Tips on social selling and turning leads discovered on social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter and SlideShare. Listen to the original podcast here: http://www.hotprospect.com/turn-social-media-into-warm-leads-hotprospect-com-podcast-episode-one/

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Turn Social Media Into Warm Leads:
HotProspect.com Podcast, Episode One
Note: This podcast was originally posted on the HotProspect.com blog. You
can listen to the original audio by visiting: http://www.hotprospect.com/turn-
social-media-into-warm-leads-hotprospect-com-podcast-episode-one/
Joe Fahrner: Hi, this is Joe Fahrner. I’m the founder and CEO of
HotProspect.com. I’m here with Kelly Huffman who is the VP of Sales here at
HotProspect. Hello Kelly.
Kelly Huffman: Hello Joe.
Joe Fahrner: And this is the first episode of the HotProspect podcast and we
talk about sales and marketing using social media and big data. Some of the
techniques built into our product and just other tips that Kelly and I have learned
in our multi-year experience as sales people. So, today, we are going to talk
about social lead generation and specifically using social tools to generate warm
leads. And so, obviously, there are two types of leads. There are cold leads and
warm leads. Every salesperson loves warm leads. These are typically
introductions that come from trusted entry points, trusted advisors, mutual
connections. And social media is really great for helping to foster those. So we
want to talk a little bit about some of the techniques that we’ve used both at
HotProspect and elsewhere to kind of generate warm leads through social
media. So, I’m going to jump off and just start talking initially about like the kind of
most impactful social network for professionals, LinkedIn. Obviously, if you are
not already on LinkedIn and you are listening to this podcast, you certainly
should be. And so, it’s an amazing network for information, prospecting, finding
new prospects, and learning more about existing prospects. LinkedIn is really
killer because basically there is lots of great search focus tools, lots of different
ways to find people at the companies you are targeting. And, so basically it works
like any other search. You basically enter information. It could be specific names,
it could be companies, it could be industries. There’s lots of different features.
Kelly, I know you’ve got lots of experience working with LinkedIn search. Why
don’t you walk through kind of when you are trying to find the right contacts at a
given company, how you approach that from a search standpoint on LindedIn.
Kelly Huffman: Sure, I think that for me the entry point and the most important
thing to do is to begin your search with your own broad understanding of you

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believe you are looking to find. It may not always be that obvious to you, but let’s
assume for example that you are interested in buyers who are in the marketing
function of a company. The marketing function can take many different forms
with a company such as a size of Microsoft will have marketing titles and
functions all over that organization that probably are not necessarily a fit for what
you are doing. But it’s always a good place to start with the LinkedIn’s people
search or company search functionality and using some of their advanced tools.
So, I like to start broad because if you go too finite you’ll probably come up with
fewer results so a smart way to do that is find the target organization try a broad
marketing keyword search and see who comes back with current titles. And if it’s
a huge list, then start using the keyword functionality and adding particular
functional specialties you might be looking for. For example, perhaps
somebody’s in demand generation. Well, that’s a marketing function. Try the
keyword demand and see if you get any kind of results. If you don’t, well, then
maybe they’re not using that particular term. Another thing I think is really
valuable and sometimes overlooked is if somebody’s been with a company let’s
say less than a year or so, they might have updated their LinkedIn profile to
reflect that but they haven’t really added any color about what specific function
that they’re doing for the company. So, a really key aspect for me is to actually
look at their history and see what were they doing before they joined this
particular company you are looking at now; what function were they doing one or
two companies prior? I think it’s fairly bet to know that they are doing something
very, very similar at the new organization if in general the role and the titles look
the same, so it’s a great way to figure out what marketing function they might
have had at a prior company and infer that they’re doing the same thing now.
Joe Fahrner: Yeah, it’s great. So, one of the things LinkedIn obviously has a
bunch of different ways you can sort search results. I think by default it sorts by
how far away you are from that person based off of social connections in your
own LinkedIn network and I think you can also sort by relevance based off your
search keywords; these types of things. How useful do you find the actual
connections stuff to be in your particular use case in searching and trying to find
potential customer for HotProspect?
Kelly Huffman: I think it’s actually very useful and I am a strong proponent of
leveraging some of the tools that LinkedIn actually has. The ability to actually ask
for a warm introduction to somebody who is a second generation from you and
you, therefore, know somebody who knows somebody. Those are great tools to
use and I highly recommend using them. They’re not always the most effective
thing I think with all the noise that we get from the various communication
channels we have now, I don’t necessarily somebody’s avoiding you, but it is

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easier to miss an inbound communication from a LinkedIn email or LinkedIn
inmail. I think the other thing too, it depends on what audience you’re going after.
You might find you that you’ve hit a node where you kind of know everybody’s a
second degree from you. But when you really try to scale your business you’ll be
running into third generation and beyond a lot. And that’s actually a good thing
because that means you’re broadening your horizons a lot. And that can create
some challenges in being able to figure out how to reach those folks. But one
thing you should do is follow LinkedIn’s guidelines to a certain extent, but you
should really be broadening your own network so that your reach is that much
greater on LinkedIn. But there’s also ways to be creative and figure out who
these folks are at a third generation and make sure you don’t give up on the fact
that somebody’s far away from you and seems out of reach because maybe
they’re not.
Joe Fahrner: Yeah, that’s a great point. The other trick with LinkedIn that I’ve
found over time is that a lot of times it can be difficult to identify the specific
individual at a company that you think may be the buyer and, in fact, like I
actually try not to guess to the greatest extent possible just because you know, if
you guess wrong you may end up not being super relevant when you try to reach
out to that person. But what I have found is that one trick is to look and just sort
of try to look at the people around LinkedIn, the employees of a target company
that are on LinkedIn. Sort of view the top few profiles when you search for that
company and one of the things I’ve found is that one indicator that someone is
sort of really active on LinkedIn or more susceptible to potential contact is that
they’ve got a really well manicured LinkedIn profile. So, they’ve got the picture,
they’ve got a full description, they’ve got several paragraphs related to every
single company that they’ve worked at, they’ve joined a bunch of groups, they’ve
got a large number of connections. And basically, even if that person isn’t the
buyer, even in the functional organization that you typically sell to, I’ve had a ton
of experience and success in reaching out to folks like that and just finding the
common ground that, hey, we are both LinkedIn users, we both kind of believe in
the karma of the introduction system on LinkedIn. And I’ve had a lot of success,
probably, you know, 50-50 or so of when you reach out to one of these types of
folks that is heavily engaged within LinkedIn and just sort of saying, hey, I’m
looking to find a person in your organization that has the problem or the need
that our product addresses and getting positive responses back there. And, in
fact, you know, one thing there that is interesting is a lot of times those folks who
are not necessarily your target buyer are people who are in positions who aren’t
being contacted ad nauseum from people like us who are trying to sell them
things and so they tend to be a little more receptive versus the VP of Marketing
or CTO or CIO at a mid-sized or larger organization who is getting deluged with

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inbound emails day in and day out. So, any other kind of tips or tricks related to
LinkedIn that you’ve built up over the years?
Kelly Huffman: No, I think that about covers it from a broad perspective.
Joe Fahrner: Awesome. So, the other sort of social technique that I want to
talk about is somewhat related to LinkedIn. It’s using presentations on
SlideShare to identify entry points for decision makers. The reason I say it’s
associated with LinkedIn is LinkedIn acquired SlideShare a few weeks ago and it
was announced a week or ten days ago and for about $175 million or something
in that range. So, SlideShare, if you’re not familiar with it, it is basically the
YouTube for PowerPoint presentations. It’s full of slide decks that people upload.
A lot of times they’re coming from conferences or marketing materials, these
types of things. And what SlideShare does is digitizes these presentations and
makes the contents of them searchable in the context of the SlidShare.com site.
So, what’s cool about that is that if you have ever listened to a keynote
presentation or presentation at a conference, you realize that it’s very common
that either early in the presentation or in the last slide of the presentation that the
speaker gives some introductory information about themselves, but also contact
information. So, bare minimum these days is typically a twitter handle but a lot of
times they’ll also provide an email address. And, so one of the things that I’ve
had success doing is using SlideShare. There’s other similar sites, DocStock and
Scrib.com. But using sites like this to search for presentations from folks at
companies that I’m targeting and very often you can find contact information in
those presentations that can be useful. And, if you think about the type of people
who commonly give presentations on behalf of their company, they tend to fall
into two categories; either they are like important people, senior executives,
CEOs, VPs that are kind of out sort of telling the story of their companies or
specific functions or specific successes they’ve had. But also the other category
of folks that tend to give lots of presentations and you know are discoverable on
SlideShare are folks that are kind of community management or evangelist type
roles. And these are folks whose job is to really be accessible, so very often they
may not necessarily be, you know, the decision maker or the buyer that you are
targeting, but they’re typically very accessible and could be a great entry point to
reach out and try to get an introduction to the right buyer within that target
organization. So, it’s, it’s– SlideShare in and of itself is actually a really cool site
just for general sales intelligence. There’s lots of great content there. So, outside
of lead generation, just discovery of cool techniques and tips and strategies that
people use, SlideShare is great for that because there’s tons of awesome
presentations there. But, ah, but yeah, something that I think a lot of people may
not, the technique a lot of people may not be using in the context of these

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presentation sites is actually discovering these contacts. Is that something that
you’ve done in the past?
Kelly Huffman: It’s actually not. I haven’t and I think it’s actually a great idea. I
think we are always looking for a leg up and a unique way of finding the right
people to talk to which is particularly decision makers of companies and that’s
actually a great idea.
Joe Fahrner: Well, the cool thing is, is like it actually gives you a great entry
point, a sincere entry point, when you actually do reach out because you have
the context of this presentation that you just viewed and you can say, “Hey, I saw
that presentation that you gave at XYZ conference. It was awesome and I really
enjoyed this about it.” And so it’s a great way to turn what otherwise would have
been a cold pitch into a relevant, warm introduction. Cool, so the final network or
social platform that I wanted to talk about today was just using Twitter as a place
to find new leads and engage and do a little bit of social selling. Twitter is really
an interesting platform because it’s got hundreds of millions of registered users, I
think about 500 million registered users, about a hundred million monthly active
users. Obviously, a lot of just general consumer stuff that happens there, but
there’s a ton of business activity and I think that gets overlooked a lot of time just
beyond kind of the B2B space, beyond the business and consumer stuff, there’s
lots of B2B companies that are really active on Twitter. And, so there’s two kinds
of interesting strategies for using Twitter for lead generation or social selling. One
is following company accounts. So, identifying the kind of official company
accounts for businesses that you are targeting as prospects. It’s a really great
way like to just get information pushed to you that could be really strong sales
triggers, and really strong understanding. Give you some insights into the things
that are important to that company that you are targeting. Some companies use
Twitter purely as a PR channel, but increasingly, I think business are finding that
they can kind of express some personality and more insight about kind of what
they’re all about on platforms like Twitter. So, following the official business
accounts on Twitter for your prospect companies I think is like a no brainer. You
should definitely be doing that. But even further, you can use this as a way to
also identify potential decision makers or leads or again kind of the evangelist or
the community evangelist-type folks because often those company Twitter
accounts will also reference employee accounts; CEOs, you know VPs, again,
community managers, these types of things. One great way to discover those
employee accounts is just to do a search for the company name on Twitter
search. So, Twitter search has gotten really great and relevant and so a lot of
times you’ll see if you search for a company, you’ll not only see the accounts
associated with the company as like official accounts, but also prominent

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accounts of employees of that company, which is kind of cool. And then it’s a
great platform if you’re following these types of accounts to be helpful. Right, so,
Twitter is not a great direct sales platform, in my experience. It’s really more
information, discovery platform. But one thing that happens on Twitter, one really
common behavior is that people ask questions, right. And that they may be just
trying to start a discussion or they may actually be looking at problems, looking
for solutions and leveraging Twitter as a platform to get answers. And, so, if you
are following these accounts, particularly kind of the executive-type accounts or
employee-type accounts, and someone asks for a recommendation, whether that
somebody maps back directly to your product or service or is just some general
piece of information that people are trying to search for, you can jump in and be
helpful and that’s just a great way to start just building credibility with your
perspective customer on a platform like that. I don’t know. How much Twitter kind
of interaction have you had Kelly historically, in your career?
Kelly Huffman: Well, a fair amount. I think that Joe touches on a good point, that
following a company gives you a lot of insight, but I also think further to his point
that following individuals, in particular, if you are lucky enough to discover the
actual people you would like to interact with. By following those people, you learn
a little bit about them, but you also are basically showing some interest in them
too and you can re-Tweet some of the interesting Tweets that they do. And, in
general, you’re essentially creating your own sort of lead-nurturing mechanism by
just engaging with them without the pushy direct message, Hey, I’m trying to sell
you something. It’s a little bit of a relationship and it’s subtle, but I think it’s
effective. It’s actually worked for me, but it’s also worked on me. So, I’ve found
myself feeling familiar with some people that followed me for reasons that I had
no idea why they were doing so. Still, it’s just a nice way to kind of warm your
prospect up to the fact that you’re out there and you exist. At the very least, if
your Twitter handle implies or your own bio states who you are and what
company you are, you might get that interest piqued by that particular prospect
as well and they might come check you out first.
Joe Fahrner: Awesome, yeah. You mentioned re-Tweets. That’s a great point
in getting on their radar through re-Tweets. Another even more subtle technique
that I think a lot of people overlook is the favorite button on Twitter, that you can
kind of favorite tweets. The cool thing is that when you re-Tweet something or if
you favorite a Tweet, the account whose Tweet you are re-Tweeting or favoriting
gets a notification by default from Twitter. And, so it’s a nice kind of subtle, like
you say, not in-your-face kind of way to give some positive reinforcement that
you like kind of what’s going on there. And you also get on their radar which is

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cool. Awesome, so actually it’s a good segue to, ah. We should talk about where
to find us on Twitter. So, you’re @KelHuffman.
Kelly Huffman: I am
Joe Fahrner: @JoeF and @HotPros is the HotProspect handle. We’d love to–
We’re pretty active on Twitter and we’d love to have you follow us there. We’d
love to get to know you on that platform as well. Hopefully, some of these tips,
techniques, strategies, things that we’ve developed over time are useful. We’d
love to hear from you. Are there other techniques you use on these platforms,
other platforms or looking. This is obviously a great emerging set of techniques
for sales and marketing professionals and it’s something we’ll continue to cover
in the future. So, thank you very much for sticking with us. Hopefully, you find the
information useful and helpful and we will catch you next time. Thanks again.
Kelly Huffman: Thank you. Take care.