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CEO at AMP | Sales Trainer | LinkedIn Top Voice
You can’t argue with the data—today’s business leaders are on LinkedIn, networking and building relationships with sales reps like you.
In this episode of Closing Time, we welcome Morgan Ingram to share his advice for using LinkedIn (& Sales Navigator) to increase win rates.
He’ll provide tips on what to do—and what NOT to do—on the platform, share his perspective on how the algorithm is changing, and explain how you can adapt your activity to maintain and improve your results.
LinkedIn is a powerhouse for B2B sales, and the data backs it up—1.6 billion monthly visitors, four out of five members influencing business decisions, and its users have double the buying power of the average online audience (source: Hootsuite). Morgan believes that if you’re serious about selling in today’s market, not using LinkedIn Sales Navigator is doing yourself a disservice.
Why are some sellers still hesitant? Morgan acknowledges that the tool can seem overwhelming at first. It’s loaded with features, and that complexity can deter users from exploring its full potential. Many people use only a fraction of its capabilities, which, according to Morgan, is a missed opportunity.
The real strength of LinkedIn Sales Navigator lies in the real-time insights it offers. Morgan explains that when professionals change jobs or actively engage on the platform, LinkedIn Sales Navigator tracks it. The tool lets users see who’s posted in the last 30 days, making it easier to identify active prospects. This level of insight is something other social media platforms simply can’t match.
For sellers, speed is crucial. Morgan argues that the ability to quickly filter through prospects—seeing who’s viewed your profile, who’s following your company, and who’s recently changed jobs—gives you a significant edge. If you can reach out to a prospect before your competition even knows they’re in the market, you’re more likely to close the deal. In this way, Sales Navigator isn’t just a tool; it’s a strategic advantage that could be the difference between winning and losing a sale.
Morgan also touches on the cost of Sales Navigator. While LinkedIn itself is free, Sales Navigator comes with a price tag. But for Morgan, the justification is simple: it’s about staying ahead of the competition. If your company won’t cover the cost, it’s worth investing in yourself because being faster and better informed than your competition means you’re more likely to win business.
It’s not just about gathering information; it’s about gaining actionable insights that help you stay organized and move faster. From saved searches that alert you to new prospects entering your ideal customer profile (ICP) to updates on job changes within your target market, the tool offers access to what Morgan calls “low-hanging fruit”—opportunities that are too valuable to miss.
Timing and personalization can make all the difference in today’s competitive sales landscape. One prospecting tactic Morgan suggests is what he coins “The Boomerang” play, a strategy that turns passive interest into active engagement. By reaching out to those who have already shown curiosity about your company, you can create meaningful connections that drive results.
Here’s how it works: when someone views your company on LinkedIn, it’s a signal that they’re interested in what you’re offering (track this using Sales Navigator!). Morgan suggests sending a personalized connection request or email to these individuals, referencing their recent interaction with your company. For example, you might say, “I noticed you recently followed our company. What content stood out to you the most?” This opens the door for a conversation and gives you an opportunity to showcase how you’ve helped similar companies.
The key to the Boomerang play is its ability to “come back to you”—just like a boomerang. By acknowledging their interest and providing relevant value, you stand out from the crowd and increase your chances of turning that initial curiosity into a meaningful business relationship. It’s a smart, proactive way to engage leads who are already halfway in the door.
Sellers are fighting not only against competition but also against buyer’s short attention spans and the noise in their inboxes. When you get the opportunity to engage with prospects, Morgan warns against sending generic, inauthentic outreach, as it will likely turn off prospects and scrap your chances of a positive engagement. He calls this the “1-2 punch, value vomit.”
The issue with this strategy is that it feels impersonal and disingenuous. People receive the same kind of canned messages repeatedly, and they quickly learn to ignore them. The real problem, Morgan notes, is that reps often resort to this method because it’s easy. They’re trying to scale their efforts by sending the same message to hundreds of people, hoping that at least one person will bite. But as Morgan points out, doing more of something ineffective doesn’t make it any better; it just amplifies the problem.
What’s lacking in the “1-2 punch value vomit” approach is effort and care. Many reps don’t take the time to personalize their outreach or research their prospects. Instead, they opt for quick, automated messages that do little to build a genuine connection.
Morgan emphasizes that a thoughtful, well-researched message stands out far more and is much more likely to receive a positive response.
As LinkedIn continues to evolve, so does the algorithm that determines what content gets seen and engaged with. Recent changes highlight a growing preference for short-form video, collaborative content, and even humor. For sellers looking to maximize their impact on the platform, understanding and leveraging these trends is key to staying ahead.
Morgan points out that when LinkedIn introduces new features, like its emphasis on video content, it’s crucial to jump on board immediately. Social platforms tend to boost the visibility of new features to validate their investment, so content creators who adopt these features early on can benefit from increased exposure. Whether it’s short-form or long-form videos, LinkedIn is pushing this content more aggressively, and sellers who integrate video into their strategy are likely to see better engagement.
Humor is another key element gaining traction on LinkedIn, evidenced by the introduction of a laughing emoji reaction. Morgan advises that if you can authentically incorporate humor into your posts, it’s worth doing so. LinkedIn’s traditionally serious atmosphere makes a well-timed, funny post stand out even more, increasing the likelihood of reactions and engagement.
Collaboration is also becoming increasingly important. Morgan has noticed an uptick in content that involves multiple people, such as LinkedIn Live events or audio events. These collaborative efforts not only broaden the reach of the content but also foster deeper connections within the LinkedIn community. Morgan is a big advocate of these events, having found them to be highly effective in engaging with his audience.
Additionally, Morgan highlights the growing popularity of “cheatsheets” on LinkedIn. These are concise, one-page documents that break down a framework or process, similar to a white paper but more digestible. These cheatsheets are proving to be valuable content pieces that drive engagement, especially among professionals looking for quick, actionable insights.
As the digital landscape grows more crowded, professionals are increasingly seeking to translate their virtual LinkedIn connections into real-world relationships. This shift towards smaller, more intimate events allows for deeper, more meaningful interactions, making in-person connections a powerful extension of online networking.
As social platforms like LinkedIn become increasingly crowded with content, people are feeling overwhelmed and are seeking out more intimate, focused experiences. Instead of attending large, impersonal events, many are gravitating towards smaller, curated gatherings where they can connect with others on a deeper level.
Morgan points out that while there will always be big staple events, the demand for smaller micro-events is growing. These intimate gatherings allow participants to build stronger relationships, transitioning from virtual connections to real-life interactions. In these settings, with fewer attendees, people can connect with a significant portion of the group, creating more meaningful and lasting bonds.
He emphasizes that this shift is driven by the trust and familiarity established through online interactions. As professionals build their virtual brands on LinkedIn, they set the stage for more personal connections in the real world. Morgan advises sellers to take advantage of this trend by participating in or organizing micro events where they can meet their online connections face-to-face. It doesn’t have to be frequent, but even a few well-chosen events can lead to valuable relationships that pay dividends in the long run.
We’ve got some impressive stats and tactics to convince you to get active or more active on LinkedIn to increase your win rates. Let’s talk about it in this episode of Closing Time. Thanks for tuning into closing time. The show for Go to Market Leaders. I’m Val Riley, head of Content and digital marketing at Insightly CRM an Unbounce Company. Today I’m joined by Morgan Ingram, CEO of AMP, a B2B influencer marketing firm. Welcome to the show, Morgan. Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Awesome. I’m going to set the stage with some crazy numbers. 1.6 billion people visit LinkedIn every month. Four out of five people on LinkedIn drive business decisions. Members of LinkedIn have two times the buying power of the average online audience. So the business case is there, right? Yeah, clearly, the numbers sound pretty good. So. Well, you flat out say that LinkedIn’s best tool is sales navigator. Why is that? And what do you think holds people back from using it? The tool itself and I’ve told the LinkedIn team this, this isn’t crazy for me to say, but the tool itself, when you enter into the tool is too complicated. Like when you get in, there’s a lot of things going on. So typically for most people, if something is too complicated or there’s too many things going on, they won’t take the time to learn exactly what’s happening. So that’s the reason why people don’t do it, or they just they just stick to one or two options of the thing that is there. Most people who use a product only use like 20 to 25% of a product and then they stop. So that’s the mistake. The advantage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator, the reason I’m a huge proponent of it is because it gives you access to insights of data in real time that other tools can’t. Most people, when they change a job, where do they go first? They go to LinkedIn. When people are posting or they’re active,. It’s the only platform where you actually could see if someone’s posted in the past 30 days and actually see if they’re legitimately active on the platform. The other social media platforms do not have the access to that. So I feel like it’s a disservice if you don’t take the time to learn these things because it’s a harder market to break the noise in and sales nav gives you all the insights to do that appropriately. So LinkedIn itself is free, but sales nav has a cost. How do you work with reps to justify that cost? Let’s say their company isn’t going to pay for it. Speed. So if I can find out if someone is following my company, if they viewed my profile and I can filter it down and I can also filter down by when you posted and also what jobs changed, I’m going to get to the person faster than you. So if I get to the person faster than you and I can run the opportunity to run the deal by the time you figure it out that they changed jobs,. I’ve already closed the deal. So you’re actually losing money. So for me, that’s an easy justification for people to be like, if you don’t do it, you probably won’t be as fast. And if you’re not as fast, you won’t be in the conversation. And even if you were better, you weren’t in the conversation. So that’s the way that I think about it, so that I could move faster than everybody else. So like the cost of doing business is what it sounds like is how you perceived. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Yeah, it’s all about insights and speed because that’s the world that we live in now. And also as well, like look, if the regular LinkedIn had this stuff then that’d be great, but it doesn’t. So the way I look at it is like if I want to get in front of B2B decision makers and I want to see what they’re doing and how they’re going about it and creating list and keeping myself very organized as a rep, this is the best way to do it. Plus, with saved searches. You can see if someone has followed your company within a certain timeframe. You can see if New people have entered your ICP. You can see what people are changing jobs every week. This is access to information that’s low hanging fruit that you’re missing out on it. So I think it’s a disservice if you’re not taking advantage of it. All right. So you’ve convinced me. Let’s talk about some of the tactics you use. The first one is one you call a boomerang. The boomerang play? That’s a really fun one. So there’s a lot of plays here across the board that you could do, right, to get in front of people and things of that nature. And there’s a lot of things that I’ll that I’ll talk about. So the boomerang play could be done in a different variation. My favorite variation of it is when you see someone that has viewed your company, for example. So when you think about LinkedIn,. There’s a couple components. There’s people who follow your company. There are people who will view your profile and there’s all sorts of different stuff. So with the boomerang, I’m literally just seeing who’s viewed my company and then I can obviously that will come back to me because they follow the company. So the way to do that is you send like a connection request, and it would be like what content stood out to you the most? Right. That’s a good way to connect with someone, because if they followed your company, they probably checked out your content. However, if they follow my company, it’s a good email. Hey, notice you recently followed my company. You probably seen a couple of work that we’ve been doing. Then you could mention how you’ve helped other companies like them and then you can go to call to action. So that’s how it all comes back to you in terms of a boomerang, which is why I call it that. That’s another way to stand out. I love it. So here’s a tactic you say people should not be using. You call it a 1-2 punch with a value vomit. Yeah. Yeah. This is this is like the classic. You send a you send a connection request and then right after that, you just send a generic message. This is absolutely what you shouldn’t do. It’s got to the point where people tell me like that are decision makers, they’ll actually unconnect from you. Right? If you send something like this that isn’t relevant and I don’t think anyone here wants to get unconnected from that’s probably not what you’re aiming for. But this is happening a lot. So I encourage people, take the time with your prospecting. If it takes you an extra 50 seconds, an extra 5 minutes, it’ll be worth it. And so a lot of people are doing the Oh, I connected with you and then they do a value vomit and then now the person is upset. Yeah. I mean, I get those all the time. And, you know, you genuinely interested in connecting with someone based on their credentials or their qualifications or what they’re posting on LinkedIn. And then they hit you with, you know, four paragraphs about why, you know, X, Y, Z product is going to be the best thing for me and my company, right? It just feels a little disingenuous,. I guess. Is that what you’re picking up on? So a couple of things. One is you, you and others have seen the same thing over and over again. So when you see the same thing over and over again and you don’t like it then you don’t want engage with it, so you just ignore it. Two is it also is a disingenuous, but it also comes down to the rep because they’re trying to do things at scale, because everyone’s always trying to figure out like, how do I do more of the same? But if you do more of the same, that’s bad. Then you’re just doing more bad things. That doesn’t doesn’t really inherently help you. The third thing is it’s lack of effort, lack of care. Most people just don’t want to spend the time to do the research, to do the thing. So I’d rather click a button and it’d be like, All right, I’m done. Then actually do the due diligence to figure out what you should be doing to get in front of certain people or do those things. That’s why if I asked you how many prospecting messages have stood out to you, it probably be a little amount of them because people most people don’t take the time to be thoughtful and be prescriptive in the way they go about it. It’s a lot easier to push a button and automate and send the same message and hopefully one person’s response out of 500 than focusing on 20 people and being thoughtful knowing you can get a response. Yeah, truth be told, even if it’s something that I’m not interested in, I really do appreciate when someone has taken the time to look at my profile or read some of my recent posts and really make a thoughtful outreach to me. It’s night and day really from like you’re saying, just clicking a button. Exactly. And the thing is, you could feel that immediately when someone is clicking that button or going, Oh, we like to call going through the motions and if you want to do that, that’s fine. But you just won’t be as successful, especially with AI right now. Like if you think that’s going to work long term, it won’t because I could literally get an AI to do the same thing. I don’t even need to pay someone for that. Right. So it’s important to be intentional and thoughtful. Those are the people that will win in the long term. So you’ve mentioned that, and I think you’re just in LinkedIn all day, every day that you’ve seen a shift in the LinkedIn algorithm with preference being given to a content like short form video, collaborative content, and maybe even a little bit of humor. Yeah, this is not because I’m biased and I create a lot of videos and it it definitely works in my favor, to be fair. But this is just what’s happening. So seven months ago, eight months ago,. I did like a nano tips course for LinkedIn. And most people don’t even know that, like nano tips exist through LinkedIn learning. I didn’t know either until they asked me so because that was happening seven, eight months ago. I was like, okay, if they have a Nano tips platform and they’re trying to tap into top TikTok creators who are actually on the platform. I was like,. That means that they’re probably going to create a video feed in the near future, and they already have. So with any social platform, this is just overall social media advice. When they roll out something new, you need to triple down on the new feature because they’re they’re going to give you more juice for that thing because they’re trying to validate their investment, because the investment that they made is probably a good amount of money. So they need to prove that it works and that the user adoption rate is going to be high. So anytime you see a new feature, you should be using it like all the time. So that’s why video is going to see an increase, especially short form video, because LinkedIn is trying to prove out the concept of a short form or even long form. We’ve seen long form work as well, long form videos work on the platform. You need to be doing it because they’re try to prove it. The second thing is the humor. So it’s just looking at the reactions like they added a laughing emoji. So that probably means that they’re probably going to cater towards funny content. Now, the whole premise here is you have to actually be funny. If you’re not funny, you might want to you might want to change your strategy, but if you are somewhat funny add it into your posting. That’s certainly something I would do. And we’ve also seen an uptick in collaboration. So are you collabing with people and that means audio events, LinkedIn live events. I’ve done a couple of these and that’s really good. I love the live events,. I’ve been a huge fan of them. I’m looking to do more. Yeah, I think the humor in the algorithm,. I mean, I respond to that too, because sometimes LinkedIn can be serious, you know, serious post, serious post, serious post, and then something makes you chuckle and you’re definitely more likely to just hit that reaction button. So that’s that’s a good point. Exactly. Exactly. So I would cater your content towards that. We’ve also I didn’t say this in my reflection, but we’ve also seen an uptick in cheatsheets. So that basically just means like you have like it’s like a white paper, but it’s just like a one page thing that kind of breaks down a framework or some type of process. That’s also a key thing as well. So I saw one interesting thing that you pointed out that you’ve seen a move from virtual connections impacting in-person events. And can you elaborate a little bit on that? Yeah. So LinkedIn and other social platforms can be very noisy, right? You see a lot of content. You’re like overwhelmed like, oh my gosh, I don’t know what’s going on. Right. So more people are starting to do mini events rather than large ones. So there will always be the staple events. Yet at the same time, from what I’ve spoken to clients about and what I’m even seeing in the space is less people are going to the bigger events and they’re looking to curate smaller experiences to connect more with those people in person. So taking the virtual relationships that you’re building and truly connecting with those people in person is the route that we’re going. And that is what I recommend people to do. I’m curious, Val, on your if you’re seeing the same thing from just a marketing perspective, but we’ve just seen more people go to micro events, building true relationships. And the way they’re able to do that is because they’ve built a virtual brand. So there’s some trust there. Now we’re just trying to make sure it’s deeper. I definitely agree. You know,. I’ve been in events, the event space for a long time and you go to events and there’s a hundred booths. Now you’re going to events and maybe there’s, you know, ten or 15 tables and there’s one small meeting area and then there’s a a dining area that everybody can fit in at the same time, it really just it’s like prioritizing intimacy, intimate gatherings over those, you know, tradeshow floors that have 20,000 attendees. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And you feel like you’re lost in the crowd. And at a micro event with sub hundred, 200 people, you could genuinely connect with 60 to 70% of the people at a deep level and feel pretty legit about it. So that’s what I tell people there. All right. So we’re taking our online connections and moving them offline. Morgan I love it. Yes. Yes. That’s the key. And the thing is, you don’t it doesn’t have to be like an event every single month or dinners. Like, you can do that. It could just be, hey, we’re going to two micro events in these cities where our clients or people are and we truly connect with them and it will pay dividends for you. Morgan, Any last tips on on LinkedIn making LinkedIn work for you? I think the last tip that I’ll give is understanding what does LinkedIn working for you mean? And I think a lot of people, most people are getting lost in the noise of what that means. Like, there’s some people out there, you look at their posts, they get a thousand likes, thousands of comments you’re like, Oh, I wish that was me. Well, do you? Because their goal could be so different, right? Those people are looking to do cohorts and courses and things that nature do 1 to 1 coaching. There’s nothing against that. I’m just saying you need to know what your goal is. Like I know people who get oh 50 likes three comments, but they’re able to source big deals from that because they’re content’s very focused on who they’re trying to get in front of. So I just tell people, be mindful of impressions, engagement, etc. Know exactly what you’re looking to accomplish on the platform. Your goals aren’t the same as other people’s and come in with the intention of what you’re looking to do. Is it to build a network? Is it to take people virtually to build deeper relationships in person? Is it to do audio events or whatever it is, but understand what your goal is. And then these tips and tactics we’re talking about will correlate to what you’re trying to accomplish. That is great advice, Morgan. That’s all the time we have for this episode. Where can people find you or your business? I mean, obviously on LinkedIn, right? Yeah. After all of this like, yeah, guys,. I don’t have a LinkedIn. So LinkedIn and Morgan. J Ingram, very simple. If you want to learn more about what we’re doing with producing shows with influencers and influencer marketing, that’s AMP. And then if you want more sales advice, we have a newsletter called The Commish. Awesome. Hey, appreciate your time and thanks to all of you for tuning in. Remember, you want to like this video. Hit the button for notifications and subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss an episode. We will see you next time.
