I’ve Helped My Clients Generate $100M from LinkedIn. Here’s How…

Over the last 6 years, I’ve helped my clients win more than $100m of business using organic social selling on LinkedIn. 

Looking back over the hundreds of people I’ve helped 1:1 and the teams I worked with in larger businesses -there are common success markers.

In this article (sorry it’s a long one), I’m sharing the success markers that are common across all my clients that have achieved extraordinary results on LinkedIn.

Here’s the 5 success markers...

1. Stop banking your LinkedIn success on posting.
2. Build authority on a specific commercial problem.
3. Working the room.
4. Pre-sell you and your offer.
5. Sell the call, not the service.

1 - Stop banking your LinkedIn success on posting.

I get 10-12 inbound leads every week from my content, but it didn’t start that way. It took time to build the awareness and trust deep enough for someone to reach out directly to me from my posts. 

Let’s be honest, we’d prefer and we want people to come to us. We’re biased to want the easy route. Content provides that easy route - but it can take time to get that to work. On average it takes someone 17 months to get into positive ROI from posting content alone.

When I was helping my client, Sarah, she was posting 5 days per week and it was exhausting her. She was spending sometimes 2 hours making one post. Then she’d spend hours analysing what worked and what didn’t. She sells high-end consulting into billion dollar businesses, she only needs a couple of clients a year - yet 20% of her working week was spent on posts. We cut down the posting, curbed the perfectionism and allocated 30-mins each day to what really mattered - developing relationships with the people who will pay her six figure sums. 

After 90-days of focus, she had one project signed, one waiting board sign off and she was considering bringing on an associate consultant.

LinkedIn is much more than just a posting platform, it’s a relationship building platform. Ask yourself this question… 

What is the most efficient and effective way to build relationships with the right people? 

That can include using posts, but the reality is 95% of the people who see your content won’t be your ideal client. So it’s a part of a longer term strategy. Over the years, I’ve seen people pursue this route and three months down the road give up saying LinkedIn doesn’t work. LinkedIn does work, they just picked the hardest way to get success in their first 90-days and got demoralised.

2 - Build authority around a narrow commercial problem.

It’s really easy to convert leads when you are perceived as the go-to expert for a specific problem. When someone sees you understand their problem, understand their situation and have success in helping people solve it - getting clients gets easier.

The trouble is sometimes our animal brain stops us doing that.

I had a real struggle with a leadership expert a few years ago. I was working with them 1:1 and despite having 20 years of experience, they’d never had to market themselves. All their business was referrals. 

What was his problem? He’d worked with so many different businesses, worked in so many different situations, he had no focus. He would flit from talking about executive communication to manager accountability then jump to cross functional teams. He was all over the place. In his mind, all these situations stem from the same underlying issues, so they are all connected.

But his audience doesn’t care about the underlying issues, they want to solve the specific issues they see and are struggling with. He was building authority as a generalised leadership expert.

The harsh reality is that you can build authority as an expert and your ideal clients can still not see a good reason to pay for your help. Nobody needs a generalised expert.

They want an expert in solving their specific commercial problem.

A lot of people I talk to worry that going super specific will shrink their opportunities - it actually does the opposite - you become more relevant and resonant. Another big reason people struggle with this is the feeling of being reduced - your expertise is broader than just one specific problem - I get that feeling too. But it’s not about my identity, it’s my commercial strategy. 

In 2018 when I dropped all my other services and focused on LinkedIn and Social Selling, it felt uncomfortable. My business grew from $18k a month to $200k a month organically just by focusing on owning a problem. It’s worked too, I’ve made $18m in 8 years which is $10m more than I made in the previous 20 years..

What is the specific commercial problem you own?

Build your authority around one narrow commercial problem people want to solve.

When you own a problem, your message, your offer all gets clearer for buyers.

Believe me it gets easier. 

3 - Working the room.

The biggest deal closed by one of my clients is $6m. 

My personal record is a $1.4m deal. 

Neither of these deals happened because of one post or one message. It was a journey of trust and relationship building.

My $1.4m deal took 23 months to get from connection to first call. Steve’s deal also took over a year to come off. I’m guessing as you’re reading this, you wouldn’t mind winning a $1m+ deal, but you’d be questioning whether you can wait a year to get it.

This is why you need to work the room.

Think of LinkedIn not as a platform, but as a room full of people. You want to be close to your buyers in that room - you need to connect with them, that’s fundamental. But you also need to find the early opportunities in that room.

Early opportunities are what help my clients get success quickly. I’ll be honest, most social selling experts won’t tell you this, but the first 90-days of taking LinkedIn seriously are hard. 

It’s where most people give up.

If you’ve been taking LinkedIn seriously for years, you have a trust and name recognition advantage someone starting today doesn’t have. That edge makes a huge difference. A newbie could copy me exactly and would still fail.

So, you have to do what I call reactive outbound in the short term, whilst you build more depth of trust and authority on the platform.

Don’t think about it as pitching people, think about it more as following up peoples curiosity in what you’re doing…

I do this even though I get inbound leads..

• I post polls and start conversations with the people who vote.
• I chat to my newsletter subscribers.
• I share lead magnets with people who connect and engage with me.
• I talk to people who have engaged with my content.
• I message people who view my profile.
• I talk to new followers.

When it comes to the crunch, for you to knock it out of the park, you just need to get a good conversation with the right people.

Reactive outbound is a way to do that without pitching people or being annoying in those early days when nobody knows you.

4 - Pre-sell yourself and your offer.

“I have no idea what you do” - I had to have a harsh conversation with a client. It was like pulling teeth trying to figure out what they were selling.

• Her banner on their profile was a photo of a meadow.
• Her featured section was a post that popped off.
• Her custom link said “join the October forum”

I asked her what’s the October forum? She began explaining she was hosting a facilitated CEO forum in October and she’d been posting about it for a while now. 

In one sense she was doing the right thing… The posting is connected to what she is selling. But in another, it was totally wrong.

She’d set up her presence where she assumed people knew what she offered. 

I see this problem all across LinkedIn - assuming it’s clear.

Pre-selling is about two things…

First, eliminate complexity, making it really easy for people to understand what you do, who you serve and you’re credible. 

You do that by connecting your entire presence so it’s a unified message.

Second, it’s about becoming known, liked and trusted by your buyers. To do this, it’s about creating multiple touch points. Robert Zajonc, a polish psychologist proved that familiarity breeds affection. Simply being exposed to something - a word, a shape, a face, or a sound - makes you like it more, even if you don't consciously remember seeing it.

He discovered that, between 10-20 exposures is where the maximum peak of familiarity and positive bias is. This is where many go wrong… they change their offer, their message too often so they don’t build that exposure count.

You need to have a consistency across your entire presence and build up those exposures. If you look at election campaigns in history, the winner is always the one with the clearest and simplest message. The ones that lose often have the more complex message.

Think about it as SPACE:

• Search - if your audience is searching or interested in a specific problem on LinkedIn, Google or with AI are you associated with what they’d be looking for?
• Profile - Is your profile clearly explaining what you do, why it matters and what exactly you offer and for who?
• Audience - Are you getting into proximity with your target audience by connecting, sharing in groups or strategic engagement?
• Content - Is your content helping the audience to know you and tied to your offer? Or are you sharing general educational information?
• Evidence - No matter where your audience looks, is there evidence you have achieved results they want? Can they easily find proof you can deliver?

Pre-selling is the long term way you get clients from LinkedIn. All of it working together to help people believe you are the best person to work with or hire.

5 - Sell the conversation, not the service.

Nobody wants a sales pitch in their DMs. I get why people do it. They are so eager to get a sale, they just want to get as quickly as possible to a deal.

There is a reason cold outreach response rates are on the floor. Right now if you pitched your service to 200 people on LinkedIn, you’d be lucky to get even one positive reply.

Do we seriously believe that none of those 200 people need help? Of course they do.

But nobody wants to be sold to.

If you’re selling a $200 thing, that is a volume game - that’s ads, that virality, that’s big audience territory. If you’re selling a $50k service, it’s a small number of conversations with the right people.

There is a subtle difference here... Sell the call, not the service. That changes how you approach messaging, follow up and your content.

People book calls and enquire because they are curious - they don’t book calls if they think they are going to be sold to. 

So, the job isn’t to convince people to buy, it’s to make them curious enough to have a conversation.

I had a conversation with a marketing manager at an enterprise software company. She was asking me what counts as a lead when it comes to LinkedIn.

I told her the best you’ll get (consistently) in the short term is MQLs - Marketing Qualified Leads. They fit the profile, expressing curiosity and interest and are open to talking.

Most of my inbound leads are what we would call SQLs - Sales Qualified Leads - they fit my target persona and want to discuss my services specifically.

I get 10x more MQLs than SQLs.

MQLs become SQLs - they just need a bit of nurturing - some MQLs become SQLs and clients in the same call.

Some take multiple calls. Some have a call with me and I don’t hear from them for months.

If I only took calls with people who fit as an SQL - my business would be a fraction of the size. 

So, if I pitch my service and ask for a call - MQLs will run a mile. They’re exploring.

If I just hunt for SQLs, I have to go for volume, sending hundreds of messages to find the person where they are looking for exactly what we offer right now.

So, I don’t sell the service in follow ups, messages or content - I offer them an opportunity to look at how things work, give them resources, just have conversations.

I know if I get 10 calls in my diary, that will net at least 3 clients. So, I focus on getting conversations with the right people.

Most of my calls are the same whether it’s an MQL or SQL - I want to understand where they are at, I want to know what their goals are, I want to know how important it is. I’ll recommend some approaches and ask permission to share how I’ve helped my own clients do that.

My “sales” calls are essentially coaching calls with a next step.

It’s a system.

I realise this is a huge article and there is a lot to unpack in this, but essentially, this is a system. It’s helped me build a $2.5m a year business organically and helped my clients generate $100m in new business.

You get reliable results when you have a plan and work it.

How I help you

I help experts to win clients on LinkedIn without waiting for referrals. I teach people how to leverage social selling to build a predictable pipeline.

I do this through 3 vehicles

• Social Selling Accelerator - A six month implementation programme with 1:1 coaching.
• One Day Strategy - I work with you and your team 1:1 at your offices.
• Public classes - I host public workshops across the US and UK

No paid ads. No pushy tactics. No posting every day.

Most of my clients launch within 30 days (depending on your bandwidth) and start seeing leads in the first 60.

If you'd like to know more schedule a call here.

If you're new here, I'm Dean Seddon, a global social selling expert, founder of Maverrik, and a 15-year practitioner who has trained over 25,000 salespeople and business owners. If you enjoyed this content, please follow and subscribe to see more.