Episode 415: Connecting the Dots: Humanizing Sales in a Digital Age

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Enjoy the show.

00:00:50:14 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m your co-host, Brynne Tillman, and I am excited to introduce our guest today, Kevin Schmitz. Kevin has been with LinkedIn for nearly a decade working within the Sales Navigator business, which certainly qualifies him as an all else in tech years. Throughout his career, Kevin has witnessed the evolution of LinkedIn from a platform serving primarily software businesses to one that now supports anyone and a customer facing all. Beyond his professional achievements, is a dedicated dad of two and loves to discuss LinkedIn strategy with good market leaders. Today, we’re going to explore the transformative journey of leading and dive into

00:01:33:10 – (Brynne Tillman): what effective sales engagement looks like in today’s world. Kevin, welcome to the show. 

00:01:42:10 – (Kevin Schmitz): Thanks so much for having me, Brynne.great to be here

00:01:45:26 – (Brynne Tillman): thrilled to be here. And I know we share at least one common client right now, which is very exciting. And hopefully there’ll be many more to come. And I’m looking forward to that because they absolutely adore you. And I adore you as well. I think you’re amazing at what you do. I want to dive in a little bit to your expertise, but before I do, we ask all of our guests one first question, which is what does making sales social mean to you?

00:02:11:25 – (Kevin Schmitz): I think it’s really simple for me, Brynne. It’s all about just connecting dots. So we have so much information on people. Just connect the right dots and start a human conversation online. That’s what making sales social means to me. I’ve heard many, many people share this before, and it hits. I think you guys have even shared it on your podcast. Act like you’re in person online.

00:02:36:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So our line is to treat the person on the other side of the message the same way they were on the other side of the table. So 

00:02:44:25 – (Kevin Schmitz): there you go. 

00:02:45:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love it. And thank you for listening. I appreciate all of our podcast listeners. But it’s really cool when a LinkedIn person is in that mix, so it’s great. So let’s dive in a little bit to your ten years you’ve seen LinkedIn transform, right. So tell me a little bit about some of the key milestones. What stands out to you. And what has happened with Sales Navigator that I believe now makes it the most powerful tool available to any business development organization.

00:03:19:13 – (Kevin Schmitz): Well, I think back, let me bring you back even pre coming to LinkedIn. So I applied to this role. There was a role out there called a sales product consultant. I had no idea what that meant, what that was. But I knew I loved LinkedIn. So I got into the conversation. I had a great experience with my first hiring manager and just got into LinkedIn as a sales product consultant.

00:03:50:13 – (Kevin Schmitz): But, yeah, that’s what morphed into, customer success manager role, which we still have today. All that good stuff. But I’m the LinkedIn sales navigator. Ten years ago, I think we were way leveraged heavily on tech companies. Right? Giving a product to tech companies and really seen as a prospecting tool. Right. Outbound. Outbound outbound. You guys have the best data. Cool. Let’s get the best data. And just,

00:04:19:27 – (Kevin Schmitz): not that we were designed to bombard, but that was the thought process for many of our clients is how do we bombard?

00:04:26:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Both call on LinkedIn. 

00:04:28:27 – (Kevin Schmitz): There you go, here you go. And that mindset shift is still there, right? many of our clients and stuff. But what happened, and probably no surprise, we’ve been on this journey, but Covid really put a stop to a lot of these things, because what happened was a lot of tech companies started shrinking and downsizing and looking at profits. People weren’t just growing naturally. So we for sure.

00:04:56:20 – (Kevin Schmitz): And we’ve served these markets for a long time, but I think we’ve doubled down our energy on the markets that weren’t so tech heavy. Not that we don’t serve tech companies anymore, but now we’re broad based. If you are a B to B seller, you should be using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. So yeah, that’s the journey that we’ve been on and it’s been a thrill over the past three, four years to see, how that is as I’ve transitioned into a

00:05:26:07- (Kevin Schmitz): sales role, and how those conversations have taken place. It’s all about what we shared earlier, right? Was connecting dots, finding who knows who and making those human conversations online.

00:05:38:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Absolutely. And this is, the ability that we have with LinkedIn data that is not available in any other platform, period, which is the ability to map out your social proximity to a buyer. Right? So you can go on to lots and lots of other tools and map out, you know, roles and people in different roles. But what you don’t have is your relationship to those people.

00:06:04:07 – (Brynne Tillman): And that’s where I have found Sales Navigator to be the most incredible tool. Right. Who do you know that can get you in front of these buyers? There’s a lot of noise out there on email, on every kind of social media, on everywhere. But if someone reaches out to me and says, hey, Kevin Schmidt told me that I should reach out to you because, you know, he thought you might get some value from X, Y, and Z,

00:06:29:24 – (Brynne Tillman): 100% of the time. I’m taking them in a call because it’s coming in from a trusted connection. So I think that if any B2B, any relationship driven sale, if you are a click to buy sales navigator may not be for you. But if you are, I need to have a conversation first. Sale. It is absolutely hands down the most incredible tool when used well.

00:06:56:10 – (Kevin Schmitz): Sure. 

00:06:57:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, 

00:06:58:10 – (Kevin Schmitz): Yeah, definitely. It is definitely used well. 

00:07:02:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And yeah. So anyway I don’t normally do all the talking on it, but this is like my favorite tool. And it’s really hard. So in your, your conversations with these go to market leaders and you’re having them in very large organizations. What are the top priorities that they’re saying to you and how does LinkedIn really help with those growth strategies?

00:07:26:09 – (Kevin Schmitz): Well, some of the conversations are mostly centered around what happened during the bombard era. Right. So what happened with the bombardment? And we’re still in it. We’re still heavy in it. It’s just like, 

00:07:40:24 – (Brynne Tillman): well, it’s alive and well. 

00:07:42:09 – (Kevin Schmitz): I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s live. Oh, no. 

00:07:47:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Alive and broken. 

00:07:49:09 – (Kevin Schmitz): That’s alive and broken. So if you talk to the average buyer or that average buyer, any buyer and you ask them to think about the last conversations that they’ve had. Nobody ever answers. They got a great cold email or they got a fantastic email from LinkedIn. It’s all centered around trusted source. Somebody told me to take that call, etc.. So one of their key priorities is as response rates plummet in email and phone and LinkedIn to right. If that becomes their, you’re doing it the wrong channel if they’re doing it wrong. Sure. It’s for sure.

00:08:33:17 – (Kevin Schmitz): Then what are my other options? Right. And that’s where we have a great conversation then, because we start to talk about things like, okay, well, how do we unlock existing relationships within your firm? Right. How do we look for alumni of your firm? Like, and I’m when I’m saying firm, I’m saying a lot of professional services. And that’s what I was talking about earlier on the journey of where we’ve gone. Do you think of those organizations that have hundreds of partners with deep entrenched relationships, and you layer on how often people change jobs?

00:09:09:01 – (Kevin Schmitz): You’re like, this is a goldmine of opportunity for us. How do we unlock that? And those are the conversations that I love having. Those are the conversations that a lot of business leaders are thinking about. And, yeah, that’s where we are now. 

00:07:22:24 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. You know, it’s interesting because, one of the greatest values, as we mentioned in LinkedIn, is mapping out your way in. But those insights that you mentioned, like job change or even that they shared content in the last 30 days, gives you an opportunity to engage, right? It gives you it opens up all of these avenues so you can show up in a trust based, resource driven way rather than, sales pitch your way.

00:09:52:00 – (Brynne Tillman): And there really isn’t another tool out there that does that. And I get very excited. And so when I’m hearing your conversations with these go to market leaders about how do we stand out? One of our clients that was a bank set came, came to us and said, you know, here’s the problem. Right now, interest rates aren’t great. They’re the same across the board. Every bank right now is apples to apples.

00:10:17:08 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s really hard to stand out. And I said, well, did you hire the best bankers who you absolutely like? Did you hire bankers that have great relationships? Absolutely. Well it does. It’s not apples to apples. It’s not product to product. People work with people they know, like and trust. Thank you. But Bert, that’s, you know, his line from endless referrals.

00:10:39:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So your differentiator is your people and their relationships. There is no one else in the world that has the same relationships as your banker. And that’s a differentiator. But most don’t know how to tap into it,

00:10:53:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): right.

00:10:54:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So exciting. I love sales. 

00:10:58:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): That’s exactly the kind of conversations we love having. And I’ll add one more. So nobody has your existing relationships and nobody has your customers, right. You unlock those two things. You’re in a better state. 

00:11:16:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So go one deeper on the customers because that’s amazing. How do we leverage the customers to get new customers? 

00:11:24:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): Imagine you have one great relationship, but you create five more. Now what happens to good things? One those if you’re one contact left to go somewhere else, then you’re protected.Two whoever in that group of now six leaves, you have a new opportunity to sell, resell to the same buyer. And no surprise to you and I, the clients or the client we’re working together on right now. It’s exactly that scenario. 

00:12:01:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Yep. 

00:12:02:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): It’s so that’s what that’s what I mean by, nobody has your relationships and nobody has your customers.

00:12:07:07- (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I love that. And this is one of the reasons we need a multi-threaded account. We need to be connecting with everyone that we’re engaging with inside that account. If I could just. Yes. And that. Because another thing you can do in Sales Navigator is you can really deep dive into their connections and filter by exactly who they know that you want to meet. And a happy client is always happy to introduce you to some others. So all that magic. 

00:12:34:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): But the triple win 

00:12:35:07- (Brynne Tillman): it is, it’s the trifecta of sales. Nav. Okay, awesome. Sorry I get weird. So talk a little bit about some of the mistakes you’re seeing that sellers make on LinkedIn. And how would you recommend they avoid them?

00:12:50:04 – (Kevin Schmitz): It’s thought a lot of it is still the bombardment. Right? I have, and it centers around a lot of the habits that LinkedIn started with, too. So it’s not necessarily the seller’s fault. A lot of this is a structural problem. And sales right now is a list of names, a title. They have the decision making power. Great.

00:13:11:11 – (Kevin Schmitz): that’s the decision maker. All right. I need to message the decision maker. And that’s the number one mistake I see. Because what I tell my customers is who are your competitors? Right. Ask the question, who are your competitors? And every single one of them names direct competitors. And I always have to reframe it into you’re not just competing with your direct competitors, you’re competing with everybody who wants that person’s attention. And it’s an attention competition, right? That CIO or whoever you need to be in front of is hearing from thousands of you.

00:13:49:27 – (Kevin Schmitz): So how do you differentiate and find your right path and to start the conversation? So that’s what that’s what the true leaders in sales do now and into the future. 

00:14:03:07- (Brynne Tillman): So I love that that’s going to lead me to my next question which is do you have any particular success stories with any of your clients that were like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I mapped that out, your sales navigator and got access and all that fun stuff.

00:14:19:18 – (Kevin Schmitz): So, plenty, plenty of them. And we do that and, lots of, like, we get a lot of anecdotal stories to share with their leadership teams, too. The ones that always stand out are the ones when we open their eyes to what we were talking about earlier, which is the relationships inside their firm. And actually, I’ll go back to a story I’ve shared hundreds of times to my clients. close friend of mine used to work at one of the big four consulting firms, and he’s texting me during this, like,

00:14:47:03 – (Kevin Schmitz): prep meeting that they’re going to have a big pitch meeting. They bring in the partners, all the people working on this, and lo and behold, up up pops Sales Navigator, and they’re just mapping out who the people were meeting with. Okay. Well, who has relationships inside of this, of our consulting firm. So when we go there, we know a little bit of Intel in the audience. And lo and behold, they start to peel back the onion. And they had a great relationship with somebody who wasn’t in that room during the prep meeting. But they got all the Intel,

00:15:21:02 – (Kevin Schmitz): they got everything. They knew how the dynamic was going to play out, who was going to own the conversation. And those are when you think, like, not every firm I work with is, you know, a big for going into a big pitch meeting. But when you start to connect the dots and really take the time to understand what’s going on, I think this is the best time to sell, right? Because all this is so much information, it is just available at our fingertips to come up informed and trusted.

00:15:48:08 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that I’m going to circle back to our shared client who brought me, and I’ll drop his name. But the bank has been quiet since investors bank. It’s now citizens. And, we did a day with them in New York, LinkedIn’s headquarters with all of their board members who Team Link extends. So I want you to talk about that for a moment. And the power of the team is extended. But the success story around that was instantly every single commercial banker could see who those board members knew. And by the way, those board members were highly compensated with vacations

00:16:34:08 – (Brynne Tillman): and other fabulous things by bringing in customers. So now this was this huge win, win win for the bank. It was. The board member was very happy to introduce the commercial banker to one of their connections, because they got points on the board, right? Because it was very gamified. That banker was thrilled because they were bringing in business and the bank got the business. But here’s the thing before Team Link extend, they’d go to they’d have meetings with

00:17:03:23 – (Brynne Tillman): the board and they go, I don’t know, not who I know. You just don’t know. So talk a little bit about the power of Team Link. Extend. 

00:17:14:02 – (Kevin Schmitz): Yeah. And I love that you brought that up. And I need to learn about the gamification of that, too. That would be a great way to reward the right behaviors. So a team like extending is simply getting access. So let’s take a bank as an example, like, not everybody is a salesperson that needs a sales navigator, but all the people inside of that bank get paid from the success of the salespeople. Right? So everybody’s incentivized for the bank to do, well, right, to pay the salaries of everybody within their form, accounting, finance, board members, what have you. So what team like extend does is it brings in the LinkedIn, networks

00:17:56:02 – (Kevin Schmitz): of everybody within the bank or the company, the firm, whatever, the customer’s looking at. So the larger you are as an entity, the more opportunity there is to unlock value. The other thing I’ll share as it relates to a team like extended brand, which I often have to share with my clients, the people traditionally this how people have used LinkedIn in the past. The best networks on a per person basis are not in sales, because sales sellers have been incentivized to connect and start conversations, whether they’re willy or great friends.

00:18:35:25 – (Kevin Schmitz): You think the person accounting is doing that, just connecting randomly with anybody. So when you unlock all of that from the other sides of the business, tremendous value is unlocked. So whenever I see somebody in my finance department is connected to the CFO that I need to be in front of, I’m like, oh my gosh. Yes, perfect. If I see a seller, I mean, I’ll still ask, but I think the likelihood is much lower.

00:19:04:08 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. When you have someone in accounting, they’re connecting with only people they know. They’re not out there building this huge network of strangers, hoping and praying. They take a call. 

00:19:16:25 – (Kevin Schmitz): Right? Right. 

00:19:18:08 – (Brynne Tillman): So yeah. So I love that. And that’s where Team Link Extend could be such a huge opportunity. And I actually have seen very large companies not take advantage of teams like, like yeah, we have a thousand licenses, but we have really distributed them like what they are and they will accept. Right. The accounting person wants the company to succeed. They don’t want to do a lot of work. But if you identify, you know who I know that could benefit from

00:19:52:22 – (Brynne Tillman): our solution. I’m going to make that introduction because I believe in our company, I believe in our organization, and I’m connected to new business, even though it’s not my job. So Team Link Extend I think could be like you said, the larger the company, the more valuable it is because that account is not going to connect with every single one of your salespeople.

00:20:14:12 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s the only other way they’re going to get to see who he notes or she ‘s not going to do that. But if they allow them to search their connections, even if they’re not a first degree connection, it opens up an enormous opportunity. So I’m a huge fan. So the second to last question I’m going to ask you, Kevin, is what question do they not ask you today that I should have?

00:20:39:29 – (Kevin Schmitz): I’ll actually I’ll go back to the one thing that the topic that we were on of, of Team Link, it’s maybe what have I seen as best practices out there, to rule out, you know, sales navigator across a company. How? I’ll answer that. Yeah. Is what you shared earlier on the gamification and having a, what I would describe as a true sponsor that deeply cares about the program and the success of the program, because it’s a lot of teams, they’ll be like, yes, of course we want the best version of LinkedIn for our sales team, and they can have all this great data and do

00:21:22:23 – (Kevin Schmitz): whatever they want. It is to stand up that program. But if you have a deeply rooted executive sponsor that has a voice and can commit to, the success of not just like the Sales Navigator program, but just how we use LinkedIn within our broader company. That’s where true success gets unlocked, because then that sponsor can do the things that you were talking about earlier, creating an incentive structure for that person in accounting to actually get rewarded when they make an introduction.

00:21:53:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): Imagine how many introductions you’ll unlock from your accounting department when one of them can go to Hawaii. If a business deal closed from an introduction that they made, like you opened my. Yeah, there you go. Join the Presidents Club. But that needs a sponsor, right? Not just sellers using a tool. Who do you sponsor that has influence and sway within the organization? That’s what sets up a true true program. 

00:22:20:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. I love this so much. I could do this all day long. Oh, I do this all night. 

00:22:25:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): Yeah, you’ve made the great decision to do it. 

00:22:29:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. It’s such an amazing tool. Well thank you. Kevin. You know, this has been amazing. If there is a company out there that starts at all. Right? All right, sales navigator, I need it. How did I get in touch with you? 

00:22:43:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): LinkedIn’s the best spot. The last name is spelled SCHMITZ. A lot of people think it’s DT. But I’m teasing. So Kevin Schmidt’s easy to find on LinkedIn. 

00:22:56:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. Thank you, Kevin, and I love working with you. It’s very fun. 

00:23:01:19 – (Kevin Schmitz): Likewise, Brynne. Let’s find a few more. Get some more. 

00:23:03:12 – (Brynne Tillman): All right. Now I love it. And so for all the listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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