Blog: How to land golden goose accounts by mastering LinkedIn

These days, most organisations and salespeople rely on digital channels to grow their networks and build professional relationships. One platform that’s now almost synonymous with BD networking is LinkedIn.

Use of the platform increased significantly during the Covid pandemic, and has continued to expand since then. With over 1 billion users and 67 million companies listed on LinkedIn as of April 2024, it is the “world’s largest professional network” and is growing by 9% year on year.

This is probably why Emma Wilson, head of communications and content marketing at our partner Hundred Brands, describes LinkedIn as “a 24/7 global networking event that is happening 365 days of the year.”

And everyone’s invited.

All this means that, with the right approach, you can introduce yourself, build a relationship, and ultimately sell to almost anyone in your industry.

However, as you’ve probably realised, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and stand out from others in your sector. In this blog post, we discuss how to make an impact on LinkedIn, whether you want to raise your profile as a sales leader or land previously unreachable accounts.

Be social, be consistent

A common complaint we often hear from clients is that they give LinkedIn a try for a few weeks, don’t see any results, and then give up.

However, like any sales relationship, it takes time to build trust with your audience. One of the best ways you can do this is by engaging with posts. After all, it’s social media, not broadcast media. The more “social” you are, and the more conversations you engage in, the more your audience will reciprocate.

When it comes to posting, focus on content that is likely to spark debate and discussion. A great way to do this is by asking questions to find out which are the main issues affecting your target audience, and prompting your network to share their opinions. Since 2023, LinkedIn’s algorithm has focused on strengthening existing connections and surfacing content that offers knowledge or advice. So, if you contribute insights or share relevant information, it’s more likely to reach members both in your network and beyond it who share the same interests.

And you have to be consistent. The more regularly you post and comment, the more your connections will start to look out for you. LinkedIn’s algorithm also favours high engagement, as long as it’s meaningful, and is more likely to display your content to other members with whom you frequently and actively interact – whether on your own posts or on theirs.

In short, the more you engage with your community, the wider your reach is likely to be for future posts. At the same time, the more high-quality content you post that is directly relevant to your audience, the more engagement you will generate.

Overall, focus on quantity of quality and, most importantly, never slide straight into someone’s DMs with a pitch.

Emma says: “It’s about building relationships and interacting with prospects by answering questions and providing useful content until the prospect is ready to buy.”

Be more strategic

There’s no denying the fact that social media can be a major time suck. So to avoid being drawn into the LinkedIn rabbit hole, you need to take a strategic, targeted approach. A good start is creating lists based on individuals, job titles, organisations or sectors where you want to introduce yourself. This is made a lot easier by using LinkedIn’s premium Sales Navigator tool. You can then begin commenting on specific users’ posts and slowly building a relationship.

By “social listening” (essentially, keeping an eye on what people are posting), you can get an idea of the topics that interest them, whether personally or professionally.

This provides a great hook to spark up a conversation either online or when you accidentally bump into them at a networking event (OK, you saw on a recent post that they’d be there and quickly booked a ticket).

When you have a clear and targeted list of people who you want to engage with, spending 15 minutes a day on LinkedIn is going to generate better results than more of a scattergun approach.

As well as knowing the industry topics your audience are likely to react to, using the right LinkedIn hashtags, which serve as topic categories, also helps you get your content in front of your prospects.

Focus on the right metrics

It’s easy to get hung up on how many likes and comments your content is generating. Yes, this is a good indication of how many people are seeing and reading your content, but these are essentially vanity metrics. It’s more important to focus on the end results.

So if you’re using LinkedIn to raise your profile – set quarterly targets for how many webinar or podcasts you get booked on. If it’s about lead generation, how many conversations are you booking in as a result of LinkedIn activity?

It’s also important to remember that LinkedIn activity produces a compound effect. You’ll certainly get better results in the fourth quarter of activity than the first (if you’re consistently spending 15 minutes a day on the platform, that is).

However, one of the most important metrics is the Social Selling Index. This is a free tool that, in the words of LinkedIn, “measures how effective you are at establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships.”

Why is the SSI so important? It helps you benchmark your performance against others in your network and industry. Once you achieve an SSI score of 75 or above, LinkedIn’s algorithm will show your content to more of the people in your network. Achieving a score of 80 or above demonstrates that you’re an industry thought leader and have significant influence.

Use the right tools

Regularly coming up with new content ideas is an issue that many LinkedIn users struggle with. However, there are tools to make your life easier. For example, Emma recommends curation tool Feedly. This helps you discover content from key industry websites, twitter accounts and other sources from the web to spark lively conversations with your LinkedIn connections.

Although you do want to time your posts well to make them more visible, using third-party tools to schedule posts in advance isn’t recommended. According to Emma, automated scheduling tools can reduce the reach of your posts by up to 15%.

This is because LinkedIn wants to foster “meaningful engagement” between connections and reduce the number of people who post content but make no effort to continue the discussion by engaging with audience comments (known as “post and ghost”).

In summary

LinkedIn is a highly effective way of staying front of mind even when you’re not physically in front of prospective clients. While in-person networking events contribute their own value, there’s no denying that a strategic approach to LinkedIn will help you strengthen your network, build relationships, and, ultimately, win more sales.