Beat the great ignore

Viktor Hatfaludi
October 17, 2024
2 minutes

Sending more emails will be the reason you miss target in 2025. But you can make a small change and improve your reply rates instead.

For the past two years instead of using AI to speed up standard repetitive tasks it’s been used to send thousands of emails a week across 10+ inboxes.

And now we’re experiencing “the great ignore”.

Now even the most personal and well-written email has a tough time landing in the inbox let alone getting seen.

But there’s a better way to get replies. One where you end up sending fewer emails.

It’s called social warm-up.

Your Social Warming Playbook

What’s social warming?

You’ve probably heard of social selling before, but not what it’s actually useful for.

See, the goal of social selling isn't to approach prospects on social platforms. It’s to book meetings with new accounts from warm outreach instead of having to send cold emails.

Engagement on social media is just a very small part of it.

Isn’t it a waste of time?

Sometimes social selling is used to refer to LinkedIn outreach so I get this question a lot:

Is social selling a complete waste of time if my audience isn’t on LinkedIn?

The right question is "which channels are my personas active on?" - and be active there.

It could be X, YouTube, IG, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit (although technically that can be considered a community channel) and other community channels.

All of these are social channels where you can do social warm-up.

Can it replace cold outreach altogether?

Replace? No. Improve your chances of getting replies? Yes.

See, there’s one thing missing from even the best cold outreach campaigns. The best ones are

  1. relevant
  2. timely, and
  3. new

But you know what’s missing? Familiarity with the sender.

If someone already knows about you, your company, or your product, they’re much more likely to see what you have to say.

So while social selling won’t save you from making cold calls anytime soon, it’s a low effort activity that pays off in conversion rates.

My recommendation:

  1. connect with everyone you talk to
  2. make note of what each person cares about
  3. leave every person you talk to better off than had they not taken that call.
  4. post regularly (on channels where prospects are active) so you stay top of mind.
  5. follow up with your contacts with “no ask updates” if you find something that could be useful to them

Even if these people never buy, they’ll at least have the confidence to refer you when you ask for an intro.

If that’s our definition of social selling then it’s anything but a waste of time.

Just don’t expect short-term results. It’s something you start doing now and it’ll pay dividends as you advance your career. Especially if you stay within the same company or at least the industry.

The 5 steps to running social warming campaigns

Here’s the TL;DR

  1. know your personas
  2. build a profile people trust
  3. find the right prospects
  4. become a familiar face: land in the notifications section a few times spread out before sending a connection request
  5. when sending a connection request, give something so valuable it feels bad giving it away for free. Then continue nurturing them with content

Wanna learn exactly how to set these campaigns up?

Watch the recording of this masterclass we did with La Growth Machine and learn:

  1. How to prep for a social warming campaign
  2. What tools you’ll need to be productive
  3. How to set them up the right way

Viktor Hatfaludi
October 17, 2024
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Viktor Hatfaludi

B2B Sales Consultant & Trainer

Meet your trainer

After 10+ years managing B2B deals full-cycle and leading sales teams across Europe, I saw the same pattern everywhere: deals didn’t die because the competition was better or cheaper — they died because reps didn’t know how to uncover the value their champions needed to win projects internally.

Now, I help Revenue Leaders fix that through hands-on training programs that improve Rep Productivity. More specifically uncovering priority problems that lead to larger opportunities, increased win rates, and shorter sales cycles.

These aren’t motivational sessions or one-size-fits-all playbooks. They’re frameworks I use to this day for getting deals unstuck — whether they’re smaller 25k opps or multi 6-figure contracts.