The Death of a Salesman

How to master the LinkedIn Algorithm

In this episode, I chat with Richard van der Blom, a social selling expert. Richard advises organizations around the world on how to implement social selling effectively as well as providing advice on content strategy, digital marketing, lead generation, and marketing consulting.

Through his own frustration at seeing a picture of salad perform much better on LinkedIn than his article on social selling strategy, he set about, with support from The Open University, Shield & Sprout Social, to try and get to the bottom of how the algorithm on LinkedIn works.

This is a hotly debated topic, with many people trying to figure out how to "game" it to get the views. 

Richard has just released his 2nd research report on what he believes are the "rules" of the game. 

He and the team have analyzed over 4000 posts on LinkedIn, every 15mins!

We break down his research across the different areas and dig into what does this really mean for you and how can you get your posts to work harder for you.

It doesn't matter if you are a seasoned user of LinkedIn or just starting out, you will learn something.

Link to the full research and Richard is here - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/richardvanderblom_linkedin-algorithm-research-report-2020-ugcPost-6721317491991285760-xc2g - be sure to mention this Podcast

How to make your content fly

It's automagical!

 

In this episode, I am joined by Kate Bradley Chernis, the CEO & co-founder of Lately, a new content distribution tool.  

Lately, which uses AI to automatically learn what sales and marketing messaging your customers are most likely to engage with so you can STOP GUESSING. It then builds a writing model, based on this data, to transform longform content like blogs, podcasts and videos into DROVES of targeted, pre-vetted social posts – in multiple languages.

Benefits:

- It takes the average human 12 minutes to write a social post. In 1.8 seconds, Lately’s AI will give you dozens. Multiply that times the hourly salary of any content creator on your team and you have MIND- BLOWING time and money savings.

- Most longform content like blogs, videos and podcasts takes hours to create, then collects dust. Get exponentially more eyeballs on your hard-earned work by UNLOCKING the value with Lately's AI.

View a 60 second sneak peek here: https://youtu.be/RlbRiAwwBiQ.

As a former marketing agency owner, Kate initially created the idea for Lately out of spreadsheets for then-client, Walmart, and got them a 130% ROI, year-over-year for three years.

Prior to founding Lately, Kate served 20 million listeners as Music Director and on-air host at Sirius/XM. She’s also an award-winning radio producer, engineer and voice talent with 25 years of national broadcast communications, brand-building, sales and marketing expertise. 

If you are serious about making your content work much harder for you, then you need to seriously consider using Lately - https://www.trylately.com/social-post-autogenerator

Scale Ups, Venture Capital and raising money.

In this episode, I chat with Jonathan Hollis, one of the co-founders of Mountside Ventures.

I met Jonathan when he was at PwC, running their Scale-up programme, which I mentor on.

9 months ago he and some of his colleagues, spun out Mountside Ventures with a view to change how VCs and Scale-ups can connect and raise capital. This is both on the Fund side as well as the Scale-up side. 

We discuss why he left the corporate machine.

What is has been like launching a business, during a pandemic, from his kitchen table.

He shares what they saw as a gap in the market and what they are doing to address it.

If you are a VC looking to raise institutional money or from family offices, you are selling futures - so what do you do?

How does VC find the next Unicorn?

If you are a scale-up, where do you place your bets?

Pitch and Marketing tactics, what is Jonathan seeing on trend at the moment?

You can contact Jonathan here

 

 

What is Personal Account Based Marketing?

"86% of communications by sales, marketing & account teams are off-target and irrelevant."

In this episode, we're going to take this social and talk about how sales and marketing can become more relevant on LinkedIn to win status quo accounts. Today my guests are Kristina Jaramillo (President of Personal ABM and Stop the Sales Drop) and her partner Eric Gruber.

Personal ABM stands for Personal Account Based Marketing which means instead of speaking at accounts, sales, and marketing speak to specific accounts and the human buyers at those accounts.

I met Eric and Kristina through their recent virtual LinkedIn training, which I participated in a post-event master class.

You can get the on-demand recordings at stopthesalesdrop.com/linkedintraining.

Questions we tackle :

1.How do you describe the concept and how is it not being applied to social, email and live conversations?

2. How are sales and marketing not relevant in their social, email, and live selling conversation?

3. Can you share some examples of how sales and marketing leaders are not relevant to their LinkedIn profiles?

4. When it comes to messaging, you say that most sales and marketing teams are just pushing out what they think is their unique selling propositions and they are not entering their prospects' world. Can you explain what you mean?

5. Many companies have the data that sales and marketing need to target specific accounts - why are they getting it wrong?

6. Why do we need to go beyond campaigns and focusing on leads - and where should the focus be?

To find out more follow this link to their website and connect with the team on LinkedIn - https://www.personalabm.com/ and https://stopthesalesdrop.com/

Getting your ticket to a conversation with email outreach

It's time to rethink your outbound email marketing & prospecting strategy.

We can no longer rely on the old templated, spray, and pray approach. Your target market deserves more respect than this.

In this episode, I chat with Kristina Finseth. Not only is she a fan of avocados, she has worked both in a direct sales role and also marketing. She is now the Growth Marketing lead at Interseller. Interseller helps recruiters reduce the time it takes to make a hire. Interseller can find any candidate's personal email address and reach them with automated & personalized email sequences, all while keeping any ATS or CRM up-to-date.

Kristina has spent a year, testing and testing different approaches to email prospecting and outreach. Through data analysis, she has found a framework that can give you up to an 80% open rate, 50% reply rate, and 30% booked meeting rate. Without having to make a single cold call.

Her focus is less volume, higher quality, targeted messaging.

This is not an and/or debate about the merits of calling, vs email, vs social - it is about doing all of this better and more effectively, using data to get better results.

This is not a silver bullet to prospecting or selling. It requires, time, focus, and effort.

Through her learnings, Kristina has created the Outbound FIRE Framework, on Teachable, which you can sign up for today. If you are serious about improving your success rates using email, this will be well worth your investment.

Connect with Kristina on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinafinseth/

Sign up to her Masterclass on Teachable - https://outboundfireframework.teachable.com/p/outbound-fire-framework

If you are in recruitment, learn more about what Interseller can do for you - https://www.interseller.io/ 

Social Selling is Dead

What started out as Social Calling, a phrase coined by Nigel Edelshain back in 2009 and his take on Sales 2.0. 

Then became Social Selling from 2014, to the first book authored on the subject in 2016 by Timothy Hughes & Matt Reynolds, where they set the standard and framework that is still used today.

Has technology, automation, and the "economy of now" killed it?

 

TikTok What?

In this episode, I chat with Anthony Barbuto, a practicing Attorney from Florida.

 

He shares with me why he uses social media.

His passion for all things Italian.

How he has amassed 100k plus followers on Facebook, 20k plus followers on Instagram AND 2million plus followers on TikTok and has become a verified TikTok content creator.

What do his peers think of it all? Does it bring in clients?

How does he find the time between his busy day job and creating the content that he does?

Please support and follow him His main website is here The Italian Enthusiast https://italianenthusiast.com/author/admin/ From here you will find all the links to his channels, including TikTok.

How to use website data

In this episode, I am joined by the brilliant Simon Marshall.

 

Simon runs his own Digital Marketing agency where he and his team help Professional Service firms get the best out of their marketing data to make better business decisions.

 

If you are in Sales, Marketing, Accounting or Law, you need to listen to this - the firms that get this will reap the rewards.

 

We cover off : 

 

Why your website is not working the way you think it is.

Why you need to look at attribution e.g. where are your audiences coming from? Both known & unknown.

If you are not using an awesome website he shares to optimise your content visibility, you should be.

Why using Google Search Console can help you figure out where your website needs improving.

How you can start to take a more holistic approach to multiple data sources from within your business to make better and more informed business decisions.

2mins is the optimum read time for most.

Does your content work like an F?

Do Sales, Market & Business Development need to re-skill in some of these areas?

 

Please do follow Simon on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/simonpaulmarshall/

and Twitter - https://twitter.com/CEO_TBD

 

The secret sauce to video

In this episode, I am joined by Priya Shah, one of the co-founders of Sauce Video.

 

What started out as a video editing app for extreme sports enthusiasts transformed into a cloud-based video collaboration and editing tool.

 

Sauce Video was acquired by Oracle in April 2020  and they are now building this technology into their CX Content platform.

 

Priya is kind enough to share with me their story.

 

We also cover off why video is now such an important part of brands' total content marketing strategy.

How it can be used to drive employee advocacy and branding.

The different use cases for video, such as Sales Enablement, Compliance training, onboarding, and more.

We touch on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality.

How AI may help drive video personalization at scale.

We also talk about how the Oracle acquisition came about and what the road map looks like for the team.

I make a really bad joke, twice.

 

To learn more about Sauce Video & Oracle CX click here - https://www.oracle.com/corporate/acquisitions/sauce-video/

Follow Priya on LinkedIn here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/priyashahsauce/

Follow me here - https://linktr.ee/alexanderlow 

Transforming your CRM Strategy

In this episode, I speak with the wonderful Nikki Finucan. 

Nikki's headline on LinkedIn reads "Transformation is taking something that exists today and making it more beautiful!"

She specialises in creating synergies between process, technology and people to support, build, and develop high performing teams. Some of the change and transformation beautification. she has experience in:
1. Enhancing customer experience through nurturing existing clients, improving coverage and building strong relationships
2. Reducing selling expenses without compromising the client through remote selling
3. Helping teams to grow, retain and acquire clients all with the aim of increasing revenue
4. Aligning your processes and technology and collaborating with your teams to adopt it
5. Core technology programmes to ensure your teams can run effectively and consistently remotely, whether it is selling, customer service and self serve or finance.

In this episode we discuss the pitfalls of CRM deploy, why having a data-led approach and strategy is critical.

CRM is for everyone in the business, and why.

What are the challenges leaders face when working with Sales teams to drive adoption.

Do you lead with People or Technology?

Where does the customer fit into all of this?

We also end with talking with her initiative, Women Connect to help promote more women in the sales profession.

Please follow/connect with Nikki on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkifinucan/