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Hey Reader, A founder I spoke with last week thought he had social selling dialed in. "I can ask a friend who knows an e-commerce manager to make an introduction," he said. I had to stop him right there. That's a warm referral. A perfectly valid tactic – but not social selling. Calling it social selling is like calling a taxi a road trip. Same road, completely different commitment. Here's what social selling actually looks like: Step 1: Find your exact ICPs on LinkedIn. Not broadly. Specifically – title, industry, company size, and the problems they post about. Step 2: Engage with substance. Not "Great insight!" but a real reaction. A follow-up question. A perspective that signals you understand their world at a peer level. Step 3: Repeat. For weeks. Sometimes months. Research puts the number at 7 to 17 touches before a prospect begins to see you as credible. That's not a typo. Up to 17 separate interactions before the door cracks open. The mechanism isn't complicated, but most founders skip it because it feels slow. You are becoming the smart person in the comments – the name they recognize, the voice they've read enough times to trust. When you finally send the DM, you are not a stranger asking for their time. You are the person they've been reading. That is a fundamentally different conversation to walk into. The Clarity Filter Insight Social selling isn't asking for a referral – it's committing value to strangers until you're no longer one. [Share on LinkedIn] [Share on X] If your current strategy relies on someone else making an introduction, that's networking – and there's nothing wrong with it. But don't confuse a shortcut with a system. The founders building real, durable pipeline on LinkedIn are not hacking anything. They are showing up, consistently, in the right orbit, until trust does the selling for them. Speak soon, P.S. Don't write code for a product nobody wants to buy. I built Traction OS to give you the exact 60-day roadmap, sales scripts, and validation templates you need to hit your first $10k MRR without guessing. From complete scratch or with an existing MVP. |
Every week, I advise founders on how to hit $10k MRR. On Tuesdays, I share my consulting notes from those private sessions. Learn from their mistakes so you don't burn your own cash.
Hey Reader, A founder I work with was freezing up on every cold call. Not because he didn't know his product. Because every call felt like a performance review – him auditioning, the prospect judging. The pressure was killing his ability to actually listen. So we tried something that felt almost too simple. He started paying prospects $100 for a one-hour research interview. Not a demo. Not a pitch. A conversation where he asked questions, took notes, and genuinely tried to understand their...
Hey Reader, A founder I work with spent weeks validating his SaaS with Account Executives. The data was damning: AEs lose roughly 53% of their deals because they're prioritizing the wrong opportunities. But when he brought this up in conversations, prospects shut down. Not because they disagreed. Because they couldn't admit it. The problem wasn't the product. It was the pitch. He was, without realizing it, opening every conversation with: "You are bad at your job, and I have a fix." Nobody...
Hey Reader, During a mentoring session last week, a B2B SaaS team walked me through their go-to-market logic. They were targeting retailers in the CPG space. The reason? Retailers could mandate that vendors use the platform. Force the supply chain from the top. It sounded smart. It was a trap. I stopped them and asked one question: Who bleeds the most money when this problem goes unsolved?Silence. Then they realized it wasn't the retailer at all. It was a specific subset of mid-tier suppliers...