My unified theory of social selling

Pretty soon after leaving Globality, I wrote some thoughts on the next 10 years. One core bet was around authenticity:

Consumers are going to be awash in generated content. This will serve the purpose of private marketing (classic advertising or astroturfing campaigns) and more malicious state-actor attempts to sway public opinion. As a result, people are going to place a much higher emphasis on trust capital online. The value of real, provable, and authentic relationships are going to increase.

More than two years later, I think this holds up pretty well. Voice cloning and video generations have gotten shockingly good, shockingly quickly. And while we haven't yet seen mass market deepfakes used for nefarious purposes, I do find myself double checking twitter handles and the validation checkmark to make sure people are who I think they are.¹

How is authenticity tracked across the major social platforms? The state of verification is all over the place:

• Twitter: Verified checks, requires a credit card but no identity documents
• LinkedIn: Algorithmic cross referencing with professional network
• Facebook/Instagram: Verified checks on bigger accounts

LinkedIn sits in an interesting position here. It has the strongest claim to identity verification because it's so tied to professional identity. Either you - or someone in your network - is going to provide some independently verifiable information. If you're part of the leadership team, you'll also appear on the company's website.² There are more datapoints to cross reference than a random account on IG.

I'll be honest: I used to give LinkedIn a pretty hard time. All those stilted conversations and posts. One too many "congratulations on the promotion" comments echoing in your news feed. But as I've spent more time on there as part of working on a suite of creator tools, I've come around on the network. There's a whole community of mentors, future collaborators, and prospects. And people spend a lot of time on there: most professionals at least a couple hours per week these days. Engagement levels are high - popular content can receive millions of views and thousands of comments.

The death of cold email

I met Will through the larger Stanford network³. When we first met in March, he was researching procurement startup ideas and thinking about posting more on LinkedIn. I thought it was a funny side-quest but wished him luck. A month later we caught up again over a latte. He already had 85,000 followers. A few weeks later he had surged to 100,000.

Watching Will's growth got us thinking more seriously about social selling: using social networks to replace some traditional work that happens in a marketing org. Having prospects come to you instead of you coming to them is the dream of most sales organization. But easier said than done. Most enterprise companies are still heavily reliant on outbound sales. It's way easier for you to find companies you want to pursue than for those companies to ever hear about you.

Unfortunately, cold outbound is getting harder than ever before. Our inboxes are littered with AI generated garbage. They seem vaguely personalized but the content rings hollow. Even if they're good, they make you feel like someone didn't even care enough to reach out personally.

Hundreds of startups are coming to market with slightly-smarter cold outreach platforms. You input your list of sales prospects and the tool will crawl their sites and write something personalized. The more of these we get, the more desensitized we become and the fewer responses we see.

Based on my own experience selling enterprise software over the last few years, I'm willing to say that cold email outbound is pretty dead.

What comes in its place? Much more effort. More warm intros. And probably much more authenticity. People don't want to pick up the phone from someone they don't know. But they do - and do enthusiastically - for people that are in their broader circles.⁴ It's easier to get into that broader circle online by developing authority in the industry.

The right kind of credibility

Social selling relies heavily on the persona behind the content. It's certainly possible to bootstrap a successful selling motion as a random BDE on an enterprise sales team, but it's hard. People in your target industry are quickly filtering for clout: they're looking for CEOs or VPs of Sales. So if you're at a bigger company, you're going to need exec buy-in.

From there you usually want executives to be selling the business through their own personal stories.

The value here is maybe more obvious if you're a entrepreneur or solopreneur. You control the brand: the brand is basically yourself anyway.

But you ideally want to break into a space where you're selling to experts. You're probably an expert in some way (most founders are), but what if you're a technical founder selling into a non-technical field?

The buyers themselves are probably already experts in their field. If you're going after insurance tech, they're probably not going to turn to a tech founder for insurance advice. But seeing content about how insurance companies are falling behind because of AI? Now that's somewhere where your credibility can actually help you.

The sweet spot is being the person who can bridge worlds. You're not trying to out-insurance the insurance expert. You're the tech person who understands insurance well enough to spot inefficiencies they're blind to.

Why this isn't just influencer marketing

A creator, an influencer, and a thought leader walk into a bar. Ouch. Get me out of here. - Old English Proverb

When I first explain social selling to people, they usually think it's just a paid partnership. Companies have been doing this with influencers for as long as social networks have existed. You give them free products (and increasingly might pay $15k per collaboration post) and they'll post a photo with your product. You get the exposure and perhaps the shine of the influencer. Think Khloé Kardashian posing with a Hermès bag.

Personally, I think the shine is overblown. People understand how paid partnerships work now. Instagram and TikTok even label them explicitly. We've already built our mental model that influencers don't really care about the product - they just get something out of posing with it.⁵

Content about a company is far more interesting, and yields far more engagement, when it's the people who are actually running the company talking about it themselves. If you're already known as a thought leader (Bloomberg articles, op-eds, CEO of a Fortune 500 company) you don't need to spend time establishing legitimacy on social media. You inherit the legitimacy you've already created in the real world.

If you're smaller, you have to establish some sense of credibility. You need to be leading something and then you need something else interesting to say. That's the winning combination.

Feedback loop

Will optimizes his content more rigorously than most creators I know. I'd heard that Mr. Beast A/B tests every piece of content he publishes, but it turns out creators with smaller audiences do this too. Most people with ~10k followers run similar experiments.

The game gets even more intense when you get bigger. Each post is essentially a testable hypothesis. Is this content reaching future clients? And do those people like what you're saying?

In most platforms, this answer is known by the algorithms (since they have the impression history) but isn't revealed to you. The most you have to go off of are comments and likes - which can be misleading indicators of actual business value.

LinkedIn provides better analytics than most platforms. You can see industry breakdowns and work history of people engaging with your content. You even get aggregate industry numbers of people who see your posts, not just the people who actively engaged with it. This gives you fast feedback cycles to see if your content is reaching the right people.

The opportunity window

Most people don't actually post regularly. Of all the people in my network (~1500), only about 10 are consistent posters. Standing out right now is pretty straightforward - you just have to post consistently.

I imagine this won't last forever. So there's a bit of a land-grab happening to build an audience before the opportunity window closes. But there's some cost to premature diversification.

Content will only help you if you're writing content and delivering authority in the space that you're eventually going to sell into. I find it much more helpful to focus on a vertical here (think: the insurance part of insurtech, the healthcare part of healtech, etc). Startup founders love seeing the content from other founders but they rarely convert into buyers.

Some fields are more crowded than others. There's a lot of competition in the generic spaces: entrepreneurship fundamentals, writing advice, self-development. You can get narrower - like professional coaching advice - but you're already going to feel the pressure to specialize.

The eventual goal of social selling is to eliminate targeted outbound entirely. Your content becomes the outbound itself. You get all the perks of free algorithmic distribution while driving your target users to your product.⁶

The cringe content economy

A lot of content on LinkedIn is genuinely cringe-inducing. We've all seen the posts: "Here's what my honeymoon taught me about B2B sales..." or "My 7-year-old asked me why I work so hard. Here's what I told her..."

Some of this comes from people trying to self-promote instead of focusing on giving away value first. But I've seen firsthand that much of the cringe content is designed that way. It's cringe because unfortunately it works.

LinkedIn's algorithm rewards engagement above all else. Comments, reactions, shares - these all signal to the platform that content is worth showing to more people during the first 30 minutes. And what drives engagement better than content that makes people feel something? Even if that feeling is secondhand embarrassment.

The most successful LinkedIn creators have figured out a few reliable formulas:

1. The humble-brag disguised as a lesson: "I just closed the biggest deal of my career, but here's what I learned about rejection along the way..."

2. The imaginary conversation: "My Uber driver turned to me and said..." or "A junior employee pulled me aside..."

3. The manufactured controversy: Taking a mild business opinion and presenting it as a contrarian hot take

4. The inspiration porn: Finding the most dramatic possible angle on a mundane business experience

The weird thing is that these posts often come from genuinely smart, accomplished people. They're not accidentally cringe - they're strategically cringe. They've A/B tested their way into discovering that authenticity doesn't always win on social platforms. Performance does.

This creates a fascinating paradox. The platform that's supposed to be about professional authenticity rewards the most performative behavior. People end up creating personas of themselves that are more polished, more inspirational, and more story-driven than reality.

But here's what's interesting: the audience knows it's performative. The comments are full of people calling out the obvious fabrications. Yet the posts still get thousands of likes and hundreds of shares. We're all participating in a collective fiction where we pretend these stories are real because they contain kernels of useful business insight.

The challenge for social selling is navigating this landscape without becoming part of the problem. You need engagement to build an audience, but you don't want to sacrifice credibility for virality. The balance seems to be content that's genuinely useful while still being engaging enough to cut through the noise.

I've noticed the most effective approach is meta-commentary on the industry itself. Instead of fabricating stories, talk about the trends you're seeing. Instead of humble-bragging about your successes, break down the tactical details of how you achieved them. People are starved for genuine insight in a sea of manufactured inspiration.

Programmatic content

We have a somewhat meta case in Saywhat.ai, because it's a platform for entrepreneurs. We're selling to the same people that want to post more on LinkedIn. So you can pretty safely assume they're more active on social networks than an average user.

It's also unique in the setup of social selling. For one thing, Will was already huge when he started the company. We went out of stealth and into private beta when he already had 150k followers. And most of these followers were already interested in personal branding and LinkedIn content creation - which is exactly why they were following him in the first place.

The alignment was fairly optimal. We had a large portion of our total addressable market already following the founder. When Will posted about launching Saywhat, we had hundreds of signups within hours. No ads, no cold outreach - just one post from someone the audience already trusted.

But here's the thing: this didn't happen overnight. Will spent half a year creating genuinely helpful content about LinkedIn growth strategies. He shared screenshots of his analytics, broke down what worked and what didn't, and gave away strategies that other creators would have charged for. By the time he launched a product, his audience was already bought in.

The authenticity paradox

I suspect we're in the early innings of this shift. As more people realize cold email is dead, social selling will become more competitive. The bar for content quality will rise. The window for easy growth will close.

But I don't think this necessarily ends with LinkedIn. Every professional community will likely develop its own version of this. Discord servers, Slack communities, niche forums - anywhere professionals gather and trust can be built. In a world drowning in generated content, authentic relationships become the most valuable currency. Social selling is just one way to build that currency at scale.

The challenge now is doing it before everyone else figures it out.