What is social selling? It’s using social media to build relationships with your prospects. And it’s the foundation of our membership. We wanted CEOs, founders, and C-level executives to use social selling to grow their personal brand and generate leads. In the last year, I used social selling to hit 35 million views on my work and help make over a million-dollars in sales. A little over twelve months ago, I started from scratch. Zero followers. Now I’m hitting record highs in engagement and generating hundreds of leads every month for our membership every month. Here are the exact steps I used to make it happen (feel free to copy and repeat):
Step 1: Create a Landing Page that Converts
I needed a landing page that sold the membership well. Rather than re-invent the wheel, I copied a similar landing page to what I’ve used for previous companies with subscription memberships.
This page is gold. 
It includes testimonials, logos, and community pictures. Instead of allowing people to buy right here, we have them fill out a JotForm. We need to qualify people who apply because most can’t afford the membership at $1,500/month. Moreover, at $1,500/month they expect to talk to someone before they purchase.
2. Qualify Your Applicants
Using Typeform, we ask a number of questions which can disqualify the applicant:
- What’s your LinkedIn profile URL?
- Why do you want to join?
- What’s your budget?
The faster we disqualify candidates, the faster we’ll get in touch with the people who will convert.
For example, if they put a “1” as their budget – they’re disqualified. We’re still figuring out a separate funnel for these low-quality leads because they make up seventy percent of the applicants we receive. When the applicants finish the form, we get their details sent to a Google Sheet and my email.
Here’s an example of a lead’s details in an automated email I’d receive:
From here, I can dive into their LinkedIn profile to see if they’re worth a phone call. The best part: I don’t do any of the qualification. I label each BASH email under Leads.
This way, I can have my assistant open my inbox, qualify the leads, and add them to a follow-up sequence. All I need to do is show up for the phone call.
3. Use a CRM That Automates Your Workflow
Most CRMs can help you, but not all are meant for what you sell. For a reoccurring membership, I needed something simple with heavy automation. I started with Google Sheets + Zapier, then upgraded to Pipedrive. I didn’t like my experience with Pipedrive, so I settled on PropellerCRM. It has Mixmax-like features with sequences, a Trello board-like feel for keeping track of leads, and a sweet Chrome extension. The Chrome extension pops this image up right next to my emails. This allows me to fill out the lead’s details while adding them right to a follow-up sequence and into my CRM.
In one click, they’ve been added to follow-up sequence. The follow-up sequence depends on what level of budget they have and their title. This enables us to cater directly to them with personalized copy.
Here’s what the the PropellerCRM board looks like:
It only take a few minutes to get up and running with this software. We make the follow-ups simple, mostly text based, and straight to the point. We haven’t done a ton of A/B testing with these email templates, but so far they’re crushing it for us with a 70% schedule rate.
When they’re ready to start the membership, we send them a Docusign template along with a proposal to fill out their credit card details. We’d rather have them fill out their account details because Quickbooks doesn’t take a processing fee when it’s an account transfer. The issue is when we ask for bank account details (Routing # & Account #), we lose up to twenty percent of our prospects. Ouch.
4. Know Where Your Leads are Coming From
If you don’t know where your leads are coming from, then you have a serious issue. You can’t double down on what works. You’ll waste countless hours on the wrong channels. We launched the membership using Facebook traffic. As we’ve grown, we’ve tested new channels. Most of our leads now come from LinkedIn. We found this out with one simple Typeform question. As a result, we’ve doubled down on LinkedIn with content and automation.
Because LinkedIn works well for driving traffic and leads, we focused on how to do this at scale. There are two areas where prospects will find you using LinkedIn:
1: Your LinkedIn Company Landing Page
We optimized our company page to express the services and benefits we offer people when they work with us. We’re not trying to include our entire story – only the pieces that will help make the sale. And we make the text mobile friendly. To get people to visit our LinkedIn company page, we create non-stop viral posts tagging it:
These statuses can drive upwards to thirty thousand visitors every month. And we do this on repeat – that’s powerful.
2: Your LinkedIn Published Posts
LinkedIn loves how-to content. And they love story-oriented content about the workplace. With how-to content, I always leave the second half of the article on my website. In this instance, I wrote an article with eleven tips to gain a following on LinkedIn. I included the first five in the piece, then had a link to view the last six on our website. This way I can capture my readers in a Facebook re-marketing audience and give them a chance to opt-in for the BASH membership.
This piece drove almost five hundred visitors to my website over the span of a week. Now I upload an article like this one every week to LinkedIn ????
5. Automate the Benefits in Your Membership
One of the primary benefits of the membership is we expand Facebook profile networks with targeted people, including CEOs, CMOs, and other C-level executives. We do this because we have one of the largest databases of enriched Facebook URLs (50,0o0+). It’s expensive to enrich a Facebook URL. On average, it costs us forty cents. The result: An entire map of the most powerful people on Facebook. At first, we used Mass Planner to auto add these people into the participants’ networks. With too many participants, Mass Planner slowed down my computer to a snail’s pace. Moreover, it required constant monitoring along with a new Proxy for each participant. Here’s what the Facebook Auto-Adder and extractor looks like in Mass Planner:
Here’s where we’d start automating the friend requests:
Here’s the Chrome extension we built to replace Mass Planner. This cost us $500 and saved us countless hours of pain. Totally worth it.
This Chrome extension auto-adds people to your Facebook network based on their profile URLs. We even have a featured exclusive for me that enables us to scrape the entire friend’s list of Facebook users.
We outsource this URL list to a VA who enriches the data, then sends it back to us. We then filter out everyone who’s not a C-level executive or founder. Once the Facebook automation is running, we set them up with Linked Helper to auto-connect to targeted prospects on LinkedIn at scale. This tool can add 2,000 – 3,000 targeted connections/month.
Once they have Linked Helper running, we help them produce content with viral mechanics. We have more than one hundred viral outlines for them to follow. It’s plug’n’play content.
Before they post their content, they submit it via a Google Doc using a Google Form link I have located in the pinned post. I use Zapier to alert me of the submissions via email. I edit each piece of content before it goes live to ensure it gets engagement.
How well do these posts work? I decided to publish one and it received over 200,000 views in two days. This was after nine months of not posting anything with only 1,900 connections.
To keep our members concentrated on creating content rather than consuming it in their news feed, we have them eliminate it with a custom Chrome extension. Take a look:
Beautiful. No distractions – only writing. Once the viewers begin engaging with the members’ content on LinkedIn and Facebook, we create re-marketing audiences. To do it with Facebook, we created a custom Chrome extension that enables us to pull all the emails of one’s Facebook friends. It syncs with Yahoo because it’s the only email platform that pulls emails from Facebook friends.
We pair this tactic with LinkedIn’s “Getting an archive of your data” feature found in Settings. Now we have emails of all their Facebook and LinkedIn friends. Before we start running ads for them, we ensure they have an optimized landing page to send traffic to. Because all the members produce engaging content every week for their network, all the re-marketing ads achieve a relevance score of 10/10. This results in less money spent on leads and engagement.
6. Follow Through
To encourage members to take full advantage of the benefits, we hold two webinars every week. There’s easy access in the pinned post of the private Facebook Group:
This way we can walk them through any problems or opportunities they have. For added accountability, we send them an email every Sunday noting their progress in the membership. This email includes the stats of their follower growth and corrections on their latest content.
7. Become a Lead Machine
We wanted to make it easy to generate leads from engagement. This way participants have an incentive to post more. With some help from my team, I built this Chrome extension that extracts emails and profile data from people who comment or like posts.
It can also scrape entire LinkedIn search queries in the blink of an eye. Hunter could only do a page at a time before their Chrome extension got shut down by LinkedIn. That’s why we don’t release these tools to the public.
To take it one step further, we added this Chrome extension that auto-connects with personalized messages to people based on their LinkedIn URLs. This helps warm outbound email and generate immediate leads.
None of this would help if we didn’t include copy templates for cold email and LinkedIn messaging. We can’t put those here because they’re the secret sauce of the membership. It took us a lot of A/B testing for our own business to find out what works.
Step up to the Plate
All membership communities require some face time from the founder. Your job? To find out where. It’s important you automate and delegate everything you shouldn’t do. This means editing posts, sending emails, and jumping on phone calls to sell prospects. It takes an entire team to automate an elite membership community from lead generation to encouraging community engagement. Once that happens, all you need to do is focus on closing.
