Webinar:
How to use LinkedIn in B2B marketing and sales

Welcome and introduction

Good afternoon, and welcome to this breakout session about LinkedIn in B2B. We have thirty to forty-five minutes together, and the purpose is for this to be interactive. The chat is open, so if you have questions or want to share a story, please use it.

My name is Sarah Vandewoude. I am the managing partner at Creactiv, and we are a proud partner of Ambassify, delivering training sessions like this one, half a day or full day, for companies. I am passionate about social selling, and I'm happy that Ambassify invited me to lead this breakout session.

A quote that inspires me every day is "keep calm, but act crazy". Do what you want in life, try new things, like today, a webinar in English. My native language is Dutch, so if I'm searching for a word, please help me by typing it in the chat.

What social selling actually means

Today we are talking about social selling, how to use LinkedIn in B2B, and how to connect marketing and sales together. You will also gain insight into the LinkedIn algorithm. Most people only use about 12.5% of LinkedIn's possibilities, so I will share what is in the other 87.5% that you can put to work immediately.

Social selling is not the hard way of selling. It is the human way, sharing insights and using LinkedIn to connect with people through your content, not by hard pitching. If you Google "social selling" you will find many definitions. At Creactiv, and at Ambassify, we see social selling as the sum of your activities that help strengthen your professional relationships, online and offline, internal and external.

Every colleague in your company has a commercial function, even if they don't have "sales" in their job title. Someone in administration is answering emails and taking calls. Every interaction is part of your commercial story. Sales is about people. Without your employees, you cannot do what you want to do. Without your clients, you cannot do what you want to do. Every successful business is built on powerful relationships, internally, externally, with partners, suppliers, even family and friends who can refer people to you.

Social selling does not replace your current way of communicating. The principles, applied through today's tools, give you opportunities to strengthen what you already do. Sales, marketing, people and communication come together, and the value placed on the person, combined with experience, sits at the centre.

Replacing cold calling with warm outreach

One thing social selling can replace is cold calling. Many companies still pay other companies to make cold calls, but we are seeing strong B2B results by approaching the target audience in a warm way through LinkedIn. It is another way to be commercial, and it works.

Visual brand identity and mental brand identity

Before you start, there is a marketing principle worth setting up first. When you communicate on LinkedIn, people look at your identity. Is the company identity strong? Is the professional identity of each individual in the team strong?

Two things matter here. Your visual brand identity is how other people see you. What is their perception when they think about you, your business, your brand? What is the first impression you leave behind? Your mental brand identity is how you think you come across, how you see yourself professionally, how you see the company. These two need to line up.

The three-words exercise

Here is a very simple exercise that helps me, our clients, and our team every day. Describe your professional appearance in three words. What do you want people to remember when they meet you live, see a post from you, hear your voicemail, or read your business card?

For me it is: authentic, honest, and friendly. I want people to remember me that way, and I want them to see Creactiv as authentic, honest, and friendly.

A few answers from the chat. Marianne said reliable, friendly, helpful. Gert said integrity, authenticity, being of service.

Put those three words on a post-it next to your desk. Look at every piece of communication you produce, LinkedIn posts, voicemail, business cards, and ask whether those three words come through. If you say your company is professional but your business card has a phone number crossed out and rewritten in marker, that is not professional. The detail matters.

Company branding on LinkedIn, the digital business card

I noticed some people from KBC are on the call, so I had a look at the KBC company page. The banner is there, the logo everyone knows is there, the slogan, a clear text and a link to the website.

Remember, in social selling, LinkedIn is often the first time someone sees you. Your company page is a digital business card. Look at yours critically. Is everything correct? Is the banner one you are proud of? Is the logo viewable on mobile and on desktop? Is the description sharp?

Personal LinkedIn profiles, treat them like business cards too

I also looked at two people from KBC who are on the call. The bridge from company branding to professional branding is here. If you use LinkedIn for B2B connections or content, make sure your personal profile carries the same professional standards as the company page.

A quick win for KBC would be to standardise the personal banner. Use the same banner across the team, or design a personal version with consistent contact details. There is research that says people need to see you six or seven times in a recognisable way before they begin to trust the brand. The more we see a brand in a consistent way, the more trust we give it. We are humans, not robots, and those small consistencies do real work.

If you have a team, look at the personal profiles together and set practical standards. Same banner option, guidelines for the professional photo, full name used, a standard tagline format (function, company, value proposition), and a short "About" section. Decide as a team whether to reuse the company description or to write a personal-professional version.

I noticed on Marianne's profile that the tagline is strong. People forget that you have 119 characters there. You can include who you are, where you work, what you do, and for whom. Ask your marketing team for the SEO keywords linked to the company page and weave them in naturally. LinkedIn helps you rank higher on Google, so the SEO real estate on personal profiles compounds across the whole team.

The contact details section also lets you add multiple website links. If you have a team of fifty colleagues and each profile carries three backlinks, that is 150 backlinks pointing to your company website. It is free SEO. The only investment is giving people half an hour to update their profile with a banner, a tagline template, and the right links.

LinkedIn Social Selling Index, the four building blocks

The Social Selling Index, or SSI, is something not many people know about. You can check yours for free at linkedin.com/sales/ssi. It gives you a score out of 100, based on four building blocks of 25 points each.

The four building blocks are:

1. Establish your professional brand. Is your profile filled in properly, with a strong picture, clear text everywhere, and brochures or media added?
2. Find the right people. Are you actively searching for the right prospects?
3. Engage with insights. Are you sharing content? But sharing is only half of this pillar. The other half is interaction. Are you giving likes to other people's posts, commenting, sharing things from your company page or your network?
4. Build relationships. Are you inviting new people into your network, accepting good invitations, using LinkedIn chat, and replying when people message you?

If you do all four, your SSI rises. I am usually around 75, and the highest I have ever seen on my own profile is 85. When I post with a score that high, the algorithm gives my content more distribution. LinkedIn sees an active, balanced user and prefers to share their content.

LinkedIn also benchmarks you. It compares your SSI to others in your industry, and to your own network across all sectors. In my industry, marketing, the average is around 35. In my full network across all sectors, the average is around 41. The higher your score, the more the algorithm prefers you when distributing content.

This is a parameter that helps marketing and sales talk to each other. Marketing asks sales to share content. Salespeople sometimes say "it only got two likes, it's not working". The SSI shows whether the four pillars are actually being used. It moves the conversation from gut feel to data.

A few clarifications from the chat. The SSI is for your personal page only, not for the company page. There is no company SSI.

What content actually works in B2B

Over the last two years we have experimented a lot with content, and the clearer the pattern gets. The more you share from yourself, authentic stories, things you learned from the field, the more people engage. People say it is not B2B or B2C, it is age to age, human to human. That human connection is what attracts people.

When Creactiv started on LinkedIn, before the pandemic, we mostly shared "what" content, tips, ebooks, knowledge. It worked then. During COVID, audience behaviour shifted. People wanted to be inspired. They wanted entrepreneur-to-entrepreneur or peer-to-peer content. We experimented, and the more we shared our vision, stories, lessons, and conversations that struck us as inspiring, the more reach, interaction, and sales we saw.

Examples from people on the call today. The Adsolut team welcomed a new joiner and tagged them, used emojis, used hashtags. Authentic, warm, and it got engagement. Gillen shared something about Belgian Entrepreneur Day, gave best wishes to entrepreneurs in his network, and got strong interaction. Else Dirix told me that the more she communicates from the daily things she sees, the conversations she has, even her work-life thoughts, the more reactions her posts get. That is the key. Write about the everyday.

So Google and LinkedIn play different roles. Google is where people look when they have a question or a problem, so SEO and keywords need to point them to you. LinkedIn is where people want to connect with you, so stories and vision are what work.

Turning likes into sales conversations

The sales sits in the follow-up. I cannot say it enough. Do something with the likes, the network, the business cards.

Here is a simple example. Marketing posts something on the company page. The post gets, say, fifty-two likes. Sales clicks "see who liked" and looks at each name. Some are people already in their network. Some are people they haven't spoken to in years. Some are second-degree connections from the network of their network.

That is where social selling happens. A like is a warm signal. From there you can:

• Reach out to a forgotten contact with a short, warm call, "hey, I saw you on LinkedIn again, I remember our last conversation".
• Send a connection request to someone interesting in your second-degree network, with a personal note referencing the post.
• Spot a strong lead and ask a mutual connection for a warm introduction.

Apply the same logic to your old business cards. The card itself might not look interesting, but that person might have a network that is. Connect with them all, and over time those connections open doors.

Action plan and Q&A highlights

A few questions came up at the end.

Company page or personal page first? Both. Even with no employees, the company brand matters because people want to see your logo and your vision. The company page also gives you free SEO real estate. Then your personal profile reaches your network and brings people back to the company page. The two reinforce each other.

What happens to the network when a salesperson leaves the company? Personal connections leave with the person. If you want company-owned visibility into your network, you need LinkedIn Sales Navigator with company licences, not personal ones. With Sales Navigator you can manage licences (move a seat from person A to person B), see the network at company level, and export the connections to Excel using another tool. The personal network stays personal, but the company-side picture is yours to keep.

If you want a one-on-one demo of Sales Navigator, or you have follow-up questions about your company page, you can reach me on LinkedIn or through Ambassify.

Enjoy the rest of the week, and see you soon.