ï»żThe Human Side Of LinkedIn Beats Automation | Mic Adam
What Is Social Selling on LinkedIn?
00:00 Mic Adam: ...to visible on the platform to be able to get into a social selling cycle. That's the key to social selling. You're not gonna sell through, you know, I post every day or I post once a week, you're going to sell when you get people to start conversations or you start a conversation yourself based on that content.
00:21 Brad Eather: Hello and welcome to the Creative Business Podcast, the podcast where creativity meets commerce. I'm your host, Brad Eather, a digital marketing consultant helping commercial services a digital marketing function that support their business.
When most business leaders approach LinkedIn, they default to a marketing mindset. But what if focusing on content alone means you're missing out on one of the platform's biggest opportunities? What if instead treating LinkedIn as a place for genuine connection is the missing ingredient you need to align your sales and marketing teams and develop profitable client relationships? My guest today is a pioneer of social selling who joined LinkedIn in 2004 as member 488,825. With over two decades of experience as a LinkedIn performance strategist and trainer, he has challenged countless leaders and teams to look inward at their existing networks as the real business opportunity. Please welcome to the show, Mic Adam.
01:28 Mic Adam: Nice to be on the show and look forward to our discussion today.
01:33 Brad Eather: I wanted to kick things off by asking a pretty broad question for those that are in B2B sales but maybe unfamiliar with the concept of networking online or social selling in general. Could you please explain what is social selling and why is LinkedIn a good place to apply it?
01:51 Mic Adam: Well, first of all, let me start. Sales has always been social. So we've always done social selling in certain ways. But with obviously LinkedIn coming on the sceneâand I won't say digitalizing or bringing it into the digital worldâit's become a term. So what is social selling? Well, social selling is nothing else but a way to find your clients, start conversations that build up your relationship and trust, and that allow you at a certain point of time to talk about doing business together. Which, as I said, nothing new because we used to do that before the internet. Now with LinkedInâand you can theoretically transfer this to any other platform if you want toâyou have a broader access to people that you can do business with and that social selling works with because of the sheer volume that are on these platforms.
Now, again, depending on who your audience is, if you're in B2B, you're more inclined to LinkedIn, who's actually the only game in town when it comes to B2B networking today, at least on a worldwide scale. On the other hand, you could do exactly the same thing on Facebook if your target audience are consumers and you do the same steps. You find them, you start conversations with them, you start building relationships, trust, and from there, the opportunity to do business together.
Now LinkedIn has built that over the years. I mean, they've been in business for 23 years. They obviously have with 1.5 billion members today, a nice audience that you can tap into. And those social selling techniques are very well applied to LinkedIn because you can search on LinkedIn. You can start conversations on LinkedIn, whether it's through comments or whether it's through connections. You build up your relationship. You start and keep these conversations going so that at one point again, you can do business.
How LinkedIn Evolved into a Content Platform
04:04 Brad Eather: The vast majority of people aren't using social media in general or LinkedIn asâthey're not participating in it actively. The majority of people, regardless of what you see online, will be still treating LinkedIn as the resume. Do you wanna maybe talk me through your experience about how the platform's changed from that initial CV type approach to where we now see it where creators as such are starting to use it?
04:34 Mic Adam: Well, it's funny you start with the CV because actually there is a stage before that. LinkedIn was actually developed as a networking tool. LinkedIn is based on a very simple concept that anybody in the world can be reached by us in six contacts. That is what LinkedIn is based onâLinkedIn was a networking platform.
Now what happened is, more and more people started basically entering all their data and entering all the functions they did and have done in the past. So it ended up being aâit moved into a resume type of website, which then became interesting for recruiters. And at some point LinkedIn realized that, you know, having the ability to message and to post content, it would give it a new dimension. It would give it a new lease on life, which means that when publications came along, which is a long way away, but they've only exploded in the last, I would say, five to 10 years, it became a conversation platform. It became a platform for visibility. And yeah, now today we're in a platform that's, you know, AI driven, AI sorted.
So LinkedIn has evolved from a pure networkingâand it still isâto a publication, networking, conversation platform, search platform. So it hasn't lost all of the other things along the way. It's just gotten broader in terms of the use and that's what we're actually seeing today. Every month I run a bunch of statistics on LinkedIn and we all know that the people who post on LinkedIn is a very limited amount of people. I would dare to say it's under 2% that post at least once a month, which leaves 98% of other people. What do they do? Well, let's say about 10 to 12% will comment on something they read, well, engage. Which means that over 85% of the people are on LinkedIn for searching, for sending DMs, for reading content or using it as a news platform. And there are some people who still use it as a tool to get a job or being recruited. So none of it has gone away, but it has evolved in a multi-dimensional platform and we all use LinkedIn in a different way that we feel comfortable.
Aligning Content with LinkedInâs Core Mission
07:19 Brad Eather: Yeah. So what I'm hearing there is the platform's evolved into many different use cases that serve people in many different ways. I'm interested to hear what you think about this: LinkedIn's mission statement I feel is a little bit revealing in some respects, especially when we're comparing it to other social media platforms which are very content heavy. LinkedIn's mission statement is to connect the world's professionals to make them more productive and successful. I'm wondering how well aligned do you feel the platform is to that mission statement today, now that there are so many different avenues to use it?
07:56 Mic Adam: It's funny, it's one of those things I always keep coming back to. For me, it is still like that. I mean, LinkedIn is still a platform that allows me to connect with the right professionals. So I go back to the networking part of it. But what we see today is that obviously the contents and the topics that get the most visibility that are shouted about are all about the content creation, about the visibility that way.
And I think the balance that we see from the outside or that many people see from the outside is too much focused on this publishing stuff, while it is still for so many of us a tool to go networking, to go develop our business. Many are still on LinkedIn living up to LinkedIn's mission statement, but it's not talked about as much as it should be. It's the people screaming for attention that get all the limelight and puts a very slanted look onto the platform.
Most people start out with the idea, "I want to build a network, I want to find people that do business, I want to start a conversation with them," which has nothing whatsoever to do with posting. But yet, all the things you see is about posting, which is kind of a bit of contradiction. And the funny thing is, LinkedIn doesn't control it anymore, because they opened it up and obviously people who want to create content join the platform. They're opening it up to people that make alternate content such as videos and so on, and yet they get all the attention.
And a lot of the posts that we seeâand I'm guilty of it too, I must admitâis all about addressing that 2 or 3% of users. And we rarely address the people who are there for searching, for networking, relationship building, messaging. It's all forgotten. It all kind of disappears in the silence of the workday.
Using Content to Drive B2B Conversations
10:19 Brad Eather: You mentioned before that there's the different use cases, right? I think that yes, there's very loud voices that talk about content generation, and often the real skill of developing relationships is actually the real business advantage for many people. Content allows you to do that underlying layer in terms of having conversationsâit makes that a lot easier. And what I find is that many businesses that don't have that content layer in their business find that social selling or that sales approach does not work because they haven't provided their team with the collateral to have the conversations around, right? We always need to contextualize our world for other people. I'm wondering how you're leveraging content to create those conversations that you're not seeing online?
11:16 Mic Adam: Well, the thing is, as you say, content is the basis or is the start of conversations. It also confirms your level of experience and expertise. So you need to be visible on the platform to be able to get into a social selling cycle. If you're not visible, you got to create that visibility in some other way. In the past, we used to be on stages, we used to go to networking meetings and all that stuff. Now you can use that content. And if that's missing, you're missing out on a big piece of what I would call easy visibility because you're actually talking or sharing your knowledge, which is important. You need to share the knowledge that you haveânot maybe all of it, but at least a lot of itâbecause in these days, most of the knowledge is known to people, but you need to show them with your company page, you need to show them with your personal pages, so that people begin to assimilate you as a person or a company with the topics that you are talking about.
And that will lead to the actual trigger of starting that conversation because people might not react or engage on it, but they might engage you on DMs, they might engage you on email, they might engage you on the phone, which is also part of social selling. Social selling isn't only LinkedIn. LinkedIn is just a channel that we approach people on and it's an easier channel because we get shown to people with our content as a company or a person. And then that would confirm that, "Maybe these guys are really into what we need. Let's give them a shout and we'll build from there." So content is important.
Simplifying Content Creation & B2B Formats
13:16 Mic Adam: Now, there's a big discussion about how much content you really need to post. There's discussion about you need to post once a week, every two weeks, every day for some people. The truth is that visibility today on LinkedIn lasts a lot longer than we think. I think if you post once a week about your products, about your experiences, your use cases, whatever, you will get a good amount of visibility. But the idea behind the creation of visibility is starting that conversation because that's the key to social selling. You're not gonna sell through "I post every day" or "I post once a week," but you're going to sell when you get people to start conversations with you or you start a conversation yourself with them based on that content.
Content is one of those things you need. I often hear people say to me, "We have nothing to say" or "We have nothing to talk about." And especially for salespeople, I'm going like, how can you not have anything to talk about? I wonder what a meeting with a client looks like when you're in, because if you have nothing to talk about on social media, if you transfer that into a real meeting, that's gonna be an interesting meeting with your client. So take the questions you get from clients and use that for your benefit to create content for social media and more specifically LinkedIn. If a customer asks you a great question about where your product would fit in, why not take that question and turn it into a post? Because I can see you answering that question in the meeting, but maybe other prospects, other clients might have exactly the same thing. So use that question as a start to a post, and that way it becomes fairly easy to create content for any platform.
15:19 Brad Eather: I think this is probably a good time to define content, right? Quite often what we see is a thought process around quality. You see people with flashy videos, very high production quality, and people associate that with content. I personally have a framework that I like to use called the REP framework: repeatable, efficient, practical. An example of that is simply a written postâno photo, nothing.
I think that quite often we get caught up in this idea of content being something unachievable, where the reality is that a piece of content can be whatever you choose a piece of content to be, right? In the conversation that we're having now around "we don't have anything to say," lower the barrier of entry while you familiarize yourself with how the platform works and how to expect the platform to behave. We spend too much time concentrating on vanity metrics and the number of followers, where in reality the type of content that I think we're talking about today is putting an idea out there, but then following through with that idea. What I mean by that is using that undercurrent of the networking layer to put that idea in front of the people that you believe will be interested in it. Are you using similar sort of ideas and tactics?
16:59 Mic Adam: Well, I am a person who's been posting now for about eight years on a daily basis. There is no way in the world that I could do that if I didn't have a system. I don't have an acronym for it, but I do have a system, which means I keep an open mind. I use my smartphone to capture ideas that I turn into posts. And I must admit most of my content is inspired by conversations that I have with clients, suppliers, people that I meet in the course of the week, because they deliver to me at least the umbrella under which I can create content.
But you mentioned a very important thing about the formatâtrying to go for perfect posts, perfectly written posts or going for the fancy videos or 50 million pictures that you need to take before you can actually use one, that makes you waste time in the long run. So I think the posts that are more out of your heart, more out of emotion, more out of don't-overthink type of input probably will do a whole lot better than the ones you spend weeks on doing research, rewriting, updating. We take ourselves too serious and we fall into a trap of perfection, and that's never a good one because we think that perfection will give us these vanity numbers, but the funny thing is it won't.
People want something that comes out of your heart, that comes out of your brain, that sounds like youâlike if you were to go to a network meeting and the same person would ask you a question, you're not going to go off and do a whole lot of research to give that person an answer. It's going to come out right there, right? The same thing can be true for content. And then you bring in the thought: what works best for me to convey my message? Do I need to put in an image? Do I need to make a video? Do I need to just put text, which is fine too, and try and deliver as much value as you can to the person through choosing something that doesn't challenge you to become a specialist in one or the other thing.
One of the things I personally laugh at all the time and find very sad is you see on LinkedIn these posts about content creators that say, "These are the 17 AI programs you need to use to make the perfect content." My first question is, how much time do I spend to learn all these tools, and how much is it going to cost me? Rather than doing that, I could have written three, four posts right out of my brain, and they didn't need a tool to create an image or write the text. You use AI to verify your grammar and all that stuff, I think that is obvious, but at the end of the day, you've got to find in LinkedIn's arsenal of types of postsâtext, photo, video, document, or pollsâwhere you find yourself comfortable in and what comes natural to you without forcing. Because the forcing part comes through in what you post.
Audience Value vs. Hacking the LinkedIn Algorithm
21:13 Mic Adam: One other element that I would like to put in here is: never write a post to do something for the algorithm. Write for your audience, even if you only get 50 people to see it. If they're the right audience, you'll get more out of it than getting that post shown to 50,000 followers who don't remember you six minutes after they read your first line.
21:31 Brad Eather: I'd almost add to that as well, understanding your audience, there's a bit of a process to that. The first part I would almost say is write for yourself, because if you write for yourself, that's where you find those triggers that then let you understand what your audience actually likes.
Quality Connections vs. Mass Outreach
21:55 Brad Eather: I want to talk about habits, but one thing that's just popped to mindâwe're all influenced by things, and quite often the type of advertising that we're used to seeing is B2C or Software as a Service, especially on LinkedIn. The business models that are involved in those types of campaigns are very heavily marketing focused because they rely on quantity to make their business profitable. The reality of a lot of B2B companies is that one, two, three clients is enough to keep the ball rolling for the year.
And that is the mentality that I think is the value out of contributing your ideaâyou're not trying to get quantity, you're trying to get quality, and quality can exist in the weight of your words rather than a mass marketing campaign. Have you found similar things? Are you talking to your customers like that?
22:49 Mic Adam: Yeah, I mean people want big numbers. We want to reach as many people as we can and all of that stuff. But I always try and bring them back to a position and say, "Okay, if you're in sales, how many clients do you need in sales to actually get to your sales target?" That probably is never thousands of peopleâthat's probably, like you said, three, five, maybe 50.
And the reasoning I'm trying to get into their mind is doing reverse engineering: "Okay, if you need 5 or 10 clients to get to your business quota for the year, how well are you converting your leads?" If that is the case, how many meetings do you need? How many calls do you have to make or touch points do you need to get to those number of meetings? At the end of the day, on an annual basis, people need very small numbers of target audience people they need to get in touch withâprobably 100 to 200. And if they develop those 100 to 200 people over the year, they will get to where they want to be in terms of selling.
Chasing numbers is hoping that people will come back to you and buy from you. Maybe that's okay if you sell a course that's $100 worth, but if you're in a B2B situation where the deals are thousands, not to say millions, you're better off focusing on fewer numbers because you're never going to be able to deliver quality in conversations if you focus on a million people instead of 100. Chasing numbers in my practice, I try and get people away from that. Do reverse engineering: start from the result and move back.
If you're going to be using social selling on LinkedIn, you're probably gonna use Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is perfect to follow 200, 300, 400 people. It's not gonna work if you follow 10,000 peopleâit's just never going to work. So I try to reduce the number of people in your audience, but improve the quality of those people with content and conversations.
Another thing that people often forget is they have in mind what their ideal client profile isâa buyer, the CEO, the finance managerâbut they forget to build a supporting network within that company that will actually talk to your ideal client. So if your ideal client is the CEO, maybe you also need to start networking with the finance officer, operational manager, marketing manager, or even the PA of the CEO, so that when they decide about products, all these people become your internal ambassadors when you are not in the room. If they say, "We want service X, who should we talk to?", at least two or three say, "Maybe we should go to this person." Then you have already developed an initial quality relationship with the CEO who probably never saw your post, but you have a network of supporters. And that's where we get back to the original idea of LinkedIn: the networking idea.
Daily 25-Minute Social Selling Routine
27:40 Brad Eather: We are going off topic a little bit with marketing, but B2B businesses' total addressable market is often very small, so you can't expect huge numbers when you're trying to talk to a couple of thousand people within a closed ecosystem. The weight of the content has so much more weight when you're the person making it for that audience. Let's get back to networking. There's a million different ways to interact with LinkedInâDMs, comments, content. If you're a busy person with a full-time job to manage, what's effective to actually move the needle from a networking perspective?
29:00 Mic Adam: I'm a very strong supporter of having a fixed time routine on LinkedIn. Mine is about 25 minutes, starting the day in that manner. When I go in the morning, I'll go to LinkedIn:
1. Check Messages: First, I check if anybody sent me any messages and reply.
2. 3. Profile Views: Second, I check who has viewed my profile. If we are connected, I send a message. If not, I consider connecting or going to their profile, seeing if they posted something, and leaving a comment to warm up the connection.
4. 5. Publish Post: Thirdly, I put my post up every day.
6. 7. Touchpoints & Celebrations: Lastly, I see who has anything to celebrateâbirthdays, work anniversaries, new jobsâand reach out with a message to congratulate them.
8. Not with the infliction that I'm going to say, "I want to do business with you now," noâstart a person-to-person, human conversation rather than a business conversation. The sales type of conversation comes later. But limit it to a fixed number a dayâeven 10 or 15 minutesâand put a timestamp on it, because if you don't, you can sit on LinkedIn all day without getting off. A habit will definitely help you achieve results.
Strategy: Turning Profile Views into Leads
31:42 Brad Eather: I wanna make this real for people. One unique thing on LinkedIn is profile views. One way to get profile views is contributing in comments. The more value you put into comments, the more likely people go, "Hang on a second, who is this guy?" and click on your profile. Another thing is filtering your feed. I have an Excel spreadsheet listing 5 to 10 people posting content I'm interested in. Rather than scrolling the main feed, I actively go into their feed through the spreadsheet to limit exposure, find posts, and contribute value with the goal of increasing profile views, which acts as an intent signal. Tell me how you're applying something similar?
33:23 Mic Adam: What you just said is what I actually do with prospects. I've identified a number of people in a prospect list and search for their content daily. Since I'm not connected with them, I can't send DMs, so the only way to get on their radar is by commenting on their posts to add value. Two things happen:
1. They visit your profile, giving you a trigger to connect.
2. 3. If you comment frequently, they will actually reach out with a connection request to you.
4. If they don't and you've commented five times, sending them a connection request results in over 80% accepting because they've seen you show up in their comments and appreciate you helping distribute their post. For me, that works perfectly to turn prospects into connections and real clients. Again, it's not a numbers game for 100 or 200 people at onceâyou do this for a limited amount of target people.
Utilizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator Effectively
35:29 Brad Eather: This detail doesn't get spoken about on LinkedIn that much. It may seem convoluted to someone not doing this play, but not a single person successful at selling underestimates how hard it is to get that initial interaction. Realistically, it is an attempt to build a connection and relationship to take into the social selling aspect.
36:23 Mic Adam: Using that process, your ultimate goal is to have a meeting with this personâpreferably face-to-face, or digitallyâto get to know each other better. The process you described that I'm following is what LinkedIn actually built Sales Navigator for. And what I find is that part of Sales Navigator is hardly ever used. People use it as a search engine, which it is, but taking that process and doing those engagement steps is where Sales Navigator's true strength lies. Why waste money on a tool if you're not using the best part to build relationships?
Why AI Automation Fails in B2B Sales
37:38 Brad Eather: One fundamental thing getting lost in this moment of AI is a belief that there are shortcuts or everything can be automated. Developing a relationship en masse in B2B sellingâwhen dealing with six-figure dealsâcannot realistically or meaningfully be automated.
38:20 Mic Adam: That's always been one of the things I have been fighting for: to stop all this automation. One, because it's not allowed by LinkedIn, but two, because it doesn't give you any results for B2B.
38:34 Brad Eather: Which may be a good segue to talk about authenticity in this moment. When we have the tools to do mass outreach and content creation, what's the importance of being authentic and what does authenticity look like?
38:52 Mic Adam: Authenticity means that you as a human control the final output. If you create text using AI but you have given it all the information that came from you and you just needed help to structure it, that's okay. But outsourcing the process of thinking doesn't work. Authenticity is showing people that you actually thought about this, as opposed to asking a machine to write 27 posts in 10 minutes. It only works if I control the process at the beginning and the end.
When you create a post, ask yourself: Are you willing to sign your name under that post? If you aren't, then don't post it.
40:29 Brad Eather: That's the reputational question. Your word is your reputation. If you're creating posts and you're not in control of it, I don't understand how people do that.
40:47 Mic Adam: Once in a while, when I see a post, I check if it was written by AI. Sometimes I know the person and I know they don't speak that way. If someone regularly posts 100% AI content, their reputation is entirely lost. I question whether they're real people, and I don't want to read automated stuff. But if content shows clearly that you thought about what you wanted to say at the beginning and phrased it at the end, that remains authentic.
Employee Advocacy: Sales & Marketing Alignment
42:19 Mic Adam: The through line today has been two elements: marketing content and networking (sales). In this digital era, sales is being pulled online. You do quite a bit of work with employee advocacy. What should the sales role be in supporting marketing?
I'm going to give a twisted answer: what should marketing do for sales? The goal for marketing is to create the image and content and distribute it, but salespeople are not robots or monkeys just reproducing what was said. Salespeople should contribute content ideas to marketing. Employee advocacy works from marketing to sales, but it also must work from sales to marketing. If it's a one-way street, it will start with a big kickoff, but after a while, it will just die. If you do it both ways, you keep the flow going.
The Role of Leadership & Guidance in Social Selling
45:16 Brad Eather: There is a crucial role for leadership to be supportive. Without support and the right training, you leave people to figure this out on their own. Without leadership valuing their opinions, advocacy doesn't work.
45:38 Mic Adam: Rather than training, I'd say guiding. Training teaches the ins and outs, but it's more about guiding all sidesâmanagement, sales, and marketing. If leadership doesn't help, contribute, and share like everybody else, your employee advocacy program will fall on its face. It's about giving them nudges. People go to a training and forget 70% in 24 hours. You need someone, internal or external, to keep that fire going through guidance.
Defining Creativity in the Age of AI
46:59 Brad Eather: Wrapping up, we always ask one question of our guests: What is your definition of creativity?
47:15 Mic Adam: For me, creativity is the ability to behave naturally being yourself in a day that is today ruled by AI. It is trying to remain authentic, speaking up in your own wordsâhowever imperfectâand not resorting to templates and AI environments. It's what humans are built to do: to think out of the box and remain true to ourselves. Daring to have the nerve to be yourself in a time of AIâthat is where creativity is going.
48:06 Brad Eather: I really like that answer. I find great joy in having ownership over my ideas and knowing authentically that my opinions are truly my own.
Connect with Mic Adam
48:58 Brad Eather: Where can people find you if they're looking to find you?
49:06 Mic Adam: The best place to find me is on LinkedIn itselfâit's my main platform. I also have a website called vanguard-leadership.be. But LinkedIn has been my life for the last 22 years.
49:26 Brad Eather: You've also just released a book related to your experiences. Is there anything you'd like to say about that?
49:36 Mic Adam: I wrote the book because I feel we are drifting away from being human. The book is called MIC DROP: The Human Side of LinkedIn. I want to show people that LinkedIn is more than automation and vanity numbers. Rather than just tips and tricks, it's about becoming human again and starting real conversations.
50:11 Brad Eather: Mic, thanks so much for joining us on the Creative Business Podcast. If you enjoyed the conversation, please remember to subscribe. Until next time, stay creative. Thanks, Mic.
50:24 Mic Adam: Thank you for having me.
