Our Software development agency, ZenDev, relied on inbound marketing to bring clients for us for the first five years of the company. Most of this was through my LinkedIn activity as the CEO of the company. I would post 2-3 times a week, over a period of a few years, which did wonders for expanding our network and finding work.
We built an organization of close to 100 coworkers, purely on this strategy. Like many other companies, we hit peak demand in 2022 when interest rates were at an all-time low.
Fast forward to 2024, and we all know that acquiring customers is harder than we remember it being in the past decade. On top of that, some customers started having financial difficulties themselves, which led to lost clients.
We knew we had to expand our customer acquisition strategy to stay afloat in these hard times.
How should we do sales now?
At Zendev, we’ve always thought about how we can do things differently. We received a ton of offers, from companies offering to do mass outreach (spam) for us. We never liked this approach as we felt that each message of that nature just waters down our brand. I hate receiving them, so I won’t be sending them.
Then we thought about doing personalized cold calling/outreach. But we felt that just by doing that, we’re going to compete with all other companies doing the same thing, while at the same time being entirely new to this way of doing business.
We asked ourselves, where can we have a competitive advantage in this?
We found a solution in something we called “Warm outreach”.
Warm outreach
Years in business have taught us that people want to do business with people they feel that they know and trust.
Rather than doing cold outreach, we wanted to leverage the relationships already created over LinkedIn. So many times I would receive a message on LinkedIn that starts with “you don’t know me but I know you”.
We realized that the people that reach out like that are just the tip of the iceberg of those with that perception.
What if we actively tried to find those people that represent the rest of the “iceberg”, and tried to reach out to them, turning reactive sales into proactive, or inbound into outbound in technical sales terms.
So we did. The way that we found who these people were, was that our team went through all my posts on LinkedIn, pulled out all the information about all the people that engaged with them (commented, reaction, repost) and then created a top list of the most frequent engagers. We assumed that the people that engaged the most, are the ones we potentially have the strongest relationships with.
We called it the “Top network”.
The top network
Our sales team started reaching out to these individuals with warm messages, referencing the engagement that they had with my posts.
This gave us a tremendous response rate to strike up a conversation. Keep in mind that these people were often not the decision-makers in their organizations, but through their help, we would often get access to them.
When we saw what it did for our sales, we realized we’ve struck gold with this approach. We also realized that this is something that many other companies could apply in their organization.
This methodology gave birth to our product “Linkbound”. It’s a systemic way to use your inbound capital, and transform it into warm outbound sales.
Linkbound
By registering for an account at Linkbound, you allow our software to do a complete analysis of all of your posts, and in return give you a list of your Top network, with a score for each individual connection, letting you know the status of your “Relationship strength”. The stronger the score, warmer the outreach.
If you’ve been looking for a new way to maximize the value of your already existing network, and 3x your sales.. try Linkbound.
