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  • Why you need to post on LinkedIn ft. Trent Dressel

Why you need to post on LinkedIn ft. Trent Dressel

30K+ Followers on LinkedIn & Youtube

June 08, 2023

Happy National Best Friend Day! We’re your no B.S. sales bestie that won’t ask you how your pipeline is looking.

 

In today’s Follow Up:

  • The Trent Dressel Interview 🎤 

  • Sales in the news 🗞️

  • Sales tools 🛠️

  • Sales jobs for closers 💰

Sales Fact of The Day

67% of lost sales are a result of sales reps not properly qualifying potential customers before taking them through the full sales process.

Growing an Audience, Crushing Quota, and Getting Fired. The Trent Dressel Interview.

This week we had the opportunity to sit down with the don of B2B Tech Sales, Trent Dressel. 

Trent has a large following in the world of Tech Sales:

  • Youtube: 31K

  • LinkedIn: 30K

  • TikTok: 11K

The reason Trent has grown so fast?

The guy is a sales ninja. In less than 4 years after graduating, he’s made $300k+ and is churning out bangers.

His story is interesting and one that any sales rep can learn from:

  • He graduated from Ohio University and landed a BDR role @ Qualtrics in 2018.

  • In 2020, he became a top performer and was promoted to an AE role

  • Around the same time, with COVID in full effect, Trent decided to go all in on growing his Youtube channel and LinkedIn audience (and it worked).

Trent shares everything online like his 2022 take-home pay ($302K) and getting put on PIP.

But in one case, Trent took it to level 7….

Back in March, after 4.5+ years at Qualtrics, Trent was fired for sharing his call recordings online.

It wasn’t the way he expected to leave the company, but it gave him the kick he needed to go all in on building his online businesses.

Here’s few highlights from our interview:

Q: You posted your W2 showing that you made $77K in 2019 and $302K in 2022. Why did you decide to share this, and how did it feel to make more than triple your starting pay last year?

A: There's loads of people making content, but do all these people have the results? Maybe, maybe not. So I said, here's my literal W-2 to reflect what I was able to accomplish at what level and age. I think everyone should be forced to report exactly how much money they’ve made because that then tells everyone your contributions and your value to the marketplace.

For the $302K, I knew I had a great year, but it was from the work I did in 2021. That's what’s reflected in 2022. But it was cool because I didn't expect it to be that much. In the previous year, I did $170K, so it was basically a full double. I just wanted to share it because it's validation of being able to accomplish this income growth by this age.

Q: When people first start posting on social media, it can be discouraging when they don’t get any engagement or views. At what point did you start seeing traction on Youtube and Linkedin?

A: I actually have the data pulled up for you here. On May 13th, 2020, right around when I was a month and a half into being at home, I was like “am I going to really commit to this thing"?”. I published 16 YouTube videos and had 100 subscribers. Fast forward to March 8th, 2021 (10 months later), I published 172 videos and reached my first 1,000 subscribers. So think about that… 10 months, 150 more videos, (and we're talking to 8 to 12 min videos) to reach 1,000 subscribers. And then another 3-5 months from that point to monetize and start making pennies a day on Youtube.

So think about that. Are you willing to put in the work for a year with no upfront reward?

Q: What are your top 3 tips for someone that wants to start building an audience on LinkedIn or Youtube?

A: 1) I think a big pitfall people have is that they're so excited, they dive into multiple platforms. They're like, “l'Il put a YouTube video out”. “I'II clip it up into these shorts for TikTok”. “I'll put an Instagram post out”. It's hard enough to do it on one channel, let alone multiple. So I would start by committing to one single channel for the first 6 months.

2) The next thing is that it's hard to start, right? Overcoming that fear of what will people think of you. That's a challenge. But the bigger challenge is staying consistent after you've started. That's the only way you'll grow is by committing to one channel, posting frequently enough, and starting to build a brand.

3) Lastly, a mistake I see is trying to monetize too early. Truly try to lead with value for 6 months to a year, and then you can justify monetizing and it will be more successful.

It also depends on what your objectives are, but commit to one channel and stay consistent. It's as simple as that.

We only scratched the surface with these questions, so if you want to hear the rest of the interview → Click Here. (and might as well subscribe while you’re there 😉. )

And if you want to check out Trent’s Youtube channel → Click Here.

👇️ Let us know your thoughts👇️ 

Sales Tip of The Day

You should only be speaking 20-30% of the time on sales calls.

Get comfortable with silence, and let your prospect talk.

Count to 3 after your prospect ends a sentence. They’ll often fill the awkward silence with more insights.

Weekend Plans

10 Best Sales Movies to Binge this Weekend

We’ve got the list of the 10 best sales movies that will have you ready to run through a brick wall (or just make more cold calls).

thefollowup.beehiiv.com/p/10-best-sales-movies

Sales in the News

Sales Weapons of The Day

  • Winn.ai: The “no-typing CRM” ai tool CRM. Automatically captures notes from meetings and updates your CRM for you.

  • Arcade: Create interactive product demos that can be embedded inside websites, blog posts, or tweets.

Cool Jobs at Cool Companies

A word from our LinkedIn Influencers:

Study the prospect, not the product.

Meme of the Day

And that’s a wrap!

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