How to Book Meetings on LinkedIn
Booking sales meetings on Linkedin isn’t as easy as it once used to be. Marketers and salespeople are bombarding prospects with spammy pitches daily, making the platform feel chaotic and saturated.
But luckily, this means it’s easier to stand out if you approach Linkedin like Charly Johnson. She's a 30MPC fan favorite and she’s teaching you how to stand out from the noise on LinkedIn and book meetings by sounding like an actual human.
Let’s break down her process step by step.
(If you want to see the full breakdown and access all her LinkedIn messaging templates, download her free LinkedIn Prospecting Guide)
#1 – How to find accounts and prospects
Charly is a big believer in working smart over working hard. There's no reason to mindlessly reach out to masses of cold prospects when you can focus on the low-hanging fruit first.
Before we start, you need to set up two things on Linkedin.
Step 1: Upload your accounts into Sales Navigator if you haven’t already.
Step 2: Filter your lead list for [a] your accounts and [b] “Spotlight” filters to identify good-fit prospects. There are many useful options but here are Charly’s top 3.
- Follows your company: These are people who “follow” your company on LinkedIn. These prospects already know who you are and therefore are more likely to respond.
- TeamLink intro: This shows people from your company who are connected to your prospects on LinkedIn. This is key because people are more likely to reply if they know of the person messaging them.
- Recently changed jobs: People usually move to a new company for a reason. This is an opportunity to help them with their big goals.
#2 – Start connecting with them
Now you’re ready to start connecting with them. But to maximize your chances that they accept and reply positively, Charly has two tricks for you.
First, connect with lower-level employees to increase your acceptance rate. A VP of Sales is more likely to accept Charly’s invitation if she already has 10 mutual connections.
Then, try getting groundswell intel from those folks too. After a brief introduction, Charly might say something like this to get seller-to-seller intel:
Feel free to tell me to bugger off, but I’m about to send an email to your VP of Sales, Bill Johnson.
My message so far mentions your team’s new leadership changes and hiring in the SDR team (congrats btw!) – I'm guessing that increasing pipeline gen meetings might be a focus. Is this completely off or is this something the team is talking about improving in your team meetings?
You can parlay this into a more tailored email or even ask for a direct introduction from there.
#3 – What to say
Now that you have some mutual connections and a better understanding of their challenges, you can leverage this in the outbound messages to your ideal prospects.
There are two messaging strategies that Charly recommends:
The first strategy is Personalization → Challenge → Offering Value Add. Most salespeople go straight into pitching their product without first building a relationship, but instead our goal here is to open the door, keep a conversation going, and be helpful. Here’s an example.
“Aggressively building the top of the sales funnel" - reading your job bio in your LinkedIn, Bob. [1: Personalization]
Salesloft & Benchmarkit did a study where 55% of companies shared pipeline gen was the biggest struggle. [2: Challenge]
If it's the same challenge for the team, want me to share the process I used that helped me produce 200K of pipeline last month? [3: Offering Value Add]
If they say yes, that opens the door to helping with the problem. And if they don’t respond, you can follow-up with the doc as a second helpful deposit.
The second strategy is the draft on behalf. If one of your colleagues is connected to your prospect, pre-draft a message for them to send to your prospect. You’ll need to personalize it based on the strength of their relationship, but you can at least get them started, like this:
Hey Billy, we crossed paths when we worked at 30MPC. I hope everything is well. Your name was brought up by one of our reps, Charly. She mentioned seeing growth in the SDR team when researching you.
We’re speaking to a lot of SDR managers at the moment who are looking at ways to decrease the time to a meeting or to get to a yes/no.
Is this something remotely on your mind right now? Either way, great to see the growth of the team. Sounds like an exciting time at 30MPC.
It’s personable and clear without being too salesy. You’re more likely to hear a response from this prospect, especially if the message is coming from someone they know.
