Hey Reader,
A founder I spoke with last week thought he had social selling dialed in.
"I can ask a friend who knows an e-commerce manager to make an introduction," he said.
I had to stop him right there.
That's a warm referral. A perfectly valid tactic – but not social selling. Calling it social selling is like calling a taxi a road trip. Same road, completely different commitment.
Here's what social selling actually looks like:
Step 1: Find your exact ICPs on LinkedIn. Not broadly. Specifically – title, industry, company size, and the problems they post about.
Step 2: Engage with substance. Not "Great insight!" but a real reaction. A follow-up question. A perspective that signals you understand their world at a peer level.
Step 3: Repeat. For weeks. Sometimes months.
Research puts the number at 7 to 17 touches before a prospect begins to see you as credible. That's not a typo. Up to 17 separate interactions before the door cracks open.
The mechanism isn't complicated, but most founders skip it because it feels slow. You are becoming the smart person in the comments – the name they recognize, the voice they've read enough times to trust. When you finally send the DM, you are not a stranger asking for their time. You are the person they've been reading.
That is a fundamentally different conversation to walk into.
The Clarity Filter Insight
Social selling isn't asking for a referral – it's committing value to strangers until you're no longer one.[Share on LinkedIn] [Share on X]
If your current strategy relies on someone else making an introduction, that's networking – and there's nothing wrong with it. But don't confuse a shortcut with a system. The founders building real, durable pipeline on LinkedIn are not hacking anything. They are showing up, consistently, in the right orbit, until trust does the selling for them.
Speak soon, — Dmitry
P.S. Don't write code for a product nobody wants to buy. I built Traction OS to give you the exact 60-day roadmap, sales scripts, and validation templates you need to hit your first $10k MRR without guessing. From complete scratch or with an existing MVP.