burner. So it is inherently just complicated this tracking of data.
Will Barron:
And what I’m getting out here is that for sales leaders to go, hey, our sales teams seem to be spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, but the results kind of don’t measure out with that. Well, it’s more complex than that, right. Because you might engage us on our LinkedIn, get a conversation going. And then the buyers go elsewhere, consuming tonnes of content, which is great, but it’s very difficult to link the LinkedIn outreach with all the marketing and data and FLs on the back of things. Is that fair to say it is complicated at this moment in time. There’s very few tools that do this across marketing sales and customer success.
Daniel Disney:
No, you’re right, Will. It really is complicated. You might have an SDR, pick up the phone and make a cold call, and that person says, “Oh, hi, Dan, really love your content on LinkedIn. Actually, I was thinking about calling you.” Now, is that a cold call? Is that social selling? Is it a mixture of them both? And the reality is that will get marked down as a cold calling generated lead but it’s probably had a huge contribution from social selling. So I think it’s very difficult, but we still have relative control of it. And as a sales leader, what I encourage sales leaders to do is just being as manual as you can in recording that data.
“Sales leaders should understand their buyers cycle and their sellers cycle at the greatest depth possible to know what is influencing these things.” – Daniel Disney · [11:20]
Daniel Disney:
Data is power, information, knowledge is power. The more knowledge you can pull out, then the better interpretations you are going to get like you’re doing, Will, with your whole process. You’re going to understand the buying cycle at such a great depth. Sales leaders should understand their buyers cycle and their sellers cycle at the greatest depth possible to know what is influencing these things. And that’s going to be a mixture of pulling data, manually inputting data, and then interpreting it the right way. But yes, not easy but not impossible.
“The statistics are shocking. It’s like two-thirds of all content that’s produced by marketing don’t ever get consumed by an end-user.” – Will Barron · [11:47]
Will Barron:
For sure. I think this is top of mind for me myself is probably why I’m on this point perhaps longer than we should be, Daniel. In that I’ve done a bunch of interviews with sales enablement, gurus, experts, in this space recently. And it seems like the statistics are shocking. It’s like two thirds of all content that’s produced by marketing don’t ever get consumed by an end user. Whether that’s salespeople just not sharing it, whether it’s salespeople sharing what they know works from a gut perspective as opposed to perhaps what the data says, there’s all loads of elements to this.
Will Barron:
But I feel like there is probably some wasted time on LinkedIn. It seems like it’s difficult to source out over the you, yourself, AB testing, what works, what doesn’t. It seems like from an organisational perspective, there’s inherently going to be some wasted time because it’s difficult to measure what works and what doesn’t. And of course everything’s in flux, everything is changing all the time anyway, so there’s got to be the experimentation.
Daniel Explains Why Closed Deals That Originated From LinkedIn Should Be The One Metric Every Sales Leader Should Analyse When Gauging LinkedIn Success · [12:38]
Will Barron:
But with that, Daniel, so that’s the measurement side of things covered. I think I maybe muddied the waters there slightly in that it seems more complex than perhaps what it is, but let me ask you this then from a different perspective. If we’re going to have a north star as a sales leader on, with our team on LinkedIn, what is that north star? Is it to generate phone calls so we measure time per day on LinkedIn phone calls generated? Could it be sales closed? What would be the north star metric for sales leaders who want to get the team on LinkedIn, and they want one succinct goal to go after?
Daniel Disney:
One top goal, which I would recommend is sales closed that originated from LinkedIn. So you want a sale to originate from LinkedIn. Again, that could be from a LinkedIn message, it could be an inbound inquiry from a piece of content the salesperson shared. Any number of ways that you might use social selling in essence. The end goal that you want to measure is okay, how much revenue, how many sales this month did you close that originated from LinkedIn. And then backtrack through how many new opportunities. And then you can start to look at a bit of, okay, perhaps it didn’t originate on LinkedIn, but has LinkedIn been involved in other things. Maybe it started on a cold call, but actually it progressed through LinkedIn. You can go deeper from that. But at a real basic simple level, how many deals were closed that started on LinkedIn.
How Can Salespeople Convince Sales Leaders of The Benefits of Actively Being on LinkedIn and What Should Sales Leaders Be Doing on The Platform to Motivate Social Selling Activities? · [13:45]
Will Barron:
Okay, okay, let’s move on then to whether sales leaders should be on LinkedIn. Probably yes. And what they should be doing on there. And let’s use the example of Brian, who is a sales manager. Brian, or sales leader. Brian is incredibly busy, daniel. He’s got all kinds of paper work to do. His sales team’s already pestering enough with, Brian, always come with me on this deal. I want you to phone this person. I want you get involved in this. Brian is going, “Hey, this is your job, not mine.” And then me and you turn around, I’m assuming you’re going to agree to this. And we say, “Brian, you need to be on LinkedIn mate. You need to be setting an example.” How do you, I guess, convince Brian of the benefits of going on LinkedIn? And then what should he be doing on the platform to motivate, coach, and be a shining example of the success that you can have social selling on LinkedIn?
Daniel Disney:
Well, I meet a lot of Brians’, Will, every day. I’m talking about having those conversations all the time. And in terms of opening their eyes, I guess it’s just about helping them see the potential that comes from it and reassuring them that it doesn’t take a lot of time. Brian doesn’t need to spend more than 15 to 30 minutes a day on LinkedIn in reality, because Brian doesn’t need to do anywhere near the sort of activities that other sales reps, SDRs, AEs, BDRs, et cetera, would be doing. There are key simple things that Brian can do. Brian should be growing his network. He should be filling his audience and filling it with people that are a mixture of target customers because, Brian, as a leader, can sometimes be more influential in starting conversations than his sales team. Brian should be connecting with local sales reps if they are hiring within an office. Or if not, within any geographic location that they’re going to be hiring salespeople, should be filling his audience with that. So salespeople can see what a great leader Brian is and how great the company that Brian works for is.
Daniel Disney:
Now then Brian needs to be starting to share content. And again, not just regurgitating marketing content, but letting people see beyond the brand, beyond the company. And kind of opening the curtains and letting people see Brian, the team, take photos in the office, document team training, document team meetings. Not only is it going to show potential new hires what a great place to work it is. And pre COVID times I’ve seen great sales leaders post photos of like a stack of pizza boxes on a Friday, at the end of the month, when they’ve ordered pizza for the team. Videos of the sales reps hitting the gong when they’ve got a sale. And all of that, people are watching that and thinking, that looks like a cool place to work.
Daniel Disney:
But it’s also going to show potential customers, okay, this is a company. I’m getting to know this company. I’m getting to know Brian, the team and looks like a company that we can trust. So it has two real positives but growing the network, sharing them in the content. And then beyond that, hopefully keeping an eye on messages and looking for engagement because there might be a salesperson for another company that’s liked your post about the pizza boxes. Now you might think actually, do you know what? Maybe we want that sales person to work for us. I’m going to ping them a quick message. See if they’re open to an opportunity.
Will Barron:
Yeah, there’s tonnes of value here. I like it. And we talked about it on the show before this idea of documenting what you’re doing rather than trying to create content from scratch is appropriate here I feel. And perfect if you can share the company culture, that’s an insight that buyers don’t typically get. Now, if we were to share, maybe we should do. I think we will do this when we do this case study that we’re going to work on. If we shared the behind the scenes of how you and I work, a bit of the process, the fact that we are real people, because even though we try and keep this conversational, when we click record, there is a slight bit of pressure not to, I don’t know, not to swear too much. And maybe second guess some of the things that you say, because you want it to be articulate. You want the audience to better understand it.
Will Barron:
So maybe, I know I do this, I don’t want to put words in your mouth. But sometimes you’ll pause or reframe things and use perhaps simpler words than perhaps what we would do having a higher level conversation, just offer together and probably a bit more buttress and stuff as well. So with that, it’s interesting then when you can share a little bit more behind the scenes because that makes things real. You can build rapport at scale, you can build trust at scale. And I love the pizza example because I would be more interested in going to an organisation if they have a, every couple of weeks of Friday pizza nights or they go off and do these team exercises. And it’s also marketing collateral, you’re doubling down on the company’s going to spend money on something, let’s promote it. Let’s share that good company culture.
How Sales Leaders Can Promote Company Culture on LinkedIn and Attract Top Talent To The Organisation · [18:06]
Will Barron:
And company culture is very difficult to black and bullshit because if you say, “Hey, we did X, Y, Z. It was fantastic.” And then there’s no comments from your team saying, “Hey, thank you for that.” Or it was great. Clearly something’s not right there. Versus if you’re working for a great company, you probably going to have your colleagues jump underneath, oh, that was awesome. Really enjoyed this. This is really valuable. And you kind of get in that social proof there as well, which adds up to a large part of sales manager and sales leaders jobs is this hiring. And if you can make that easier by a little bit of investment up front, it seems to make total sense.
Daniel Disney:
Well, there’s an extra thing that sales leaders can do that actually again, ties into both of those things. And that is praise and acknowledgement of your team’s successes. How good you think it feels if you’re Brian, you are a sales leader and maybe your SDR, Sarah, smashed our target that month. So you, and let’s say you’re in the office, or you do this virtually, you get a photo with Sarah and you do a nice little post on your LinkedIn saying, huge congratulations to Sarah, her first month in, she smashed her targets. Been great to blah, blah, blah. And you give this really nice praising post to Sarah. How great is Sarah going to feel? First of all, so from a motivation point of view, that’s going to make Sarah feel amazing. And then everyone else in your networks when they look at that and think, oh my God, my manager won’t do a post like that about me. We don’t get that sort of support or training or development. I want to go and work for Brian.
Daniel Disney:
So again, a lot of these activities have multiple benefits. But going back to the time because we know Brian is very busy, these things don’t take time. I was, January last year, I was in the Philippines for a sales kickoff. And the VP of sales spent five minutes taking a quick selfie in the wonderful hotel that we were in. Took five minutes to take the photo, post it add a bit of text, tonnes of engagement, tonnes of likes, comments, reach. Amazing for people who wanted to work there or potential customers. But compare that to marketing saying, here’s our latest blog. Can you share this out? They reshare it, it gets one like, no engagement and no benefits. The whole time, perspective thing, these activities don’t take a lot of time. Taking a photo, writing a post, whatever it may be, taking the photo of the stack of pizza boxes. Minutes, two to three minutes max, to put that post up. This doesn’t take a lot of time. So to reassure all the Brians out there and a female equivalent of Brians, it doesn’t take a lot of time.
Will Barron:
And there’s another angle on this as well. So if you’re in sales leadership, you have jumped up the corporate ladder. You probably doing great. More power to you, right? And there’s an element of, if you really suck at sales and it’s not the right job for you, you probably haven’t got a VP position. You’ve probably not got a director of sales position. So you probably doing a bunch of things right. Now, you’ve invested a lot into your career. You’ve probably turned down other opportunities. You’ve done things. You’ve not done things. Now it might be a point in your career where it sounds double down and even have a little bit of a side hustle.
Will Barron:
And you’ll probably know what I’m talking about here. I won’t call them out fully. Some of the audience will know who he is, but there’s a VP of marketing called Dave. He started a podcast. He started a Patreon page. I think he’s doing probably last, I’ve not listened to it in a while now. I worked for him at the last organisation he worked for. And it was doing like 10 grand a month from Patreon sponsorships and stuff on his podcast on top of his VP salary. And it was really, he’s not really doing much over then what I started, this Salesman podcast originally to do, which is interview people, learn from them and share that with other people. And hopefully there’s some kind of business opportunity there. So he’s doing a hundred plus grand a year on top of his salary, bonuses, FNS that he’s getting within the organisation from probably, I make maybe it’s more than this. Maybe I’m downplaying it, but from probably 10, 15 minutes a day of a post every couple of days, a podcast once a week.
The Numerous Opportunities For Sales Leaders to Build Personal Brands and Side Hustles on LinkedIn · [21:53]
Will Barron:
And there’s a real side hustle business that is built on his brand that he’s already put in the time, the sweat equity to learn the skills, to be able to communicate effectively. If you’re a sales leader, communication should be 101. You should be absolutely crushing it. You should be able to write a blog post, a post on LinkedIn on the feed and get engagement because you’ve been communicating for numerous years now with your sales team. You should be ahead of the game of all of this. It seems almost like a wasted opportunity not to develop your personal brand in this space for the small, medium sized chance that it spins off into something more valuable.
“And so many sales leaders, they’ve got the knowledge, they’ve got the experience, they’ve got the right personality. All it takes is that little bit of effort.” – Daniel Disney · [23:01]
Daniel Disney:
Well, this is how people are now becoming authors, speakers, trainers. You’re absolutely right, Will, thinking on a slightly more selfish term, I guess, and maybe not so much benefits for the wider company or the sales team. But you’re 100% right. There are a lots of opportunities to generate side income and create a platform for your long-term future, where you may set up your own sales training company. Maybe you write the sales book that you’ve always wanted to write. Maybe you set up a Patreon page and have subscribers where you’re sharing content. Create a podcast, create a video series, all of these opportunities that are out there. And so many sales leaders, they’ve got the knowledge, they’ve got the experience, they’ve got the right personality. All it takes is that little bit of effort. Maybe it’s 15 minutes, maybe it’s an hour.
Daniel Disney:
I mean, when I was building, probably similar to you Will, this is my evenings and weekends. I was a full-time sales director and then all evenings till midnight, weekends were spent building this up. So the more you put in, the more you get out. But you’re absolutely right, beyond your direct businesses’ benefits, you have potential opportunities to either own additional revenue or build a name and brand that goes beyond the company you’re at. Because maybe at some point, you’re going to want to move on. Maybe you want progression. And actually the company sees you on LinkedIn, sees you being active and you get opportunities for that next promotion. So yeah, a lots of benefits for you as an individual, as well as the wider team.
How Sales Leaders of The Future Will Negotiate Contracts By Simply Having Thousands of Followers on LinkedIn That Can Generate Sales Leads · [23:49]
Will Barron:
For sure. And if you are looking to hire a VP sales, VP of marketing, whoever it is, a sales director of marketing, who are you going to hire? The person that has 50,000 followers of potential customers in your space. Or Brian, who has 500 followers that are mainly his friends and family and people he’s pestered over the years just to connect with him. So he doesn’t look so daft for having three followers. If you can get someone on board who has that user base there, that’s leverage for you to get a high base salary to even, perhaps even negotiate maybe now, but definitely in the future to negotiate into your contract. Hey, if I start generating leads for to our team internally as a VP, if leads are coming in via my content, maybe I won a commission on the sales as well as the performance of the team as well. All of these things become possible if your audience is big enough, right?
Daniel Disney:
Yeah, no, 100%. And I’m seeing not just within the sales leader space, but even the SDRs, those that are building audiences of brands are getting paid X amount of money for promoting company posts because they’re generating so much engagement. It’s no different to paying an influencer or even LinkedIn for sponsored ads. So yeah, lots and lots of potential, but it all starts with using LinkedIn. And that’s kind of the whole goal of this episode, Will. It’s to really hopefully open eyes, not just to motivating your team, not just to leading by example, not just from learning how to actually measure things, but to create opportunities for yourself in the now or in the long-term.
Tips For Sales Leaders with no LinkedIn Experience on How to Build and Scale Personal Brands on LinkedIn · [25:22]
Will Barron:
Okay, so the answer to this question is probably, and I know you’re relatively humble, Daniel, so I’ll call you out for it. The answer to these question is probably hire Daniel to come in and work with yourself and your team. And I listened to the Social Selling Show and hopefully we can provide a lot of value on this platform that will do some of this job for you. But as a sales leader, perhaps you have budget. Perhaps you have corporate budgets to just come in, blitz this, solve problems and not have to spend hours watching a podcast or YouTube content to got to get it by osmosis, by consuming yourself and being in the environment.
Will Barron:
What should a sales leader do if they’re like, right, I’m sold, this is great. I’m going to start doing this, but I still don’t really have that much time. Should they be reading your book? Should they just be like, Daniel, come in, create a roadmap for me, get all this sorted. And then I can just get back to do my other stuff. Or is there other avenues. How does a sales leader who perhaps they don’t want to watch 20 episodes of the Social Selling Show. How do they get up and running with this as fast as possible?
Daniel Disney:
Assuming if they don’t have the time to watch episodes of the show, consume YouTube content, podcast content. They’re probably not going to have much time to read books either, although that is a great place to start. If you’re stuck for time, find a trainer, coach, or expert that matches you and your business. That might be me, that might not be me. There are a lots of amazing LinkedIn trainers and coaches out there, but find the right person that you gel with as an individual. And that has experience either within your industry or within your sector, within your business, that can bring the most to the table. So that not only do you get the most value, but you’re able to hit the ground running.
Daniel Disney:
But make sure they have a solid understanding of how you, your team, your business operates so they can create a roadmap very specific to you. There is, same with sales trainers. There are a lot of not so good LinkedIn trainers out there as well, and it can end up being a waste of money and a waste of time. So just make sure you take a bit of time to find the right people. Like I said, it could be me, might not be me. Amazing trainers out there, find the right people and then work with them to create something that’s right for you as an individual and your team.
Daniel Talks About Ghost Writers Who Manage LinkedIn Accounts For High-Ranking Sales Leaders · [27:30]
Will Barron:
It’s probably Daniel that you’re looking for. So with that said, final thing on this, and this just came to mind. So again, this may be less appropriate for an individual sales person. It may be more appropriate, especially if you’re like VP of sales at a massive enterprise organisation. It might be that you are somewhat of a personality internally, if you’ve been with the company for 20 years, whatever it is, the company might want to invest into you and your kind of personality and personal brand.
Will Barron:
Have you ever seen anyone go on LinkedIn with a ghost writer? Someone who perhaps, so two sides, one can interview a VP of sales, create content or polish content from these interviews and put it down on a paper perhaps better than the VP could do it themselves. And then also this content can then be passed through legal and other things. If it’s a public company, what they say might be somewhat important and how they say it. If you ever seen anyone use, including people who do read books all the time, but have you ever seen anyone use a ghost writer on social media like this?
Daniel Disney:
Yeah, so I won’t name names. I do this for a handful of people, very selective with who I do it for because it is not easy to do. To capture someone’s voice authentically and share their stories isn’t the easiest task in the world. But there are some people that are just insanely busy and those that climb the sales ladder will know when you get the sales director, VP of sales, CRO level, CSO level, you don’t have time. And that’s completely understandable.
Daniel Disney:
So yes, it can work. But I can’t stress enough, find people that know LinkedIn to make sure you actually have content created to generate engagement. But then make sure you’ve got someone that can interpret your voice because if your audience or people see that it’s not you or see sort of gaps in different things you’re posting, maybe a text post goes out, and then you’re doing this video interview and you sound and speak very differently to how your posts are written. People will see through it. So you need to find, again, the right people. But if you really are super busy, yes, it is an opportunity. Again, key is making the right decisions and choosing the right people to work with.
Will Barron:
For sure. I genuinely didn’t know that. So I appreciate that, Daniel. Perhaps a service that will be valuable to, again, if you’re a VP of a massive organisation and one of your team has hopefully sent you this video, perhaps you have no idea who me myself or Daniel are day to day, then that’s, I think that’s a real option for individuals. I’ve no idea of the cost of things, but if your are a company is, let’s assume it’s going to be expensive because it needs to be done congruently. And there’s a tonne of layers here for it to be successful, right.
Will Barron:
But if your company is invested in you and there’s people at Salesforce that I know, perhaps don’t have a ghost writer, but get help from some of their marketing experts, some of their writing experts, or some of their content. Even people, I know people get coached before they come on the Salesman podcast when I interview them. And they ask for the questions ahead of time and they practise the questions. And then I give them totally different questions in the interview itself because after the first one, whatever I planned tends to go out the window anyway. So I always get PR people complaining about me about that.
Will Barron:
But I feel like it’s worth mentioning that a lot of high level individuals who perhaps have a massive audience elsewhere, or have a massive audience on LinkedIn, I think it’s worth bearing in mind for people that a lot or some of what they do at a minimum, it has been polished, has been looked after by professionals. And perhaps it isn’t Bill Gates, is not publishing his own YouTube videos. He’s not sat there with a camera being like, okay, we’ll do the interview. And then he runs over, turns the camera on and sits back down. And he goes, “Hey, blah, blah, blah.” Of course there’s teams behind all this.
Will Barron:
[inaudible 00:30:55] might be the best example of all this. He might be familiar with some of the audience. He has, last time I, because we lost contact was probably couple years ago, we had 30 people doing these. It seems like it’s just hit movies, his camera phone, his iPhone doing these videos. There’s a massive team of people, not just creating the best bits because he probably puts a load of shit out there. And one out of 30 is really valuable. So they get rid of all the crap, but then repurpose and get all this kind of stuff. It does take time, so yeah. Anything else to add, Daniel, before we wrap up the show mate?
Daniel Disney:
No, but for any sales leaders listening and watching this, if anything, just start learning LinkedIn. Now is the best time to start. Again, hopefully you’ve watched this episode, listened to this episode. Go and start using it. Go and start consuming some content. But chances are your sales team is using it. And if you don’t understand it, you’re behind them. So make sure you get ahead of them, lead by example, that’s my biggest tip.
Will Barron:
Amazing stuff. Well, that was the Social Selling Show. That was Daniel Disney, the king of social selling. My name is Will Barron, founder of salesman.org. And with that, we’ll speak with you again next week.
Daniel Disney:
See you next time.
