Best of LinkedIn: Social Selling CW 33/ 34

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

00:00:07: Frenness supports clients with identifying target attendees for events crafting outreach that cuts through the noise and driving qualified registrations through strategic LinkedIn engagement.

00:00:17: you can find more info in description

00:00:20: if your still relying a ninety day content calender or batch creating your text in Word, and then just sending these like massive four paragraph automated direct messages.

00:00:30: Oh man yeah!

00:00:31: You're basically optimizing for a version of LinkedIn that died I don't know six months ago.

00:00:36: Literally a ghost town?

00:00:37: Yeah exactly so.

00:00:39: today we are unpacking the complete structural rewrite.

00:00:45: Specifically, we're looking at this massive shift away from raw reach toward high relevance and also how AI search is just completely forcing us to rethink the mechanics of every single post we publish.

00:00:56: Right

00:00:57: because the reality

00:00:58: for strategic B-to-B marketers right now Is that the ground rules have completely shifted under our feet like?

00:01:03: We can't steer the ship by looking at the wake of last year's metrics anymore.

00:01:07: no

00:01:08: not all.

00:01:09: So the mission of this deep dive is to basically isolate the actionable signals from all the noise, you know and look at actual data.

00:01:17: that's driving pipeline today.

00:01:18: Yeah I think we really have start with algorithm itself because the definition of a quote unquote good post has just fundamentally changed.

00:01:26: It really does, I mean, a lot of marketers are kind of panicking right now because they're raw reach.

00:01:31: you know their follower velocity.

00:01:32: it's just slowing down.

00:01:34: Right everyone's views or down

00:01:35: Exactly.

00:01:36: but i saw this really interesting insight from Nicholas Benzenberg and he frames not as a penalty um But As A Correction.

00:01:44: Okay a correction

00:01:45: Yeah.

00:01:46: so The algorithm Has drastically reduced the weight Of those old vanity metrics like actively prioritizing deep relevance now instead of just surface-level clickbait.

00:01:56: Which is, I mean that's a huge relief honestly because it means the system is shifting from like this pure attention economy to more of retention economy.

00:02:05: Yes Like if we look at data shared by Florence Gourgeois The mechanics of this becomes super clear.

00:02:11: She found out single save on a post Now generates like sixty four point seven percent more views.

00:02:18: Wait

00:02:18: Almost sixty five percent more views just from someone hitting save.

00:02:22: Yeah, because the platform is looking for utility.

00:02:25: now when a user hits save they are there signaling to is reference material, right?

00:02:33: Like I need this for my job tomorrow.

00:02:35: Exactly it's not just something that you know entertains them three seconds while they were scrolling in line for coffee.

00:02:40: It's actual B to B utility.

00:02:41: Well and the distinction between entertainment & Utility...I feel like it changes the actual physical way we have create content.

00:02:49: Oh one hundred percent!

00:02:50: The literal keystrokes matter now.

00:02:53: Yeah Which is crazy, there was this technical report highlighted by Peter Hussle and it showed that writing a post directly into the LinkedIn UI yields up to twenty-two percent more reach than if you just paste drafted text from like Word or an AI generator.

00:03:13: Right.

00:03:14: And I mean, think about the operational implications of that for marketing teams.

00:03:17: you have You know agencies and social media managers who literally live in Google Docs and scheduling tools.

00:03:24: Yeah They batch everything

00:03:25: right.

00:03:25: but The algorithm is basically doing behavioral analytics on the front end now like it's Tracking the cadence of your creation.

00:03:32: So he was looking For That Like Irregular Human Rhythm Of Typing.

00:03:35: Yes

00:03:36: It Wants to see you typing and editing natively as a direct countermeasure against just you Know mass produced AI Slop

00:03:43: Man, so it forces authenticity through friction.

00:03:45: Exactly If you want the reach You have to put in the manual labor.

00:03:49: Yeah In their sandbox.

00:03:50: And alongside that back end change There's also a really crucial structural update on the front-end.

00:03:56: Oh

00:03:56: right The hook length Yeah

00:03:58: Holly Joiner noted That the visible hook...you know?

00:04:00: ...that text displayed before the Seymour button cuts off the post.

00:04:03: It is actually expanding from two and half lines To five full lines

00:04:06: Which totally kills the broach reformatting we've seen for years.

00:04:10: Yes Finally You don't need that hyper aggressive like one sentence cliffhanger anymore because five lines is a massive amount of real estate on a mobile screen.

00:04:20: It's

00:04:20: like a full paragraph

00:04:22: Exactly, so it gives you the mechanical space to establish A complex B-to-B premise or introduce a paradox.

00:04:29: set up a micro story.

00:04:31: You don' t have resort to cheap clickbait tactics just to force the user to expand the post

00:04:37: Right.

00:04:37: But I guess having the space to tell a better story, it doesn't really matter if the story itself is stale.

00:04:43: Right?

00:04:43: The speed at which the market moves right now is basically rendering traditional planning obsolete.

00:04:58: Because she found her highest converting posts are entirely reactive.

00:05:02: They're built on like fresh raw insights pulled directly from a sales call.

00:05:07: that happened earlier That exact same week

00:05:09: which makes perfect sense honestly because if the B to be team is Scheduling posts, you know ninety days out.

00:05:15: Mm-hmm There they basically broadcasting Q one problems to an audience that's actively dealing with q two realities

00:05:21: Exactly.

00:05:21: You just lose the edge of immediate relevance right?

00:05:24: But to even know what the market cares about this week, you have to engineer your own environment.

00:05:30: Banca Colates has a brilliant tactical approach to it.

00:05:33: Oh

00:05:33: I saw that!

00:05:34: It's so smart Yeah

00:05:35: She says To aggressively use The not interested button on Your feed

00:05:39: Which nobody

00:05:40: uses?

00:05:40: I Know its such an often ignored feature but Its literally the only steering wheel You Have.

00:05:45: So by actively filtering out you know, generic hustle culture posts or those irrelevant industry polls.

00:05:52: You are retraining the machine's understanding of your professional graph.

00:05:55: so you're basically curating a high signal environment

00:05:58: exactly which ensures that the time you spend engaging in the comments is actually spent with target accounts and the peers that matter to your pipeline.

00:06:07: not just random noise right

00:06:09: but manually curating your ingestion.

00:06:12: um It doesn't solve distribution, right?

00:06:15: Like we can write native highly relevant posts all day but the algorithm still has to decide who it's gonna serve them too.

00:06:22: True And Moritz Newhouse brought up a mechanic that totally changes how we have to think about our historical footprint on the platform.

00:06:30: Okay what-what is the mechanic?

00:06:31: So The algorithm is no longer just judging the performance of an isolated post, it's actively evaluating your topical consistency across you entire profile.

00:06:41: Oh wow so its looking at everything that you've done?

00:06:43: Yeah!

00:06:43: It's effectively acting as a highly specialized matchmaker.

00:06:46: Okay I see.

00:06:47: So if your profile positioning is scattered right like If you're posting about leadership on Monday and then sauce marketing Wednesday And personal development Friday yeah

00:06:56: exactly

00:06:56: Matchmaker gets confused.

00:06:58: It does.

00:06:58: it doesn't know who your ideal audience actually is, so it just stops trying to introduce you to new networks

00:07:03: Man... that puts an immense premium on how we position our personal brands.

00:07:08: then Huge

00:07:09: Premium!

00:07:09: We have draw a hard line in the sand.

00:07:11: Matt Gray laid out core components of resilient brand and The standout mechanic.

00:07:16: he mentioned having unique point-of-view that would actively argue about at dinner party.

00:07:22: Oh I love that.

00:07:22: A Dinner Party argument Right..it

00:07:24: has some edge And you combine that with owning your email list, and you basically insulate yourself against all these algorithmic mood swings.

00:07:31: Right because that dinner party test really exposes the flaw in most B to D corporate advocacy I mean if your positioning is so sanitized and safe That nobody could possibly disagree With it You don't Really have a brand?

00:07:46: Exactly, a boring brochure.

00:07:48: And Rihanna Praveen actually took this step further into the physical packaging of that expertise.

00:07:54: She emphasized you must create your own frameworks and proprietary language.

00:07:58: Okay let's expand on it because I think packaging is everything here Like if the algorithm giving more reach like say moving from billboard to a storefront window You suddenly have time in space for buyers.

00:08:15: But if your window display is just generic cardboard boxes labeled, you know synergy and optimization buyers are going to walk right by.

00:08:24: Yeah they glaze over but

00:08:25: inventing your own terminology that forces the buyer to adopt your lens to view their problem.

00:08:31: That's a really good analogy.

00:08:34: The visual component of storefront windows equally vital though it has highly debated Right now.

00:08:38: Oh profile pictures.

00:08:40: Kevin box frames the profile picture as personal logo And he argues that since top tier brands don't use, you know pixelated or casual logos professionals should use AI headshot tools.

00:08:50: He specifically mentioned InstaHeadshots to basically achieve a high-end look without needing a massive studio budget.

00:08:58: See

00:08:58: it there is a mass of tension though because Marcus Peter actively tested that exact thesis.

00:09:03: Oh we did what happened?

00:09:04: He used AI generated photos to sharpen his visual branding but he eventually scrapped them completely Because his network flagged them as inauthentic.

00:09:14: Yeah, he reverted back to slightly less polished real home office photos.

00:09:18: like the audience's radar for artificial perfection is just so sensitive right now that The slight dip in visual quality was actually worth the massive gain and trust.

00:09:29: Wow yeah I guess that friction between polish and reality really defines the platform's current era doesn't it?

00:09:36: It really does.

00:09:37: Liam Darmity summarized this beautifully, when he was discussing the broader approach to building influence.

00:09:41: He basically advises just ignoring all these self-proclaimed gurus selling these like forty seven step hook frameworks that are designed to engineer manufactured vulnerability.

00:09:50: Oh

00:09:50: my gosh yes!

00:09:51: The carefully calculated crying posts.

00:09:54: or I spilled coffee on my shirt and it taught me a valuable lesson about BtoB sales narratives.

00:10:00: Right right...the market is entirely exhausted by.

00:10:03: so his model.

00:10:04: as much simpler though admittedly harder to execute.

00:10:07: He says, you just make consistent deposits into your reputation piggy bank.

00:10:10: I like that.

00:10:11: yeah real trust compounds slowly and there's no algorithm hack that bypasses the need for genuine credibility.

00:10:20: Yeah, well actually speaking of making deposits into that reputation piggy bank.

00:10:24: If you are getting value out of the unfiltered mechanics we're breaking down on this deep dive.

00:10:29: take a second to hit subscribe.

00:10:30: We are constantly analyzing the signals That actually drive BB growth and subscribing ensures You catch every single edition.

00:10:37: awesome.

00:10:38: So we've kind of established The rules for content And the necessity Of this highly consistent authentic brand.

00:10:44: But the critical transition for a strategic marketer is taking that accumulated attention and converting it into measurable sales pipeline.

00:10:51: Right,

00:10:51: because attention without conversion is just vanity.

00:10:54: Exactly So.

00:10:55: let's look at the brutal realities of direct outreach right now.

00:10:58: Chris Cosolino shared The mechanics behind booking over a thousand meetings.

00:11:02: Wow!

00:11:02: A thousand?

00:11:03: A thousand.

00:11:05: And the date was pretty definitive.

00:11:07: He found that manual out reach yields three times the response rate Of automating campaigns

00:11:12: Three times.

00:11:13: Yeah.

00:11:14: And look, we all crave the scale of automation but B-to-B buyers have just developed a highly tuned immune system against automated sequences at this point.

00:11:22: They can smell an automated cadence from a mile away!

00:11:26: So how does he offset that loss in volume though?

00:11:29: If you're doing it manually...

00:11:30: You need to dramatically increase targeting precision.

00:11:34: So he relies almost exclusively on the sales navigator filter for posted on LinkedIn in past thirty days.

00:11:40: Oh,

00:11:40: that's smart.

00:11:40: Yeah mechanically this ensures you're only spending manual effort on the active ecosystem Reaching out to dormant profiles even if they have the perfect job title.

00:11:48: It's just a dead end.

00:11:49: it's a total waste of time and I think when we do reach out to that active ecosystem The constraints on copyrighting are severe right now.

00:11:56: oh yeah Michelle Lieben analyzed over a hundred thousand outreach conversations.

00:12:01: Wow!

00:12:01: Yeah, huge data set and he found that messages kept under.

00:12:04: one-hundred fifty characters generate twenty two percent more replies.

00:12:08: One Hundred Fifty Characters?

00:12:09: That's brutal.

00:12:10: It is so short.

00:12:11: Most B-to-B marketers can't even get past their company's tagline in a hundred and fifty characters, let alone deliver like a personalized hook.

00:12:19: Right it forces you to strip away all those pleasantries and the corporate throat clearing.

00:12:24: You just don't have room to pitch!

00:12:25: You only have room.

00:12:26: ask a highly calibrated question that basically proves you understand there specific operational pain.

00:12:32: Exactly.

00:12:32: And he also noted that sustained three step campaign gets forty two percent more replies than single message.

00:12:40: Okay, so persistence still matters?

00:12:41: Yeah.

00:12:42: Persistence matters.

00:12:43: if the format is hyper-condensed

00:12:45: Interesting.

00:12:46: Well we could also bypass text entirely to prove human effort.

00:12:49: Oh!

00:12:50: How so

00:12:51: So Christian Krauss ran this really rigorous six month experiment.

00:12:55: He was sending twenty five direct messages every single day.

00:12:58: Wow That's a lot of manual work.

00:13:00: But definitive winners were voice and video DMs

00:13:04: Video DMs... interesting

00:13:06: Because they provide undeniable proof.

00:13:09: A mass automation tool cannot fake a video where you are physically holding up a prop or using the prospect's name and context, ya know?

00:13:17: Right.

00:13:17: It forces authenticity again.

00:13:19: but I will say even with video The fundamental strategy can still fail if the message is wrong.

00:13:26: Mykita Kankov outlined the primary killers of B-to-B lead generation.

00:13:31: Where were the top ones?

00:13:32: The top two are fake personalization, so you know where a script just scrapes the prospects recent post and awkwardly glues it to generic value prop

00:13:41: the worst.

00:13:42: I loved your post about hiring, anyway buy my software!

00:13:45: Exactly.

00:13:46: and The Second Killer is pitching far too early in this sequence.

00:13:49: it just kills the relationship instantly.

00:13:51: So

00:13:51: what does a mechanically sound conversion engine actually look like then?

00:13:54: Well Amelia Sordell shared her specific five-step founder funnel.

00:13:58: Okay First she leads with storytelling to build the affinity we discussed earlier.

00:14:03: second She offers a highly utilitarian lead magnet.

00:14:06: okay pretty standard so far

00:14:08: Right, but third—and this is where the mechanics get really interesting.

00:14:12: She uses a tool like iClosed to capture buying intent instantly by tracking who's actually interacting with her booking links.

00:14:20: Oh wow Yeah.

00:14:22: And that intent-tracking feeds directly into her final steps which are nurturing those who aren't ready and aggressively disqualifying the wrong leads.

00:14:30: Wait...disqualifying is a step?

00:14:32: Yes

00:14:33: That funnel generates a hundred ninety one qualified leads for her every sixty days And disqualification is the secret engine there.

00:14:40: If you don't use intent data to weed out bad fits, your sales team will burn hundreds of hours on discovery calls that go

00:14:47: nowhere.".

00:14:47: That's so true!

00:14:48: Though direct customer acquisition isn't the only way to leverage those DMs.

00:14:53: Really?

00:14:54: Yeah Lucas Wolfschlager completely flipped this model entirely.

00:14:57: instead targeting buyers he uses LinkedIn outreach exclusively for referral partners.

00:15:03: Oh interesting like who?

00:15:04: He targets CPAs and brokers who already hold the trust of his ideal client profile.

00:15:08: Okay, that is immense channel leverage right there.

00:15:11: exactly a warm introduction from a trusted CPA Is going to convert at an infinitely higher rate than even the best crafted one hundred fifty character cold DM.

00:15:21: It completely shifts the burden of trust building off-the-marketer and onto the established partner.

00:15:26: Wow, that's really smart!

00:15:28: So okay those outreach mechanics handle The Active Partner but here is the absolute frontier the

00:15:38: silent buyer.

00:15:38: The Silent Buyer, the buyer who never likes a post they never accept to connection request and They Never Reply To A DM.

00:15:45: but They Are Actively Researching Your Company.

00:15:47: Right.

00:15:48: And Ivana Britannik Dropped A Statistic On This That Should Just Entirely Reframe How We View Our Digital Footprint.

00:15:54: She Found That Ninety-Four Percent of BWB buyers are Currently Using Large Language Models.

00:15:59: So Tools Like ChatGPT, Perplexity Clawed To Conduct Their Vendor Research.

00:16:03: Ninety Four Percent!

00:16:05: Yeah The traditional buyer journey of Googling a company and reading their perfectly polished website is literally being bypassed by AI summaries.

00:16:13: And the source material those AIs use to generate those summaries, Is the real kicker here?

00:16:19: Tarona Heath revealed that seventy-five percent Of the LinkedIn citations used By AI search engines come from member profiles not Company pages.

00:16:28: Oh wow so the AI is actively ignoring the corporate marketing speak.

00:16:32: Yes,

00:16:33: it's pulling answers directly from subject matter experts and executives who are posting on their personal feed

00:16:38: which completely democratizes authority.

00:16:40: If you think about it, You don't need a massive marketing budget to dominate AI search anymore.

00:16:45: Exactly!

00:16:46: In fact Kaylee Moore highlighted that over half the individuals getting cited by these AI models have fewer than ten thousand followers.

00:16:53: That's amazing.

00:16:54: Right.

00:16:55: The AI doesn't care about your clout or your vanity metrics.

00:16:58: It only cares about your suitability.

00:17:00: Its just looking for the most direct authoritative answer to users.

00:17:03: prompt.

00:17:04: But wait, how do we mechanically optimize for a machine reading our posts?

00:17:08: I mean if i write this beautiful you know five-line narrative hook that perfectly captures human attention and LLM might just struggle to extract the core data point from it.

00:17:18: Right!

00:17:18: And that is the exact tension of answer engine optimization or AEO.

00:17:22: AEO Yeah.

00:17:24: Kathleen Jean Pierre advises us that we have structure our post with a machine in mind now.

00:17:28: So this means incorporating very clear headers, explicit bullet points and distinct answer blocks within the post.

00:17:35: Wait like formatting it almost an SEO blog post?

00:17:39: Exactly who essentially format the insight so that LLM can easily parse and extract structure data without losing any of context?

00:17:47: I mean i see utility there but feels a really dangerous tightrope to walk.

00:17:51: If we format our content like a textbook just so chat GPT can read it, don't we lose that authentic conversational tone?

00:17:58: That the regular LinkedIn algorithm supposedly demands for reach.

00:18:02: It does sound counterintuitive but it requires a hybrid approach.

00:18:05: Basically The Narrative Hook captures human algorithms and then structured data block within the body of post feeds AI engine And Carmen Vicente is actually treating this as new SEO.

00:18:17: She uses platforms profound to track her brand citation share across all the different models.

00:18:23: She says if you aren't measuring how often your executives are cited by AI, You were completely blinded to modern discovery process.

00:18:31: Wow!

00:18:32: And the enterprise layer is already reacting to this.

00:18:35: Evita Degulite pointed out that giants like Deloitte, Clay and Starbucks Are pouring massive resources into employee advocacy right now

00:18:43: Because they realize their employees are the citable nodes.

00:18:46: Exactly!

00:18:47: They recognize that their employees have highly-citable nodes of expertise.

00:18:51: Astra G recently launched Atradius Voices, which is her organization's second corporate influencer program specifically engineered to train staff on this visible expertise.

00:19:01: See those programs are incredibly powerful but do come with a massive operational risk.

00:19:06: Yeah Lee Denzmer issued an important warning regarding these initiatives.

00:19:10: She says never mandate employees post.

00:19:12: Oh yeah, forced enthusiasm is the worst.

00:19:15: it's instantly detectable It ruins the authenticity and more importantly it destroys that topical consistency we talked about earlier.

00:19:22: That algorithm relies on to match profiles with audiences.

00:19:26: right you can't script five hundred employees and expect The market to buy

00:19:30: exactly so denser alternative.

00:19:32: as a minimum viable strategy Don't force them to write original thought leadership.

00:19:37: Just get them to optimize their profiles for AI parsing, build strategic networks leave highly contextual comments on industry posts and execute the manual DM strategies we discussed.

00:19:48: Oh that's smart!

00:19:49: Yeah you need them.

00:19:50: act as credible nodes in network not necessarily viral content creators because visibility and sightability are far more valuable to a BDB pipeline right now than virality.

00:20:00: Man,

00:20:00: if we pull all of these mechanics together you know the algorithm demanding native creation The necessity of unapologetic positioning the brutal constraints of one hundred fifty character outreach And now the rise of answer engine optimization.

00:20:14: it creates A really fascinating paradox for the modern b-to-b marketer.

00:20:18: It

00:20:18: really does

00:20:19: I mean, if AI is summarizing our expertise and buyers are increasingly reading those machine summaries instead of our actual posts.

00:20:25: Do we eventually stop writing for humans entirely an only format data?

00:20:29: For the machines?

00:20:31: or does that machine filtered landscape make raw unscalable human connection The ultimate premium?

00:20:37: something to mull over?

00:20:38: fascinating question To leave off on because when machines handle the information transfer the Human element becomes the only true differentiator left in the pipeline.

00:20:47: If you enjoyed this episode, new episodes drop every two weeks.

00:20:50: Also check out our other editions on Field Marketing, Martek AI in B to B go-to market ABM and channel marketing and partner ecosystem.

00:20:57: Thank you so much for joining us on the steep dive And don't forget to subscribe to catch.

00:21:01: all are upcoming insights see next time.