How To Start A Sales Conversation On LinkedIn

In this week’s episode of The Social Selling Show, Daniel and Will reveal tips on how to successfully start sales conversations on LinkedIn. Resources: Daniel’s LinkedIn Will’s LinkedIn Transcript Will Barron: This episode of the show is brought to you from the Salesman.org HubSpot Studio. Welcome to the Social Selling Show. Myself Will Barron founder over at Salesman.org and the king, the freaking king of selling, Daniel Disney. Daniel, how's it going mate?   Daniel Disney: It is going very well. We're excited to be back and today I know we've got quite an interesting topic that I'm very excited to dig into.   How to Appropriately Start a Sales Conversation with a Prospect on LinkedIn · [00:35]    Will Barron: Well we're going to dive into how to appropriately start a conversation on LinkedIn, on social media without it being weird. It can't be as simple as just doing what I do every week for yourself Daniel and be like, “Hey, how's it going.” So Daniel, how do we … probably multiple criteria here, but I'll start super open ended. How do we start a conversation with a potential prospect on LinkedIn without it being weird, salesy, and just not appropriate and unbusiness like all together?   “You need to be confident and comfortable in what you're doing. The moment you have or show any nervousness or uncomfortability that's when you start to show the sales colours as such. Then the other bit is you need to have knowledge. You need to have knowledge on them and you need to have knowledge on obviously what it is you want to talk to them about.” – Daniel Disney · [01:01]    Daniel Disney: Well, there are two key components in my experience. Number one, separate to the whole, I say separate, separate to the whole social selling piece is confidence. You need to be confident. You need to be confident and comfortable in what you're doing. The moment you have or show any nervousness or uncomfortability that's where you start to show the sales colours as such. Then the other bit is you need to have knowledge. You need to have knowledge on them and you need to have knowledge on obviously what it is you want to talk to them about. So we'll talk a little bit today around doing research, having a bit of homework and the balancing act of what to look for and how not to spend hours and hours and hours researching every facet of their life to only use one little bit of information. So yeah, knowledge and confidence are the key components of starting effective conversations on LinkedIn.   Is Confidence the Secret Weapon in Modern B2B Sales? · [01:48]   Will Barron: Totally going to sidetrack here. But is confidence the secret hack, if there is one to sales in general? What I mean by that Daniel is, I know that our training project we sell at salesman.org, I can talk about it comfortably. I'm really happy with the quality of it and I've never really worked at any bad companies. I've only ever worked for, by fluke if nothing else, outstanding companies in the space. So I've always felt this confidence. But I know that I don't need to lie, I don't need to manipulate people.   Will Barron: If someone is a good fit and they don't sign up, it's almost their loss. Of course perhaps I'm losing out some revenue and opportunity there, but I can walk away confidently from these conversations when someone doesn't want to sign up and go, “Well, it's your problem not mine.” It's confidence that they hack to all of this, because I feel like a lot of traditional sales training, sales training in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, was how to fake confidence, how to manipulate people,