How to steal your competitor's LinkedIn followers
What's Plan B when email stops working?
"This past May/June/July was crazy for email delivery. We had customers we would warm domains for 3 weeks and then get absolutely no responses on the inboxes."
- Eric Nowoslawski, GTM guru
"Emails were working about six months ago and then just stopped working."
- CEO of an early-stage SaaS company
How many of you have experienced a decline in email performance over the last few months?
GTM strategies are not meant to last forever.
Even the best-performing plays will eventually depreciate because Big Tech changes the rules, the play gets overused, or the market changes.
LinkedIn has been the best-performing channel for our clients regardless of persona and industry for the last 18 months.
Three issues with doing outbound on LinkedIn:
📛 Lower ceiling on the number of new relationships you can build each week because of limits to LinkedIn connection requests (~100 to 200/week)
📛 Mass-blast automation of messages is less effective and quickly sniffed out by the contact
📛 Requires an extremely soft sell approach. The best campaigns get 'pull from the buyer' instead of 'push from the seller'.
Three ways to prioritize who you engage on LinkedIn:
1️⃣ Seniority
Focus on contacts who are VP level and above.
2️⃣ Recent activity on LinkedIn
Peter Conforti published a great report about which industries are most and least active on LinkedIn.
You can also filter leads on Sales Navigator based on who recently posted on LinkedIn.
3️⃣ Signals
Identify buyers engaging with your competitors’ content.
A real-world example of how an early-stage AI startup captured demand from their competitor’s audience:
1. Identified a senior executive who:
✅ Following a competitor's company page
AND
✅ Following the competitor’s CEO
AND
✅ Recently engaged with content from competitor’s CEO
2. The CFO on the seller's side contacted the executive-buyer to spark a peer-to-peer insightful conversation.
"What tools are you using to calculate forecasting?"
3. The buyer responded in less than two hours and mentioned using their competitor's product. This is not surprising since insights showed that the buyer is frequently engaged with the competitor's content.
There was a back-and-forth conversation from one executive to another.
4. The meeting was booked less than 24 hours after the conversation started in the Linkedin DMs.