Social Selling Is a System, Not a Side Channel

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video, cleaned for punctuation and names. Speaker labels are not included.

[0:08] Welcome to the GTM Vault Podcast. I'm your host, Rick Koleta. Today we have a special guest, Parthi, founder and CEO of Letterdrop. In this episode we dive into the evolving world of social selling and explore how to boost sales efficiency. Parthi shares valuable insights on aligning sales and marketing, key metrics for success, and the transformative role of AI in sales. Stay tuned for actionable strategies to propel your B2B venture to new heights. Parthi, thanks so much for being here. Yeah, thanks for having me, Rick. So how do you see social selling evolving in the next few years, and what strategies do you recommend for companies looking to leverage social platforms effectively? So I would say that the status quo when it comes to social selling is perhaps not as aent, or getting nothing. So I think the vast majority of companies

[1:11] that talk to your average BDR or full cycle AE is perhaps not C posting on whatever platform their buyers are on, most probably LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. They're not really trying to engage with their customers or cross this on these platforms, and not really trying to build me relationships. The way a lot of sellers are approaching it today is they just send over a DM, they will send over a connection to us, and that's where people feel like they're being pitched constantly. That's why people feel very apprehensive of connecting with paining sales, because we're with CDF in LinkedIn with them trying to P you something immediately afterwards, right? And that's not a great feeling. It's not a great way to build a business relationship. And so I think with a lot of sales, there are two things which matter in terms of out success. One, do you have the right message around the right problem at the

[2:16] right time? And two, can you actually get your message seen? And I think that's that second part for a lot of people are struggling right now. So you can try to send them an email, your email is amongst 80 other unre emails. Try to cold call them, people are just picking up their phone less than ever before. You try to LinkedIn DM them, once again your message is just lost with a bunch of other people ping. However, if you flip this around, you started using social selling as a seller, you become a person that your buyer wants to connect with, wants to follow, then your chance of getting a message read increases exponentially. So for example, Bryan LaManna at Gong, very famous on LinkedIn and has close to 100,000 followers, and if he were to email me I will immediately open it. I already subscribed to his newsletter. If he DMs me I would immediately open it. If

[3:19] Adam Robinson tried to reach out to me, I would immediately see it. I'd be like, oh, this person I look up to or follow is reaching out to me. If they want to see that message. And so people think, oh, you have to be famous in order for you to have that kind of power, and the reality is you don't. I think the bar is so low in terms of being a helpful educ individual who educates others, but even if you were to just your buyers, educate them a couple times a week publicly, it dramatically increases your chances of connecting them. Our BDR, since he started social selling, we saw, we look at his data three months before social selling, months after starting, 5% increase in his ability to connect with buyers. So from five, under 5%, to a little over 10% in terms of his raw connect rate. And then once he's connected, in terms of him DMing something in your response, massive increase. It went from under 5% to 20.6%, because people are like, hey, this

[4:24] is a guy who I see all the time on my feed. If he reaches out to me, I'm going to have a courtesy to at who's respond to him and tell him, hey, that's a good CIT, or no, not interested. And right now every seller does begins the relationship with that pitch, and they get ignored. And so I think that's what a lot of people need to start to understand is inboxes are getting saturated. It's very hard to reach out to people. The right way to is to make your user come to you and want to engage with you instead. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Can you talk a little bit about how content plays a crucial role in social selling, and what types of content do you find most effective in engaging potential customers and driving sales through social channels? So I think content is great in the sense that it's a way for you to get value to your customers for free, right? You can, how do you provide value to customers? Either you have a product, then you can sell it people, and maybe have a free version of the product or something. All of those

[5:27] CLI which gives thement value, and you can provide value that way, but that still requires them to sign up for something, could something's work. The better thing to do is to just give them value and help them do their jobs and openly, right? That's where comp comes in. And I think everybody out there, any ambitious worker, is trying to figure out how do I do my job better, how do I get promoted, how do I make sure I'm hitting my KPIs. And so if you look at their information consumption, the entertainment, they are actively trying to understand how to answer these questions. And so if you can be the individual, if you can be the person who they are seen in their LinkedIn feed, in their thy, wherever they may be learning about of stuff, if you can be the person who is educating them about certain types of problems, I think that's a big win where they want to actually connect all you. In terms of the types of content that in, that really easy source is or,

[6:32] and a lot of people get tripped up on this, a lot of people think to themselves, oh, F know watch you write out. It's actually really easy, especially as a seller, to figure out what to write about, because you're in conversations with customers all day. You're in all these discovery calls where customers are telling you about their business problems. You were asking questions like, oh yeah, why is that? Why is that expensive for you? Why is there get mad at you if you don't solve this call? Why do you reach out to us? All of his stuff, right? And that's a full mind, true treasure trove of information that you should be sharing with the rest of the world, because if one customer is asking you a question, there's a very high chance that every other customer who looks like them has the exact same problem, the exact same questions. And so if you can answer it for one person, it makes sense to answer it publicly for everybody. Why confine that to that one call with this one person, for doing one to one sales when you could be doing one to many sales instead? And so I think that's where people should really look for source of content is

[7:34] conversations with their actual customers, and try to figure out, hey, what's keeping you up at night? What's confusing you? Let me share, answer those questions more broadly. Makes a lot of sense. Especially with the lines between sales and marketing increasingly blurring, how do you facilitate better alignment between these two functions to create a more cohesive go to market strategy? I think the line between sales and marketing should be blurred. Unfortunately, I don't think that's the case today. I think they're actually way too separate. A lot of companies still operate under this old model where marketing is focused on MQLs and sales is just focused on closing. They look at these as two separate entities, and that's why marketing will just generate email addresses and say, hey, these are MQLs, and then sales will be, I can't close these guys, these are not qualified. And so instead I think sales and marketing both should be really

[8:36] thinking about revenue, or business recurring revenue that you can actually renew, really is what both these organizations should be thinking about. And I think the way in which sales and marketing should be collaborating is they don't look at the other for doing entire jobs. So a lot of push factor social sell might be, hey, it's marketing's job to get me leads, my job is just to can't get an email address and then get on a call with them, essentially. And I think that's a really real good way of looking at this. If you're a full cycle AE, if you're a BDR, you should be responsible for your own pipeline. So you shouldn't just rely on and throw stuff your way. You should figure, okay, how do I make people come to me as well? I've heard sales leaders say, it's not my job to S customers, that's marketing's job. I think it's a very narrowed way to look at that. If you're in sales,

[9:39] if you are educating customers one to one, why not do it one to many? And then I think the separate thing that they don't realize is, when people buy, they're essentially buying from people, especially if you have a sales team that's not a self-served PLG product. They're buying from another person, not just a company. When I buy from Gong, if Bryan LaManna is my seller versus another AE, that kind of makes a difference to me actually in terms of their ability to understand my business, understand their problems, and communicate that to me. And so I think sellers should think about building their own reputation into business consultants who can actually help their buyers solve problems, go from point A to point B. And this is something you need to do independent of marketing, because it's not going to just build you pipeline, but it's also going to help you book more meetings and close those meetings as well, because your buyers are going to be like, hey, this person really knows what they're talking about. I trust

[10:41] them, I really want to work with them, I want to work with this company. So that's how I think sellers should start thinking a little bit more about their job as part-time marketers as opposed to justor, and they mind to about their focus. Got it. Speaking of booking more sales, what are some key metrics and KPIs you believe sales teams should focus on to measure the effectiveness of their social selling efforts? So I think a lot of people like to just track what they can measure, right? So if you say social sell on LinkedIn, people immediately think, oh, I can track the number of impressions in life. In reality, you don't really care about those numbers. Whether you get a thousand impressions or 10,000 impressions doesn't matter. What matters is, do you get 20 impressions with ICP buyers, which LinkedIn does not report to you. And then there's all of these secondary benefits that come from that, like I mentioned earlier, your LinkedIn connect rate and your LinkedIn

[11:45] reply rate on DMs actually go up when your profile looks better, when you start social selling, when people want to connect with you, and that's actually more pingable. Once again, it's a very hor metric to trap, because LinkedIn doesn't have an Apollo or Outreach's inbox where you can just say, here's my reply rate to ICP buyers. I'm just looking that we're trying to actually solve for as well, so we can show people the ROI on their social Nets. But I think those are the most valuable netfs. It's your ability connect with ICP buyers, your connect rate, your reply rate, they actually want to respond to you, so now you get a message across to them. And finally, the number of ICP buyers who seem to be engaging their content than LinkedIn on your website. Even if they see your content, they click on your profile, go to your website, that counts. Now they're educating themselves about your product and about what you do. So those are the three mats that would track. Speaking of some of the functionality that Letterdrop offers, can you talk to us about AI and automation, and

[12:51] how you see the role of this technology transforming the sales landscape, and where Letterdrop fits in within this evolving landscape? Absolutely. So with Letterdrop, we're really trying to help companies educate their customers better with content, whether in the marketing side or the sales side. And so for sales teams, what we're really trying to do is figure out how do we use AI effectively so that they can bring about sales efficiency while keeping the parts that should be human with your actual team. And so for example, what Letterdrop will do is will hook up to your Gong or Chorus or anything you're using to record your sales calls. It'll pull out the questions your customers are asking your sales reps, it'll pull out the answers your sales reps to back customers, it will look at all your sales collateral and assets, use that to construct blos for your individual reps. So it's not making not anything, it's just using the

[13:54] existing conversations, the existing things that people are actually talking about, and kind of them for you. So now makes very low friction for you as a seller to be posting this content, for you to be educating your buyers. These are real questions your customers have asked, the top of C good. And then scrip being, whoever is engaging, so a buyer who this Clos from two weeks ago hopped in a post last week, that's a signal that they care about these problems, that they're in market. So we pull those out for you and give you a list, sync it with your CRM so you actually know reach out to. So that's how we try to figure out how to use AI intelligently, and when and where, we're just using noral, L animation. The last thing people want to do is use AI in the wrong places. I never want to use AI to write a message for me for it to go out without a human seeing, not something I would not be comfortable with it. Or I don't want, you don't

[14:57] want to use AI and social selling to write comments or to have a lot conversation with somebody. That doesn't feel good, people can tell, and those are situations where you want to avoid use the AI as it stands right now, and you really want to maintain that human to human connection. Totally. Can you talk to us a little bit about more the retention side of social selling? When you say retention, are you talking about see on? Yeah, sure. We are seeing how AI is used to compose text and even automate some of the outreach, right? But there are also use cases to leverage this technology to engage and retain existing customers. Absolutely. So this is actually something that both our AEs and our customer success managers see value from. For our AEs, even though they book in the, as soon as you book, as soon as you get call some, your

[15:59] instinct is go connect with right now. You're professionally, you're in a professional context, you want to be connected with them. And AEs will do this. They'll try to get the prospect's number, they'll try to move the communication to be something quick, informal, stuff like that. As soon as you are connected with that prospect, they're now going to start seeing your stuff in their LinkedIn. And so what does every AE think about? They're like, oh God, this person is go to me, they're not talking to me anymore, I don't know what the status stage of this deal is. What's a better way to nurture them than for you to appear in their feed a couple times a week talking about the problems that you guys initially talk about in that discovery call? So this actually helped you accelerate deals even post booking that first meeting. The second way which this is called, our customer success manager, is when he goes about new features, he goes about conversations he's having other customers, or existing customers say, oh, I want to use that feature too, or I have the same problem that you were describing, that PO which you mention

[17:01] another customer has. I didn't know that Letterdrop would solve that problem for me. Can you show me how to use that feature? That gives him a great opportunity to upsell customers onto other modules and packages that we offer as well. And so I think today we think about all this stuff in a very structured way. We think about these as, oh, we're going to set up a product newsletter with updates to our customers. But the reality is that the way people canum informations there, a lot of times it's one-on-one relationships. And so if you can get individuals at your company to be sharing this kind of stuff more publicly, the amount of serendipity that happens that moves deals along, retains customers, is actually very high. I don't think people realize that, and it's a very undervalued playbook, I think. Yeah, no, I see that. With the changing landscape, Parthi, we're seeing so personal branding becoming increasingly important, especially for sales

[18:03] professionals. What advice would you give to these sales professionals looking to build their brand on social media? Yeah, so a common objection I will see from individual BDRs or AEs is, I'm shy to post social media on LinkedIn or Twitter or what have you, and I don't know what to post about it. I fear being judged if you're being wrong. And all I can say is it doesn't really matter. The base case is you are ignored. A lot of people never even get the level of impressions or engagement they want. People who are trying very hard are struggling for this. It's similar to somebody who goes to the gym for the first time, and then within a week they're like, oh yeah, I don't want to get too bulky, or something along those lines. And I'm like, it's going to take years and years of very hard work before you have to worry about that problem. So similarly, you don't have to worry about being famous and being torn down by the masses or B people or some VP

[19:07] calling you out and say, this is dumb. I think initially you're just trying to get helper, so don't be afraid of putting yourself out there. 99 times out of a 100 you can only benefit from this. Or only has told me that he was very skeptical about social selling when he first joined us. It's been transformative for his career. One, it's all the reasons I mentioned. He's able to book more meetings, he's able to blow his deals faster. When he gets on a call with somebody, they know him. They're like, hey, this is Zach speaking. Oh yeah, I've seen you on LinkedIn. It's just so much easier to actually do your job once you start doing this. And then B, it also makes you look good for the entirety of your career, right? It's a very transferable skill. I think if you're in the job market now, another employer looks at that, that says, oh, this person has a large following, or this person knows how to social sell, they can bring that to my company as well. And so it's just

[20:10] going to help you personally from a brand building perspective, from a career opportunities perspective, as well as doing your job better. And so I think there are very few, next to no downsides from this. I think before you say something stupid and get people to tear you down, it's a very long time before you get that famous or anything along those lines happens. Yeah, that's very encouraging. In this post pandemic, post AI world, what I've observed is a change in the way that people are making purchasing decisions. I mean, besides the fact that budgets have been super constrained these past 24 months or so, can you talk to us a little bit about the biggest challenges you faced in your go to market? Yeah, I think our biggest challenge in our go to market right now, especially when budgets are constrained, is people are looking to be safe. A lot of people just want to invest

[21:12] in things that they know. They want to invest in categories or products that they know. People are looking to consolidate. And so I think if you're a company that's really trying to innovate, try to do something that's a little bit different, if you're trying to do something that's going to try to generate alpha for companies the way that they're not necessarily accustomed to, you have to kind of educate them about why a different is good thing, right? I have to go and educate customers on why their old spray and pray approach, here's a cold account list that I downloaded from ZoomInfo, I drop everybody into a sequence in Apollo, and then I just wait, is not going to work as well anymore, and why. With, especially with AI, everybody's inbox is going to be completely saturated, right? It's easier than ever to write a quote unquote personalized message. If you can do it, your competition can do it, everybody can do it. So we're going to see the volume of noise in your inbox everywhere increase, and it's going to be harder

[22:14] than ever to stand out. And so companies actually need to try to figure out how do I do something different, how do I be unique in my go to market approach so that I can actually stand out and build those relationships and actually sell to my customers. And so I think that's our biggest challenge, is just helping companies understand that, understanding that they do need to change. They can't just be doing what worked for them for the past 10 years and expect it to work when the market has changed dramatically. You can't hire as much as you used to. Before you'd be like, oh yeah, we want more revenue, we're just throw in 10 more SDRs, and you had the ability to pay I account. And then also post AI, a lot of the things that used to be hard to do are not easy, and that changes the economics of doing them, but also changes the efficacy of them as well. And so I think we all have to really think about, just because it's easy to do, anything that's easy to do is often not worth doing as well, because it just becom so

[23:16] competitive. Absolutely. And in a world where everyone can do everything, brand just becomes more and more important, doesn't it? Totally. It's all about brand, and not just the brand but also your individual brand, because at the end of the day people lie from people, and people represent the companies that they work for. And so I want to say that when people say brand, it's not just the product, but it's also the people at that company who are selling that product. One last question I have for you, Parthi, is what trends do you predict will shape the future of sales and marketing, and how should companies prepare to adapt to these changes? I think the first thing that we're seeing is just the availability of data. I think there's way more data than there was before. It's become easier to collect that data than before. You have tools like Clay, for example, where literally going out and scraping the web for you, scraping LinkedIn for you, and telling you as much

[24:19] information as you can collect about your customers publicly. And so I think a lot of companies really don't know how to use this data, especially in conjunction with other data sources, how to use that data in conjunction with your internal sources of data and information from Ste. What do you do with this? And so I think the biggest thing that sales and marketing teams have to think about is how you become more intelligent about how you use data, how you're thinking about who to reach out to, when to reach out to them, when to just be educated them instead of reaching out to them, so that you can actually be more efficient, have fewer, smaller headcount, have fewer, spend fewer resources, and reach out the right people at the right time. As opposed to this old model where it was really truly spray and pray, a lot of hiring, not really being intelligent about data, wasted ad budgets, wasted

[25:23] emails, wasted LinkedIn DMs getting blocked, getting put into spam. So I think that's really what companies need to think about over the next couple of years. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the GTM Vault Podcast. I hope you found our conversation with Parthi from Letterdrop insightful, impact with actionable strategies for improving your social selling and sales efficiency. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review if you enjoy this episode. For more information and resources, check out gtm.com. Thank you.