Here is an undeniable truth: The No. 1 reason for failure in sales is an empty pipeline, and the No. 1 reason you have an empty pipeline is that you are not doing enough prospecting.

In sales, everything rests on putting qualified opportunities in your pipeline. Prospecting is the beginning and the end, alpha and omega. If you don’t prospect, you will fail. That is a guaranteed truth.

Each and every sales day, you must connect with prospects, engage them in meaningful conversations, and convert them into pipeline opportunities.

It’s a Noisy World

The problem is that we live in a noisy world in which those same prospects are being inundated with prospecting messages from dozens of other salespeople who are also attempting to get their attention.

So, if you don’t stand out, you lose.

But I doubt I’m telling you anything that you don’t already know. It’s freaking hard to get attention when prospecting, and it’s not getting easier. There are days when it feels like you could be jumping up and down in front of your prospect in a pink bunny suit while throwing hundred-dollar bills in the air, and they’d still ignore you.

The Sledgehammer Approach Is Dead

One of the key reasons so many salespeople fail to break through is that their entire prospecting strategy is pounding away at prospects through a single communication channel—typically a series of automated emails sent through a sales engagement platform like Outreach or SalesLoft.

Sadly, this sledgehammer approach just doesn’t work anymore. Recent data reveals that salespeople are sending as many as eight times more emails today than they did five years ago and getting just a tenth of the results.

A big reason prospects are tuning out is that AI-powered sales automation tools have scaled email prospecting activity to an extraordinary level.

In the past, writing a prospecting email involved strategic thought and taking time to craft a message that was unique to each prospect. It was a slow process, which meant salespeople sent fewer but better prospecting emails.

Today, AI engines can pump out hundreds of cold email variations in seconds with shallow, and often cringeworthy, personalization that, more often than not, turns prospects off. And as AI-generated prospecting emails flood inboxes, the sheer volume of this outreach has eroded any impact from the improved efficiency.

Constant exposure to this irrelevant, repetitive AI-generated crap has left business executives exasperated. They are overwhelmed and have tuned out, turned off, and are ignoring all prospecting messages—good or bad, human or AI-generated.

Break Through the Noise

Most sales professionals today are desperate to find new techniques to help them break through the noise and get attention when prospecting so that they can engage in more meaningful conversations.

Most salespeople want a bigger, stronger pipeline filled with qualified opportunities. Yet many overlook one of the most powerful prospecting tools right at their fingertips: LinkedIn.

Why LinkedIn, Why Now

It can be argued that the moment the sales profession changed forever and the door opened to modern selling as we know it was when Alexander Graham Bell said on the very first telephone call, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

The telephone’s impact on the sales profession was profound and lasting. Then, as now, the phone remains the most efficient and effective means for conducting real-time, synchronous human-to-human conversations with prospects.

Bell made his call to Mr. Watson 150 years ago. Since then, only a handful of pivotal technologies have advanced the sales profession with such impact:

The automobile gave sellers the freedom to cover wider regional territories more efficiently.
Air travel literally gave sales professionals wings, expanding their reach nationally and globally.
The internet put unimaginable data at the fingertips of both sales professionals and buyers.
Smartphones put powerful computers in our pockets and made communication ubiquitous.
Video calling shrunk the globe and accelerated sales cycles.
CRM (we still hate it) made it possible to efficiently capture, organize, and access data.
Artificial intelligence is transforming the way we develop insight from this data—revolutionizing targeting, prospecting, communication, deal strategy, and forecasting.

But, of all these advances, none has had a more dramatic impact on the sales profession and your ability to connect with almost anybody, anywhere, at any time than LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is a Vibrant Sales Ecosystem

LinkedIn is a vibrant ecosystem where a billion business professionals are linked together. It’s a prospecting and sales Swiss Army knife with dozens of tools and applications for a variety of purposes:

Prospecting
Networking
Research, qualifying, and list building
Multi-threading and stakeholder mapping
Pre-call planning
Discovery
Communicating
Building familiarity and personal branding
Projecting thought leadership and authority

What makes LinkedIn truly unique is that this giant database and sales ecosystem is constantly self-updating. This means that the data and contacts are never stale.

It is the only sales data center where you are always working with the most current information about prospects and their companies, which makes it an excellent list-building tool. It gets even more powerful when you combine LinkedIn with AI and data platforms like ZoomInfo.

This matters because when prospecting, the better your list, the better your outcomes.

When you consider that the very essence of selling is connecting with people, building relationships, and solving problems, it’s easy to understand why LinkedIn is the most important technological advancement in the history of the sales profession.

A Prospecting Swiss Army Knife

To break through the noise and earn attention, you need to ditch the sledgehammer and pick up a multi-function Swiss Army Knife.

Multichannel prospecting sequences that leverage LinkedIn are that Swiss Army Knife.

Sequences diversify your outbound strategies with a multi-channel, multi-touch, interwoven-message strategy that helps you stand out. And LinkedIn amplifies the impact of these sequences.

A multichannel sequence gives you the opportunity to meet prospects where they are and how they prefer to communicate. It also allows you to experiment with multiple iterations and formats of your message to hone in on the one message that pulls your prospect in.

LinkedIn, when combined with AI and traditional communication channels like the phone and email, can give you almost superhuman prospecting powers.

Superhuman Prospecting Powers

Sales professionals who harness LinkedIn in their Fanatical Prospecting sequences can transform their prospecting strategy and explode their pipeline with high-quality opportunities by generating more leads, opening more doors, and engaging in more meaningful conversations.

To be sure, LinkedIn is not a prospecting panacea. It will not provide an endless stream of inbound leads with little effort. It requires hard work and time investment, and it must be combined with other communication channels to be effective.

LinkedIn is, however, a key component of a complete prospecting system. From list building and direct outreach to lead generation and long-term cultivation of future opportunities, LinkedIn’s panorama of features can be a crazy powerful weapon in your prospecting arsenal.

This is why I want you to stop today and consider how you are using LinkedIn. Do you feel like you are getting everything out of LinkedIn that you should be? Are you scheduling consistent LinkedIn blocks on your calendar, or are you erratic with your efforts?

Take some time this week to consider new possibilities for how to make LinkedIn work better for you and recommit to making LinkedIn a core part of your fanatical prospecting routine.

The LinkedIn Edge: The “Fill Up the Pipeline” LinkedIn Book

In my new book, The LinkedIn Edge, I give you a comprehensive prospecting playbook. You’ll gain tools, tactics, and techniques for building a robust pipeline with both fast and long-game strategies for landing big, lucrative deals and dream accounts.

Prospecting on LinkedIn can feel utterly overwhelming, so I’m going to teach you:

How and where to get started.
How to build better prospecting lists and find who and what you are looking for.
Develop effective prospecting messaging for InMail and LinkedIn Direct Messages.
How to communicate on LinkedIn and conduct more effective prospecting conversations.
How to get found and generate inbound leads.
How to generate referrals and warm introductions.
How to differentiate, build trust, and stand out in a world that wants to commoditize you.

My mission is to teach you exactly how to enhance, elevate, and accelerate your prospecting efforts by blending LinkedIn seamlessly into your sales toolkit. Don’t wait, go get my new book: The LinkedIn Edge.

And here’s a bonus: Once you purchase The LinkedIn Edge, you’ll get access to a comprehensive LinkedIn Course (a $50 value) with 10 videos and a reading & reflection guide. Just purchase the book and then take your receipt to salesgravy.com/edge to redeem your free course.

And never forget, when it’s time to go home, always stop and make one more call.

431 - Joshua Sturgill & Dcn Seraphim Rohlin - The Art of Imitating Heaven: Structure and Meaning in Ancient Cosmology

The Symbolic World

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