A YC Founder's Guide to Linkedin Sales

If you’re a technical founder, especially building B2B, you’ll quickly realize that sales and marketing, not the technology, is the hardest part. We spent a lot of time learning how to do this right, and this post is a primer on one of our more successful strategies: linkedin outbound.

For B2B there are a lot of channels that you can use. By far and away, the most valuable two are 1) warm intros and 2) linkedin. When we started using Linkedin our rates were terrible, and we had to learn a lot about how to use it as a tool. This post has all of the little tricks that can get you up to 40-50% connect rate, 20-25% response rate, and allow your team to book 30-40 meetings a month with your ICP per cofounder.

Overview

The key to linkedin sales is using a bunch of small tricks that add up to give you really good rates with your ICP. This post will go over all of them in detail, but at a high level here’s what you need to know:

• Have a good profile (good tagline, headshot of shoulders and above - this is what people see)

• Connect, don’t message

• Once you’re connected, have multiple touch points with a lead

• A/B test messaging

• Sales is about activity, you should be spending 30 minutes sending 40+ connection requests a day to max out your 200 per week, and following up with leads who have already connected

• Use sales nav, not the regular linkedin search

• Filter for people who are actually active on linkedin

• As you’re building your audience, publish useful content to engage them

There are some downsides with this process, especially with how it can be hard to target some ICPs through sales nav - for folks with this issue, consider using Flyflow to find leads.

Your Profile

When sending connection requests, people will look at your profile to decide whether they want to connect with you. Most people when deciding to connect will make a snap decision based on two things: your profile picture and your description. Here’s what to include:

Your Profile Picture

Your profile picture is simple: keep it to a smiling headshot, shoulders and above that clearly shows who you are. No anime art etc. Just be you.

Your Title

Titles are part art, part science. The best converting linkedin titles have three things: your title at xyz company (include YC, dollars invested etc if you have it!), something professional about you, and something personal about you. The best linkedin outbounders have figured this out over a lot of iterations. You want to be professional, but real and authentic. Mine goes more professional with “built to build“ and “I like going from zero to one“, but it’s authentic to who I am and what I like to do. Bonus points if you can work in something about your ICP.

The Rest of Your Profile

The rest of your profile is important, but not as important as the profile picture and title. Make sure your professional history is filled out, especially if you have done impressive things in the past. Rarely will people look at this stuff, but you want to make sure it’s populated when they do.

Connect, Don’t Message

I can’t stress this enough, but anything but a plain connection request (no message attached), comes off as too salesy. Don’t use inmail etc, just connect. Over tons of iterations, it’s proven that just plain connection requests convert better. Part of the world is using linkedin for sales, and part of the world is using linkedin for networking, and who doesn’t want to add an ambitious YC founder to their network? Connect first, then you can figure out messaging once they’ve connected with you.

You only get 200 of these a week, so a lot of the strategy is using them well and maxing out that connection count per week - more on this below.

Multiple Touch Points

On average it takes 7 points of contact to book a meeting with a prospect. I think this is the thing that comes most unnaturally to founders: you need to follow up. On the first message, at best your response rate will be 5-10%. Rarely people are annoyed with follow up message, and while you’re doing sales your goal should be either to get to a “no“ or a demo meeting as fast as possible.

Once you’re connected with a prospect, message them every 2-3 days until they either tell you to go away or book a meeting. I typically do up to 5 messages before giving up. The difference between 1 message and 5 will be a 15-20% increase in meetings booked.

Perfect the Messaging

Never Start with “Hey <name>“

Every linkedin sales pitch that people get starts with “Hi <name>“ - don’t do this. Use some messaging that makes the prospect feel like you’re reaching out casually and have already done some research on them. Lead with something like “Hey I know this is random, but you seemed like the right person to reach out to“ as your opening line.

My typical linkedin pitch has three parts

• “Hey I know this is random, but you seemed like the right person to reach out to“

• Pitch on what you think the value props of the product are to the prospect

• Proposal to book a meeting

• … Lots of follow ups

A/B Test Casual and More Salesy Messaging

Once you’re getting to enough connections, you should be A/B testing messaging. The two best types of messages to test are something very casual (quite literally “Hey, wanna get coffee?“ - that’s it) and then something like the sales pitch above to see what converts better. Sometimes people will be more excited to get a virtual coffee with you than book a sales pitch.

Focus on Activity

Sales is about how much activity you pack in a day. Linkedin is a good channel because it actually limits the amount of outbounding you can do. In total you can only send up to 200 connection requests a week and then linkedin will lock you out. Set a goal of sending 40ish per weekday for best results. This should take about 30 minutes and will get your process started.

Most of sales or SDR work is a game of activity, so packing your linkedin with as much outbound a week you can fit is in your best interest.

Sales Nav

Sales nav is 100% worth the $100 a month it costs for better filtering and tracking of your outreach. There are a lot of ways to use sales nav, but probably the most powerful two are the search and lead lists.

How to Search For Prospects

Here’s a good example of a sales nav search:

Some keys:

• The title search is probably the most specific you can get on your ICP. Here I’m searching for CTOs at medium-sized companies as a filter

  • One problem with sales nav is it doesn’t allow you to drill down companies as leads, so if you want to find “COOs at cat and dog food brands“ you’re going to have a hard time - if this is a problem for you, consider using Flyflow - more on this below

• Always use either “changed jobs“ or “posted on linkedin“ as filters - this ensures that the person you’re connecting with is active on linkedin and will boost your connect rates by 20-40%.

Lists

Once I’ve built a good search of people who are active on linkedin, I go through each and just send plain connection requests and add them to a list.

This helps me keep my connections organized. In sales nav you can also filter for “on list CTOs at Medium Sized Companies“ but that you haven’t messaged - this allows you to make sure you don’t miss any outbound opportunities.

Publish Content

If you’re doing this right you should be getting between 80-100 new connections a week per cofounder. That’s almost 400 connections a month! Besides just messaging them, all of a sudden now they’ll get all of your content.

Start by adding value. Post things that will be interesting to your ICP and give them value. Sprinkle in content about your company and what you’re building - this will also help increase message response rates.

Use Flyflow for Hard-to-Find ICPs

One of the downsides to sales nav is that it makes it hard to find very specific ICPs. At Flyflow we built a solution that allows you to easily narrow down to build lists of your perfect target customer, regardless of how you plan on engaging them.

We have a workflow builder that uses AI and company signals like the content on their website or what roles they’re hiring for. You can even drill down to find “COOs at cat and dog food brands“, quickly and easily.

If this sounds interesting, sign up at https://app.flyflow.ai to get started!