How Social Selling helped the international fintech company EXANTE generate B2B leads through personal employee profiles on LinkedIn

It isn't easy to attract B2B clients in the financial sector since there is a compendium of competitor offers on the market. You need something that will set you apart from the rest - trust! Not only in the company but in the people that represent it.

That was the challenge EXANTE, the international investment company, faced. They provided their clients with direct access to a wide range of financial instruments and were looking to expand their reach. This is where the Social Selling agency ModumUp comes in. They helped EXANTE increase the number of B2B leads and deals by using personal employee profiles on LinkedIn.

The ModumUp team offered to establish a mentoring group for EXANTE employees from different countries: The UK, the USA, Greece, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Chile, Milan, Singapore and CIS. All the training and support processes were dedicated to the Social Selling approach - the building and developing of personal brands on LinkedIn to generate potential B2B leads among clients and partners.

We conducted two corporate mentoring groups with 20 participants in total. Thanks to this course, the EXANTE team had active dialogues and calls with leading banks, brokers and other financial institutions from many different countries.

Throughout the project, the participants gave positive feedback about working with the agency's experts. For example, one of the participants, Nadira Sadykova, noted her mentor, Sofia, who supervised Nodira's work directly.

Two other participants left a detailed public review on LinkedIn and published it on their personal pages:

The mentoring group participants shared their insights and best practices of Social Selling and constantly supported and motivated each other. Before joining the group, some EXANTE employees didn't know each other, and afterwards, they noted that the group also helped foster new friendships among colleagues in addition to practical benefits.

The agency's experts did weekly thematic webinars for the participants, where they discussed such topics as:

• positioning on LinkedIn
  
• target audience growth
  
• content preparation
  
• interaction with target audience profiles
  
• automation and shadow banning
  
• The Social Selling Index and follow-up strategies
  
• lead generation mechanics

For example, one of the training sessions was about target audience growth. LinkedIn has several ways to find target company representatives, but most participants said LinkedIn's internal Sales Navigator tool was the most beneficial resource. The ability to sort the audience by selected parameters allowed them to find relevant people more precisely and send connection requests only to those actively maintaining their LinkedIn profiles.

We paid special attention to script development and various lead generation approaches throughout the project. The mentoring group members studied several of ModumUp's lead generation mechanics. It was important to show there's no magical approach that'll immediately bring leads; therefore, testing different hypotheses is essential.

In particular, we shared our general lead generation algorithm with the participants, which includes our team's best practices:

The Social Selling algorithm from the ModumUp team

After studying the "Lead Generation" topic, all mentoring group members decided to create a common script database where they could share successful messages with their colleagues.

In addition to weekly group calls, ModumUp's expert team worked individually with each participant via personal messages. They tracked the progress of each EXANTE employee and even gave some agency nominations (for example, the most interesting content, the most active interaction with audience profiles, etc.); this encouraged the most active participants.

In addition to active dialogues and calls with leading banks, brokers, and other financial companies from various countries, participants regularly maintain their personal profiles on LinkedIn. About 70% of managers remained active on this platform even after the end of the project.