Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

As a B2B startup, we’ve found LinkedIn really powerful in pin-pointing new potential customers. Where LinkedIn falls down is actually connecting with those people (does anybody actually read their LinkedIn messages?… mine is just filled with InMail spam from recruiters). Fortunately we’ve worked out a couple of tricks.

Email Hunter and ReplyApp.io combo.

The Email Hunter Chrome extension will find anybody’s email address from their LinkedIn profile. Does it work 100% of the time?… no, but it’s pretty damn good.

Once we’ve identified the person we want to contact, at the touch of a button we’ll (almost always) have their email. That’s where  ReplyApp.io comes in.

ReplyApp.io automates your sales outreach. Essentially you can pre-write follow-up emails that are sent only if you don’t get a reply. With all the time you save not having to follow people up, it will feel like your sales team has been multiplied by 2 or 3. We love it and are very happy to have finally made the discovery after researching about 20 different competitors (in fact I’ll write a separate blog post on this if anybody is interested, because finding the right tool was painful — we were using our own custom solution for a while)...

What’s the difference between your resume and your LinkedIn profile? For some people, the two are practically identical. Each lists work history, career accomplishments, notable projects, and perhaps a fun fact or two. Maybe your LinkedIn page has a picture on it, but otherwise, they’re the same.

But there’s a slight problem with this approach. Your LinkedIn profile isn’t an online resume.

My first pillar of social selling is moving “from resume to digital reputation,” and it requires looking at your social profiles from the eyes of the customer you’re trying to earn trust from. If you’re bragging about your quota crushing abilities or merely listing your work experience, that’s not interesting or appealing to potential clients....