How we use LinkedIn to get 61 inbound 5-figure opportunities in the first year

up next we've got Vladimir Blagojevich from fulfill funnel IO who's going to be talking about how to leverage LinkedIn to get 61 inbound five-figure opportunities in the first year all right hello my name is Vlad and I'm from I'm co-founder of full funnel.io and I want to tell you about how we use LinkedIn to land five and six figure opportunities all inbound uh all without

spending money on the ads so what I want to explain in over the next 20 minutes essentially is how LinkedIn works if you're selling five six figure deals uh the framework that we use for LinkedIn and what kind of results can you expect and when after that I want to show you how to drive awareness and demand so that you're not reaching out call to people and then how to actually start

conversations in a way that you're getting eighty percent acceptance rate 40 40 plus uh response rate and you're actually driving those opportunities so we are an early stage uh started with two people last year I did a quarter million we are going to the half million this year we work with Brands B2B SAS companies with five or six figure deals

helping them in account based marketing which is what we focus on and usually the idea is that from your target list you should be able to generate opportunities with with at least 20 percent of your target accounts that's the approach so let's start with the first part so how does LinkedIn work for B2B SAS companies with high annual contract value

and uh sharing also my framework and what kind of results you can expect so this is our framework so again we call it account based marketing framework companies marketing on LinkedIn why because you're focused on your target accounts and just to be very concrete for example one of our clients uh we figured out okay what the best like what what would be the best fit account how how can we Define it and they build a

list of 11 accounts 11 just 11. with about 150 buyers there these are these were larger companies and they ended up in six months uh closing well let's say driving 5 million pipeline so nine out of 11 accounts these were seven hundred thousand uh bucks uh deals annual deals and they close 2 million out of there they close three so this is what I mean like very talk very

focused account based so what that means it means is well that you should be targeting so that's what's in the middle there you have the different types of people or roles in your buying committee and a lot of people make that mistakes a lot of companies just go after the decision makers decision makers are the most difficult ones to get and they're often maybe not even interested they're maybe interested more in the category than the actual solution Etc so they're not they're you know the

only they shouldn't be the only focus there you should actually be driving awareness connecting and engaging the complete buying commit including your Champions including different kinds of influencers and potentially also blockers so that's in the middle so how do you do that well what do you have you have on LinkedIn above there you have you can share posts you can comment you can engage with people they're connected to that's another thing and I will share you five

different audiences you should be looking at people like I mentioned just look at the decision makers that are actually five different audiences you can be looking at um that your buyers trust that your buyers are connected to So you you're using them kind of as amplification and a proxy to the Target buyers obviously what else do you have on LinkedIn well you can grow your network proactively like this is the only social network that allows you to do that and if you do it in the right way like I mentioned

with 80 80 plus acceptance rate you can you know you can do a pretty good job of that and obviously you have the messaging so but most people like screw up on the messaging so I want to share with you how how we do it so that it works well so what are the kind of results that you can expect so if you're posting on LinkedIn and commenting you should be able to drive millions of views of your contents and the content obviously relevant to the buyers

relevant to your brand uh this is just a snapshot from my account over the over the last year but that's you know you could say you know it's a a vanity metric what does it mean well if you also look at the kind of accounts kind of people and the buyers that are actually viewing that that's just amazing that you're getting that and I'm not not really even connected to some of these companies but these are these are just amazing amazing opportunity there

the second one is what some people like to call dark social what I mean by that is the most important conversations actually happen outside of your funnel you know the way that the buyers are buying today is very different than it was 10 years ago fortunately a lot of companies still still use outdated playbooks so what that means is that for example I just recently closed the deal and I had to speak to the CFO and the CEO and the cro Chief Revenue officer

and the head of marketing and I spoke so to four different people and they all knew me and I was like how do you know me you know I mean they're not just new who I was but like knew a lot of the stuff that we are preaching and we are sharing Etc what happened actually was I was just chatting with one of them and he was sharing out my content on the company's slack this is what I mean by that dark social so this is like really amazing because without you having to do

all the work you're actually driving this you know demand over the whole buying committee the third type of results is inbound you know requests and this starts to happen usually let's say after two quarters of being consistent it's not something that happens quickly the first thing that will happen is that people you're already connected to that know you may be some frozen deals maybe people who you you know had to chat in the past they know you you work with them whatever you're connected with them they

will start seeing you LinkedIn and they they're the first one that will reach out to you for let's say in one lead but like pure inbound leads from people you didn't know before that's something that usually happens a little bit a little bit later but it's it starts happening and we see this like a ramp up when we started so we started about a year uh two years ago you know consistently being being active and I show you like our kind of a plan uh what we do of the key of the activities but essentially what happened

is at the beginning there was like you know like you know the beginning of the the hockey stick there's nothing happening there's nothing happening there's a little bit you you see some let's say a leading metrics you see some like early signals people are liking your content they're starting to follow you you know you're seeing like the right buyers visiting your profile all of these things that are kind of the early signal but no Revenue yet so and then it took some time and you saw you know you saw people coming reaching out to us and all of that but it's only now that we see really it's ramping up it's

like when a lot of people are you know complaining about the lack of demand and the downturn we are we're seeing like uh usually our our third quarter is always the worst this is like the best quarter we ever had like it's just amazing how many people are reaching out to us and this is a big one and we call them Outreach triggers it's simply like you have different triggers that you can use to reach out to people so you're not reaching out to them cold and the best trigger you you have is actually people engaging with your content

so people engaging with the content that you're sharing is probably the best trigger this these are like usually like I mentioned the 80 plus percent 40 plus percent response rate uh height acceptance rate like having good conversation meaningful conversations they're not necessarily immediately sales conversations but our conversations about the topic that you know you can help them with right so you can have a very meaningful conversation very fast and by the way if they are actually buying if they're in in the buying mode they will be like in this

example they will they will be reaching out to you and you will soon start to have a discussion that will lead into an actual qualified opportunity a big one for us uh we are like two Eastern European youths and like no but you know like Vladimir blagowitz my co-founder is Andres incavich like who the are you guys right and so what helps a lot is by you know connecting also to people like Nathan like why am I

here it's exactly because of our LinkedIn activity Andre got invited Two Times by Nathan on his podcast he invited us to speak here we got invite we get invited to you know big conferences uh this is the biggest podcast will be will be growth biggest podcast in our space and over time you start building relationships with the influencers influencers in your industry whomever they are right so we are talking about a very specific uh influences in the industry and you can do stuff with them

we do for example last March we did a summit a virtual Summit more than 5 000 people subscribed uh it was just amazing because of the people who were speaking there so it was a little bit like Nathan is doing here live and in person we did it online um just because we were there with you know the right people and what happens as well sometimes the new some of you may know people like from Austin

uh we built really good relationship with him and after a while this is kind of like the really nice uh result is you start getting referrals from people who have influence in your industry and this is like one of the largest deals we closed came came through a referral like that okay so these were the seven different so I showed I showed you the framework just the high level overview you know you remember you were targeting those buyers and I showed you the

different results that you can expect so I I want to share with you two more pieces like the the first one is like how do you drive this awareness in demand and like very practically how do you create content for LinkedIn in a way that's not going to take you too much time and I spoke about these different activities like posting commenting engaging but I wanna just mention like two important things and I already spoke about it's like people want to focus on the decision

makers but you actually have a bunch of other people who are connected to your buyers who your buyers trust who your buyers you know have a relationship with that you can be influencing and the way that we look at it is you have obviously you have the target buyers you have their colleagues you have the complete committee we spoke about it but then you have people we call engagers so these are people who are never going to buy from you there are people from the industry maybe trying to do the same thing as you're trying to do on LinkedIn right they're trying to grow Their

audience following you know Etc so they're engaging with your content and they're helping you spread the word they are kind of their proxy they are connected to the buyers or they're just like also helping with you know social proof because you're getting more engagement and all of these things you have the industry influencers I spoke about them you want to be proactively building a relationship with them and you have Niche media owners people who run a podcast like Nathan run a podcast organize events Etc you want to be connected with them because

obviously right you get that extra credibility extra exposure and you also have partner Brands so for example we ran the beginning of last year we ran five uh uh partner webinars with we partnered with martech companies marketing technology companies they have our same audience but we are not competing and so we drove like more than 2 000 signups and you know I I remember closing like at least like three different deals just

out of those partner webinars uh very quickly quickly after this what you're doing is it kind of you're kind of exchanging your audience with your partner so you want to be building relationships with that so like broaden like think about it how can I influence people that my buyers already trust now here's a Content framework that I promised that I will share with you and essentially you know if you just don't think too much about the stuff below just think about it you you need to

figure out what you want to write about you need to figure out the topics and then you need to figure out like what kind of a post do I want to create so let me just dive in so the first thing and the biggest mistake that people make is they don't list out or the all the topics the subtopics and the questions that your buyers have as they move through the buying Journey so this is like the first thing to do like figure that out how do you figure it out you do some buyer research you're interviewing

your customers you're looking at Community stop questions that you need to do that work it's not it doesn't take so much time but it saves you an enormous amount of time it makes sure that you're writing about relevant stuff so you have that document you have that that's the first step so I don't have to think about it just pick any question that I have so for example here the topic was okay Arabic topic for final B2B marketing and so for example one of the specific things is like how to most

B2B companies treat marketing so that was a this is what I wanted to write about right so you pick a topic and then you pick a post type and for you I've prepared here on the naden on the little disk there uh USB uh 11 Post types that we use with a bunch of examples so you can just like you know you can just look at that so there and so one of the one of the post types so just to continue this example

is the so-called villain post so where you're kind of like challenging the status quo in the industry you're positioning yourself as a thought leader because you're like you're on the mission to help improve the industry so that's the kind of the post here they work really well they get really they get good engagement and they um a really good positioning so that's the second step is like what kind of post do I want to write and then you do the rest actually quite quickly you do a

quick outline you do a quick draft and then you do a bit of editing at the end but it's actually shouldn't take you after some practice longer than 20 minutes to create a good post every day final section is about starting conversation booking calls in a way that you get 40 plus percent so and the the secret here is engagement based Outreach and I mentioned this so you don't want to be reaching out cold you want to be reaching out to People based on some triggers and the easiest trigger if

you're posting is engagement on your on posts this is just some examples you see like acceptance rate a minimum 60 some of them close to to 90 and response rate yeah anywhere from 40 to 80 percent which is amazing which is like usually if you're just reaching out cold the numbers are much much worse and so how does it look like well in this case you know gentleman core likes engaged with the post and uh that I wrote about

account based marketing and I told him hey by the way so I'm not like pitching on it I'm just saying by the way if you want to learn more we also have this event that we are running it's a free event now in this case Lex actually a Texan here he uh he was actually in the market and so he said you know what I'd like to connect and so we had to call and that that turned into an actual sales opportunity but most of them don't and that doesn't matter you're there you're nurturing it's a

long game when they're ready they will be so you're always like offering to take the relationship to the next level but you're leaving them in control you're not being pushy you're not being creepy so I also included a bunch of scripts that you can use with different triggers and just to close this wanted to share with you our weekly pillar framework and it's just to like keep yourself for people who are doing this like if people are on sales accountable so just defining number of activities you want to do each week for example I

wanna I I'm committed to post five times a week uh you know reaching out and connecting to probably like you know 50 people 50 50 you know icps uh you know posting some thoughtful comments on thought leaders posts Etc so it's really important that you get somewhere a routine right uh I you know aim to get anywhere between three to five hours if you can like an hour a day of course and that's why we use the weekly pillars because not everywhere the day is the

same right so you want to give yourself some wiggle room but also be committed because the results only come like I was mentioning only come after being consistent with this for you know a period of time at least like a quarter two quarters that that's when you're really starting to see the things speak up and so that's what I covered I shared our LinkedIn framework how to create content in a quick Way Drive awareness

and how to turn that awareness into actual buyer conversations that can lead into opportunities so uh yeah it's uh not the slide that I was expecting so thank you very much [Applause]