Hi, Dima Ly, founder of LinkAdd, an automated customer acquisition service via Linkedin.
By launching the SaaS service, we actually took the opportunity to actively publish cases away from ourselves. Customer data is encrypted and all that we see is the corporate mail of users, which they indicate when paying.
When communicating with representatives of service companies, I often hear envious phrases: “Cool, you once invested in product development and now you make money on a subscription, and we have to constantly communicate with the client.” To be honest, that was my goal.
But our dreams are shattered by the realities of the market. The harsh Russian-speaking market.
American LinkAdd users are perfect — they buy the service themselves and set up their own selling funnels, they don’t know us, and we don’t know them. Perhaps they are taught packaging and sales in kindergarten, I don’t know.
But with the growth in the number of Russian-speaking users, we increasingly began to face basic questions:
- How to sign up to Linkedin
- How to create a selling profile
- What messages to send
- How to sell received leads, etc.
We even created tutorials on Linkedin, but Russian-speaking users preferred calling the manager to any of the five-day lessons.
It made me terribly angry at first. Then came the realization: if users do not want to learn to work independently, and we do not want them to send some crazy things through our service, we will have to help them.
All by Ross model:
- Denial. I couldn’t believe that users are really so incompetent at Linkedin and basic packaging and sales.
- Anger. I swore at those who do some nonsense and then, of course, do not get the result.
- Bargain. I tried to develop automated training so that users still figure it out for themselves.
- Depression. Despair and horror, losing interest in life.
- Acceptance. OK, we will help such clients personally.
But every cloud has a silver lining. Consulting a large number of clients, we have got statistics of sales through Linkedin not only of our own product. And this statistic sometimes surprises me.
As a rule, Linkedin is used for B2B sales: from classic IT outsourcing services to all kinds of robots for enterprises. But sometimes you come across interesting B2C products, for example, all kinds of training by Tony Robins or … cannabis.
The fact is that the cannabis market is very regulated, this can only be done in certain states, in the case of our client, California. You can’t buy a target on Fb / Insta and you have to look for alternative sources of leads. So, this business found us. However, I’m talking about cannabis just for the sake of being able to put a clickbait headline, I really wanted to combine the words “sex” and “drugs.”
Okay, there will be almost nothing about sex either. It will be about dating — a hot dating niche. Ukrainian girls dating foreign men. Perhaps after they have a purely platonic relationship without any sex. At least the client assured me that everything is absolutely legal with them.
Admit it, dating is not a B2B niche at all and Linkedin comes to mind last for its promotion. However, the results surprised me.
But, first, let’s go through the difficulties. Linkedin is a very loyal social network. Unlike Instagram, it is almost impossible to get banned here. Instead of a ban, they came up with such a phenomenon as a “restriction” — freezing the account until the moment the passport data is confirmed. Upload a scan of your passport, wait for moderation and you can work further.
But this does not always work. In case you were doing something completely dubious, the moderator postpones your application for confirmation of passport data somewhere in the end and returns to it about .. never. Such a polite ban.
Our clients constantly faced this while they were learning from experience.
Giveaway in profile design
It is logical that if you write something like “I will introduce you to interesting girls” — sooner or later you will lose your account. Although some naively hope that they will escape that fate:
This problem was solved quite simply — by removing all explicit mentions of the activity from the profile description. Moreover, in some cases, male profiles worked better than female ones — I’ll tell you further why
The Western world is pretty law-abiding. For example, when you openly sell your thesis (essay) through the same Linkedin, you may encounter complaints from the students themselves. It is logical that if you start sending out an explicit offer of acquaintance or pimping, you can run into negativity from the recipients.
On the other hand, we used to laugh a lot when our manager, due to bad English skills, set up a mailing list with an ambiguous question and began to receive quite unambiguous answers:
- Do you use Linkedin for dating?
- What kind of dating do you mean, baby?
But still, you shouldn’t do this on purpose.
As a result of our tests, in general, the story worked best when a male profile sends a message like: “Hi, I recently met a bride on Linkedin and wrote about it on my blog. Do you want a link? “
As it turned out, in this kind of dating, the target audience has a fear that upon meeting, instead of a beautiful girl, they will meet marginalized people at the airport and lose a kidney. Therefore, communication with a man who has successful experience in the issue of interest to them is an excellent option.
More money than cannabis
For the scheme to work, you need to work out every little thing: from the account registration process to the correct message funnel.
But, as a result, the ROI of this channel is 1900%. To be honest, not every B2B client of ours can boast of such indicators. Each of their Linkedin accounts sends 2000 invites per month (through our service), about ten of them are calls assigned and, on average, three sales.
Three sales per month with a net profit of about 600 euros each — $2100/month. From an account that costs them about $100/month.
Of course, within the framework of one account, the numbers are not huge. But unlike all the “radioactive carburetor turbofan bearings” that are commonly sold on Linkedin, this niche scales to the size of the universe and is only about the speed of hiring new salespeople.
