How to Get a Million Impressions and Sell on Linkedin

You're a B2B business, and all your prospective customers are on LinkedIn. But they ignore your cold DMs. You're wondering how to actually use LinkedIn to sell to them.

You're in the right place. This guide will give you a more in-depth look at what LinkedIn can do for you and how you can generate a million impressions with your target ICP organically within months. I've done it for myself as the founder at Letterdrop, going from 1,500 followers and zero impressions to 7,600 followers and one million impressions in 6 months. Letterdrop gets 60% of its leads from LinkedIn as a result. Read more if you want to unlock this for your company.

Why Is LinkedIn a Good Sales Channel?

LinkedIn has 800 million users and counting. Most decision-makers at companies are already on LinkedIn to build teams and recruit. They're also connecting with peers and looking to learn from them. This gives you a natural way to sell your B2B product: by educating your network on how to do better at their jobs. It's also not yet saturated as a social media platform like Facebook and Twitter.

Every BDR and sales rep is on LinkedIn, but they choose to spam DMs with the same message over and over again. Reminds me of the seagulls in Finding Nemo.

Instead, a more powerful way to use LinkedIn is to get prospects to come to you by posting genuinely helpful content on the regular.‎

Stop Thinking of LinkedIn as a Resume and Instead as a Sales Channel

Most people think of their LinkedIn as a public resume. But it's a lot more than that — LinkedIn is a sales channel. The LinkedIn feed is an excellent way to organically get in front of prospects.

How a Prospect Becomes a Customer on LinkedIn

Let's paint a picture of how LinkedIn gets you customers — you send a prospective customer, Lauren, a connection request. As soon as she accepts it, she starts following you. She sees your post in her feed and likes it. She is reminded of you and what you do. You've piqued her curiosity, and she opens your profile.

Your next goal is to make her want to reach out to you or visit your site from your LinkedIn profile. That's where a great LinkedIn profile that sells your offering comes in.

At this point, you want good lead capture to get her to sign up for a demo, trial, or newsletter sign-up. Or, at the very least, for her to be familiar with your company so that she doesn't brush off your sales rep when they cold call.

Rinse and repeat. You now have leads!

How Content on LinkedIn Scales

When Lauren liked your post, she did you a favor.

When someone likes or comments on your post, their connections see the activity on their feed. This means that if you sell to CTOs for example, and one of them engages with it, their network (probably other CTOs) also sees it. You just got that case study, feature demo, or thought leadership piece in front of thousands of CTOs.

Steal an Audience with Comments on Other LinkedIn Posts

You don't have an audience when getting started. To get around that:

1. Find influencers on LinkedIn whose audience is relevant to you. For example, if you were selling software to sales managers, follow Chris Orlob.
2. Make insightful comments on their posts to get in front of their audience. In the early days, it's easier to comment on a post with 500k impressions and get 50k than to get 50k impressions with a post yourself when you have no followers.

You should also comment on your target ICP's posts so that they know you and are warmer when your sales team reaches out cold via email, phone or DM.

Becoming active in the comments is a quick way to get your name out and for people to see your opinions even if you don't have a network.

Ma‎ke Your LinkedIn Profile a Sales Page

Much like your company website, you want people landing on your page to take action and get one step closer to buying from you. So you need to make sure your profile is branded and gives people a reason to follow you.

Here's the checklist for your profile page:

1. Get a professional profile picture. Toss out the picture from sophomore year that you haven't changed since college.

2. Your tagline should have your role and what you can help people with. For example, "Sales at Acme | Drop customer churn by 18%"

3. You need a company-branded banner with a clear CTA to follow you. Talk to your designer for help.

4. Turn on Creator Mode. It makes connections automatically follow you by default. Also, your “Activity” section will feature your own posts instead of engagement activity alone.

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5. ‎Your About section should answer help visitors qualify themselves. Mention the pain points you solve and give them a way to contact you. Describe what your company does and what you do as simply as possible. It doesn't matter if it tells the whole story. Nobody has time to read that.

For example, "I run sales at Letterdrop where we help B2B marketers create and distribute 32% more content to drive revenue." Short and sweet.

Mark Jung, founder of Authority and LinkedIn growth expert, explained the improvements I could make to my own LinkedIn profile to sell better.

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Posting Content to Get in Front of Prospects on LinkedIn

Post From Personal Accounts, Not Just the Company Account

When it comes to posting, remember this: people buy from people, people connect with people, and algorithms prioritize people.

So why on Earth do companies just post to their faceless corporate account? Prospects prefer to interact with real people who work at your company.

Post from your personal account to actually see results.

Get your founders and exec team to post too. Get your entire GTM team excited to sell on LinkedIn. Companies like Lavender and Metadata are proof that this is a very successful acquisition strategy that beats paid ads.

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Your Content Needs to Educate and Entertain In Order To Sell

Posting regularly on LinkedIn isn't enough. The type of content you post also matters. It has to resonate with your target buyer. You don't want to build an audience that never buys your product.

You need your ICP to trust you, follow you, and seek your advice. They're on LinkedIn to advance their careers, so post content that responds to this need.

Here are a couple of ways to come up with ideas for content that prospects engage with:

1. Share what you're doing and what you're learning. Use storytelling with real-life anecdotes — it is both unique and authentic. In a world of AI-generated spam, this stands out.

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2. Remix ideas from sources and people you respect. Follow thought leaders in your space on LinkedIn or subscribe to newsletters. Apply what you learn to your own experiences to add your own twist. Make sure not to plagiarize. You'll definitely get called out.

3. Long-form content is evergreen and can be recycled if it performs well. Turn a blog post into a video or re-post it as a carousel next quarter. If something worked well in the past or a different format, re-post it.

4. If you run a podcast, webinar, or do Zoom calls with customers, pull out snippets from there. Use an app like Descript to turn it into a short video clip that you can share on LinkedIn.

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4. Listen to sales calls for questions your prospects are asking and answer them. If one customer is asking you a question, everyone else is too. Letterdrop can extract these for you automatically from Gong.

5. You can turn to your own team for inspiration. Interview your team on their jobs and what they're learning from customers. They might not be actively thinking about turning this into content since it's not their job. Connect with your engineers or PMs if you want deep technical or industry insights.
6. Brainstorm with AI. Skynet seems inevitable. Why not have a chat with ChatGPT in the meantime? Ask it to roleplay as a potential customer and see if it can help you discover new angles.

You Need to Post Consistently to Establish Trust

Posting every day sounds daunting, but we promise it gets easier once you build a routine.

Set up a sustainable posting schedule. Initially, it's more important to set an achievable goal that you can complete than shooting for the moon and failing. Start slow with two posts per week and then ramp it up to five times a week.

Also, don't spend too much time on a single post. If you take an hour to post, it will be impossible to do one every day. LinkedIn posts are ephemeral, so don't spend as much time on them as an evergreen guide or blog post that will be used in sales enablement or SEO forever.

You can even segment your days per topic so you don't have to think as much. For example, at Letterdrop, we have "Feature Fridays" where we post about a random Letterdrop feature. It reduces overhead in terms of deciding what to post every Friday.

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Remember this: it's better to post regularly with minimal impressions than not to post at all.

What I Find to be the Best LinkedIn Practices (And What I Avoid)

Here are a couple of tried-and-true tactics that work for us at Letterdrop:

1. Add any links in the comments, not in the body of the post. The LinkedIn algorithm doesn't promote content with links, so don't lose out on clicks. Letterdrop automatically puts your links in the comments for you.

‎2. Use images and video where possible to illustrate what you're saying. They don't have to be fancy — you can draw a graph or illustration on paper and take a picture, or you can record a Loom of yourself talking into the camera.

3. Track attribution wherever you can. This lets you see what % of your leads originate from LinkedIn so that you can invest accordingly. In your lead form, you could ask, "How did you hear about us?" with LinkedIn as an option.

4. Stay on top of the algorithm. The feed algorithm changes all the time. You should focus on consistency and providing value first. But it's always worth reading the LinkedIn Algorithm Research Report.

As for the practices to avoid?

Don't be controversial for the sake of controversy. You will alienate your ICP. No one needs that negative energy.

Don't post clickbait. It might boost short-term impressions, but it's not going to inspire trust. Focus on your content being helpful. Position yourself as someone your audience wants to work with.

Use Letterdrop to Streamline Your LinkedIn Practices

Let's face it. You're busy, and any assistance implementing the above would be a huge unlock to more leads.

Letterdrop automates a lot of the above processes to generate inbound on LinkedIn while only doing what's minimally needed. Here are some of the things Letterdrop can help you with when it comes to LinkedIn:

1. Automate likes and comments from your Sales Team. Your Sales and Customer Success teams are directly connected to prospects and new customers, so it's incredibly important for them to engage with content. When they engage, their network sees your content.

If you have more than five teammates on your GTM team, you should be asking them to like, comment, and reshare posts. Most marketers will create a #social-boost Slack channel where they ask the team to engage with posts. But your team is busy, and they usually start ignoring you. Letterdrop can automate their engagement with your content so that you still reach their network.

Leveraging your team is free distribution. Think about how much you're paying for every impression on LinkedIn Ad Campaigns today (you can calculate the impressions and equivalent ad cost here).

2. Ghost write for teammates. ‎You can even post or ghostwrite on behalf of team members with an approval workflow to get their permission in Letterdrop.

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3. Schedule posts in advance with the Letterdrop content calendar. A daily posting schedule can be tough. Bulk posts and advanced scheduling can help. It's easy to set up a posting regimen and stay consistent with Letterdrop.

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4. Get your team to suggest ideas via Slack or email. You can add ideas straight from Slack or email into your ideas backlog. Make it frictionless for your team to drop ideas so that you can aggregate all the great content ideas in one place. No more loose notes on Notion or on your phone.

‎5. Automatically extract content ideas from Gong sales calls. You can connect Letterdrop to Gong, and it'll look for questions asked in sales calls. These are generally great content ideas since you have real customers asking them.

Driving sales on LinkedIn often requires some heavy lifting on your part. Letterdrop can ease the burden.

Get in Front of Prospects with LinkedIn, the Sales Channel for B2B SaaS

Selling on LinkedIn isn't easy. There's no sugarcoating it — building an audience requires a lot of work, unique insights and creativity. But it's a great channel if you put in the hours.

Your team may not want to post publicly, or they may tell you it's not their job to sell on LinkedIn. But the bottom line is this: no social channel is more suited to your B2B product, and if you're not selling on LinkedIn, you're missing out. The platform's network effects offer you the perfect sales channel — all you have to do is be consistent, thoughtful, and patient.

Still think scaling on LinkedIn is an uphill battle? Plenty of companies have been where you are and eventually made it one of their primary lead drivers, including us at Letterdrop — if you ever need a sounding board on how to get started with organic marketing on LinkedIn, talk to us. We don't bite.