Best of Linkedin: Social Selling CW 31/ 32

00:00:00: provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frennis, based on the most relevant LinkedIn posts about social selling in calendar weeks thirty-one and thirty two.

00:00:08: Frennis supports clients with identifying target attendees for events crafting outreach that cuts through noise driving qualified registrations.

00:00:21: So for the strategic B-to-B marketing professionals listening, you can basically consider this your executive briefing.

00:00:27: We are completely skipping The Fluff today!

00:00:30: This deep dive is going to be a no fluff highly actionable breakdown of taking over at LinkedIn.

00:00:38: Exactly, our mission today is mapping out the shifts in how BWB buyers actually operate right now and uh...how smart sellers are adapting to that.

00:00:47: And we're doing this strictly based on this incredibly curated stack of real-time insights from those two weeks.

00:00:52: Right!

00:00:53: It's wild out there right now.

00:00:54: Oh it really is.

00:00:55: So let's jump straight into the first theme.

00:00:58: What were seeing was that LinkedIn essentially splitting into two distinct disciplines.

00:01:03: The first one is this highly quantifiable measurement layer and it's entirely anchored by the social selling index or the SSI.

00:01:10: Right, the SS I!

00:01:12: And Miran Colotto provided a really great technical breakdown of this.

00:01:16: so your SSI has scored out And it's based on four pillars.

00:01:20: You've got your brand, you're network engagement and relationships.

00:01:23: The really crucial thing here is that doesn't measure popularity measures consistency Consistency?

00:01:29: Okay so its not just about going viral

00:01:31: No!

00:01:31: Not at all...and the stakes for maintaining that consistancy are actually way higher than most people realize.

00:01:37: Isabella Schnorr and Clarice Bucillaro both noted that if your score dips below a sixty, LinkedIn will actively hide you profile from recruiter searches.

00:01:45: Wait!

00:01:45: Hide it entirely?

00:01:46: Completely

00:01:47: invisible.

00:01:47: Okay let's unpack this.

00:01:48: Does obsessing over a vanity metric actually drive pipeline?

00:01:52: Well

00:01:52: I mean thats the natural pushback right.

00:01:54: But Lucas Atomposis is perfect example here.

00:01:57: His scores sits at seventy three Which

00:01:58: high Right.

00:02:00: Yeah It puts him in top one percent of his industry where average only around thirty.

00:02:05: But the thing is, he doesn't obsess over it.

00:02:07: He just checks maybe once a month because ten-second early warning system for his daily sales habits.

00:02:14: Ah, so it's a diagnostic tool?

00:02:16: Exactly and David Kuliev proved that leaning into the system actually works.

00:02:22: he jumped from the top forty percent to the top six percent in the finance sector with just three weeks of you know highly intentional networking.

00:02:29: Three

00:02:30: weeks!

00:02:30: That's incredibly fast

00:02:31: Yeah.

00:02:32: And It literally earned him a trip to LinkedIn HQ.

00:02:35: Wow, so the platform definitely rewards you for playing along.

00:02:38: And if you want to know the exact lever-to-pole to raise that score, Matan Kleiman shared a highly tactical one.

00:02:45: he says commenting three or four times a day on posts from your ideal customers.

00:02:49: Your ICP is basically the biggest hack to raise your SSI

00:02:52: which makes sense.

00:02:53: It signals relevance right

00:02:54: and doing that actively doubles your weekly connection requests limit.

00:02:58: So get double the outbound capacity.

00:03:00: That's

00:03:00: a massive advantage.

00:03:02: But Laura Kamno notes there's a big risk thereto.

00:03:05: If you just use that extra capacity to send out poorly targeted connection requests and they get ignored, the algorithm treats it as negative feedback.

00:03:13: It flags US spam.

00:03:14: Basically

00:03:15: yeah!

00:03:15: It signals poor targeting And your risks getting your account restricted Which

00:03:19: means all of those outbound velocity is totally useless without clear positioning?

00:03:23: Mm-hmm And Ann Yang highlighted that U.S.

00:03:26: buyers will judge profile in just ten seconds.

00:03:29: Ten Seconds is brutal

00:03:31: Its nothing.

00:03:32: But Yonathan Levy offered a really practical fix.

00:03:34: He says to run four specific AI prompts in Claude, To audit your profile photo Your headline You're featured section And you pass content.

00:03:42: Just make sure positioning is razor sharp.

00:03:44: That's such smart use of AI Especially since that brings us right into our second theme Algorithm mechanics and the platforms.

00:03:51: absolute war on AI slop.

00:03:53: Oh this was big one

00:03:54: It IS!

00:03:54: LinkedIn actually rolled out A new internal ranking model.

00:03:57: Its called Three

00:03:59: Sixty Brew.

00:04:00: Blair Huddy did a great breakdown of what they're actually means.

00:04:03: Under this three-sixty brew model, A Save on a Post is now worth roughly five times as much the standard like.

00:04:09: Five time.

00:04:10: so they really want reference level content?

00:04:12: Exactly and The algorithm is also actively scanning for those manipulative prompts.

00:04:18: you know Like comment.

00:04:19: yes to get the guide.

00:04:20: it demotes those And it aggressively suppresses anything that looks like AI slop

00:04:25: which is entirely necessary when you look at the scale of the problem.

00:04:28: No Manisan estimates that fifty-three point seven percent of The Feed Is Currently AI Written.

00:04:33: Over half The Feed, That's just exhausting!

00:04:35: Yeah.

00:04:36: and Fox Tucker who works in digital media he noted that forty one percent Of long form content is generated And He pointed out this incredible irony LinkedIn literally sold its users a I writing tools for two years?

00:04:47: Now they are actively penalizing the exact output those tools created.

00:04:51: That is honestly hilarious.

00:04:53: They armed the users and then declared war on them.

00:04:56: And hey, by the way if you find this kind of algorithmic breakdown helpful make sure to subscribe so you catch our future deep dives.

00:05:03: But yeah LinkedIn is definitely fighting back.

00:05:05: Brita Barrens Nicole Mesasama and Liam Darmity all highlighted This new three-dot menu option.

00:05:12: Oh!

00:05:12: The reporting

00:05:13: tool.

00:05:13: Yeah It's a New Report button that literally says Seems like AI Slop.

00:05:18: It flags low value content with zero friction.

00:05:21: There's no confirmation step at all.

00:05:23: Wow, and Joshua B Lee actually noticed that while they're rolling that out LinkedIn is quietly retiring its AI rewriting tool.

00:05:30: They're replacing it with a proofreader That just preserves the author's original voice.

00:05:34: so then you want to fix your typos not write your thoughts

00:05:37: right?

00:05:38: And Joanna Louise a geese makes really fascinating point here.

00:05:40: She argues that unpolished human writing You know even with small errors Is now the ultimate differentiator.

00:05:47: I totally agree with that.

00:05:49: It's basically like fast food versus a home-cooked meal, i mean AI slop is cheap it's perfectly shaped and it is everywhere.

00:05:56: but B to b buyers are just starving for the messy nutritious reality of an actual human perspective!

00:06:02: I love that analogy and that naturally pivots us into theme three which is all about creating that authentic content and actually executing outreach.

00:06:09: that works

00:06:10: definitely.

00:06:10: so looking at content Magdalena Shillekka brought some fantastic data showing that specifics always win.

00:06:16: She tested a post announcing a concrete price drop from two hundred fifty-six zoos to two hundred and thirty zoo against the posts which is just a vague CTA.

00:06:24: And let me guess, this specific one won?

00:06:26: Massively!

00:06:27: Yeah Because the granular specificity anchors the trust... ...and Natalie Freer & Beatrice Floodoo both stress that personal profiles get eight times the engagement of brand pages.

00:06:36: Eight

00:06:36: times?!

00:06:36: That's as crazy multiplier.

00:06:38: yeah.

00:06:38: and seventy six percent people inherently trust a person over company.

00:06:42: The human face is so much more effective.

00:06:45: But you still have to frame it right.

00:06:46: Mngali Daru did this super-transparent postmortem on three of her own posts that totally flopped, like... sixty six percent below her average.

00:06:54: Ouch!

00:06:55: What'd she find?

00:06:56: Well, her autopsy revealed they failed because she led entirely with their expertise rather than the reader's actual problem.

00:07:03: She completely missed The Human Connection.

00:07:05: Ah,

00:07:06: demanding authority without offering empathy That'll kill a post immediately

00:07:10: Exactly.

00:07:11: And that exact same friction applies to outreach.

00:07:14: The old spray and pre-DM is dead.

00:07:17: Alina Grigolite warns that generic Let's Connect DMS are basically treated as spam by users now.

00:07:23: Right,

00:07:23: and we established earlier that trains the algorithm to restrict your account.

00:07:27: Exactly!

00:07:27: It is self-sabotage.

00:07:28: So Steve Osborne suggests a much better approach.

00:07:31: He says run simple polls or send really low pressure value messages something like hey I put together some research on this

00:07:37: Right Removing expectation of meeting.

00:07:39: Yeah And doing so he consistently yields a thirty percent response rate.

00:07:44: That's massive conversion for outbound And to scale that kind of personalized approach, Darren McKee shared a brilliant internal tactic.

00:07:52: He runs two-hour company wide power hour where every single salesperson works twenty specific prospects at the exact same time

00:07:59: All engaging manually

00:08:01: completely natively in the feed.

00:08:02: Yeah, and it reliably generates ten or more meetings every time they deploy.

00:08:06: that is an amazing operation.

00:08:08: But what if your team is full of introverts who hate bragging?

00:08:11: Oh That has such a common roadblock Mm-hmm.

00:08:13: but Eli Gunduz had the perfect advice for this.

00:08:15: He says introverts don't need to be loud influencers.

00:08:18: They just need to document reality

00:08:20: Document reality like

00:08:22: yeah Like just sharing a complex problem they solved that week Or mistake they made.

00:08:26: And Jasmine Ollich reminds us that sharing results like that isn't bragging.

00:08:30: It's literally the fastest way to build trust with invisible decision makers who are silently doing their research.

00:08:36: Oh,

00:08:36: totally!

00:08:36: and Deepak Bhutra is empirical proof.

00:08:39: this works.

00:08:39: He spent two years just consistently quietly publishing technical observations.

00:08:45: he avoided viral tactics entirely.

00:08:48: it earned him a top ten ranking in global B-to-B sales coaching

00:08:52: Just by quietly showing his work which ties perfectly into our final theme.

00:08:56: Scaling through advocacy and partnerships, And most importantly proving the ROI.

00:09:01: Yes!

00:09:02: The ROI conversation.

00:09:04: We have to talk about employee advocacy first Lee Denzmer strongly advises against forcing your engineers To become creators.

00:09:11: It breeds resentment.

00:09:13: Just find two or three genuinely willing volunteers

00:09:16: Right...and Mike Adam adds that those ambassadors cannot just be human RSS feeds.

00:09:20: If they do Naked reposts of company content without adding their own perspective.

00:09:25: It reaches basically nobody

00:09:27: because the algorithm wants The human context

00:09:29: exactly.

00:09:30: but when you do it right, it works across-the-board.

00:09:32: Sarah Goodall shared data from eight hundred and sixty B to be companies showing that employee Executive and seller activity levels all rise and fall together.

00:09:42: They're an interconnected system yes

00:09:44: But companies still manage them in disconnected silos which is just

00:09:48: It really is.

00:09:49: And if you're struggling to break through those silos, partnerships are an amazing alternative.

00:09:53: Matthew C Brown shared that thirty-five point seven percent of his agency's clients actually come through partnerships.

00:09:59: He pays a twenty percent recurring commission To complementary businesses who already have the buyer's trust

00:10:05: Basically renting their social capital.

00:10:06: That it so smart?

00:10:07: Yeah!

00:10:07: Its incredibly

00:10:08: efficient.

00:10:09: Okay, how do we actually prove the financial return on all this social activity?

00:10:13: Right.

00:10:13: Well Jack Clare tracked a social selling program that costs thirty six thousand eight hundred dollars to run and it delivered one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars in direct revenue.

00:10:22: right yeah two hundred sixty seven percent ROI.

00:10:26: but The kicker is That Revenue usually stays completely invisible under last-touch attribution

00:10:32: because It just credits the final demo

00:10:34: request clicker exactly.

00:10:35: And Kiam Calvair adds Judging your social content on a timeline shorter than the standard six-month B to B sale cycle is basically a fatal mistake.

00:10:44: You have to let it play

00:10:45: out because the buyer spending those six months silently consuming you're content.

00:10:49: and Amanda Bujo's cited gardeners twenty, twenty five data which says sixty one percent of btb buyers actively prefer completely rep free process.

00:10:58: now

00:10:58: They don't want to talk to sales until the very end.

00:11:00: Right, and Rajit Geary noted that sixty-eight percent of buyers have a definite front runner before they ever even make contact And that frontrunner wins eighty percent at the time.

00:11:09: Eighty percent.

00:11:09: so if you aren't that front runner You've already lost

00:11:12: exactly.

00:11:13: So how do you find the ones who are actually ready to engage?

00:11:16: Connor Paulson shared The ultimate execution tip using Sales Navigator.

00:11:20: Oh I love this tip.

00:11:21: tell them he says To use the filter for users Who Have posted on LinkedIn in the last thirty days it will take A massive list Of say ten thousand prospects and shrink it down to maybe two-thousand.

00:11:32: Right, cuts out all the noise!

00:11:33: Exactly...

00:11:34: And because those prospects are currently active on the platform.

00:11:37: your response rates will literally triple.

00:11:39: you stop messaging dormant accounts.

00:11:41: It's such a simple but powerful pivot.

00:11:44: so to leave everyone listening with a final thought if AI can perfectly mimic professional polish and algorithms are actively hunting down automated slop The only BtoB currency left is your un-staylable, messy human experience.

00:11:58: Are you leaning into your flaws enough to actually be trusted by your buyers?

00:12:02: If you enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks!

00:12:04: Also check out our other editions on Field Marketing, MarTech AI and BtoBe.

00:12:09: Go To Market ABM and Channel Marketing & Partner Ecosystem.

00:12:12: Thanks so much for joining us with this deep dive And don't forget to hit subscribe.