LinkedIn, Dux-Soup and Slack tech stack gives sales teams huge increase in demand

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AMPED Marketing launched their sales and marketing agency in 2020, with a focus on start-up businesses and medium sized enterprises.

The company uses Dux-Soup to enable sales and marketing teams to build better, stronger client relationships with a focus on improved efficiency, customer service and accelerated growth.

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A huge supporter of Dux-Soup, AMPED were keen to explore a solution to equip teams and agencies with a better collaboration tool for delivering on their sales targets and driving business growth, through LinkedIn.

The Art of engagement

Co-Founder Scott Wright spent years mastering what he calls ‘The Art of the Pivot’; a messaging strategy that enables him to successfully connect and engage with prospects. The accelerated growth of AMPED is in part, due to Scott’s love of Dux-Soup and his desire to innovate using the tool’s capability.

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The drive behind AMPED’s recent innovation came in direct response to client requests. Scott comments “We had enterprise clients coming to us looking for guidance on how their teams could programmatically create Dux-Soup campaigns to align with existing company goals and marketing strategies. We began to look at how these teams were communicating with prospects, and who in particular they were trying to communicate with.”

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AMPED found that the business development and sales teams were individually managing outreach to their targeted prospects and therefore communication wasn’t always aligned with corporate goals. Profiles were not shared, so individuals were using their own LinkedIn accounts for business prospecting, rather than a more relevant, senior company profile.

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AMPED’s research highlighted that team members were:

• Creating messaging content that wasn’t relevant to the audience. It simply wasn’t engaging enough to lead to a connection, and often didn’t align with company objectives.
• Not responding to prospects in a timely manner. Lack of access to shared profiles, meant that an individual’s availability often had a negative impact on prospect engagement.
• Targeting the same prospects. The individual nature of the campaigns often led to a cross-over in messaging from multiple team members at the same time.
• Seen as ‘cold callers’. Team members often sent connection messages to business influencers or decision makers far senior to themselves.

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Innovating with Dux-Soup

"For us, the solution was simple. We’d create LinkedIn accounts for employees representing a cross section of the business, including Sales, Marketing and the CEO or a company Director. We would use Dux-Soup to help our clients figure out who they should be targeting. Then we would develop the campaigns in Dux and write the copy for each of those business areas too".

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This however raised an additional concern. If AMPED were managing all of that activity, not only would their own business focus be diluted, but their clients would remain unable to manage this ongoing activity themselves.

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“That’s when our thoughts turned to Slack and its collaborative nature” said Scott.

We realised that if we could integrate Dux-Soup with Slack, our clients could use the platform to respond on behalf of any LinkedIn account using Turbo for Teams. They could connect with each other and formulate their own campaigns and messaging content as a group. So, this is what we did.

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The concept is to provide a collaborative working space, where team members can share content and request feedback from one another before launching a new campaign, or sending an ‘approved’ response to their prospect via Slack through Dux-Soup or LinkedIn. For optimum results, the group should comprise a cross section of employees from a clients’ organisation including business development, sales and marketing. This ensures that the wider business strategy is well represented internally and externally.

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With this solution, the need for access to the target user or dummy LinkedIn accounts is eliminated. This means that CEOs and Marketing Directors can maintain the integrity of their own LinkedIn accounts, while at the same time, allowing their teams to reply to potential clients on their behalf using Dux-Soup Turbo. Content and messaging can be better tailored to suit prospects and it can be sent to them by the individual persona which is likely to be of most interest or relevance.   This innovative solution allows for a more streamlined workflow and improved communication between sales and marketing teams, ultimately leading to a much higher meeting acceptance rate.  

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LinkedIn account activity and conversation history is pushed via the integration into the Slack channel and from here all content can be seen across all participating profiles, without needing access to LinkedIn. This means that any team member can view the progress with any client or campaign from anywhere, on any device and in real-time.

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The data can then also be pushed into a client’s CRM for complete end-to-end visibility of the sales pipeline across all departments.

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Enabling teams

What the team at AMPED then realised was that ‘The Art of the Pivot’, was something that could be taught too. “That’s when the concept of the Enablement Training Programme really hit us”, said Scott.

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An AMPED team member could participate in the clients’ Slack channel and provide remote support for every team member through the entire process - from content to campaigns to list building – all with the intention of helping a business to connect, engage and convert clients.  

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Ultimately, our aim is to empower our clients. Suddenly a sales and marketing team can have multiple team members in one channel, each able to act on behalf of multiple different users on the team. That’s how small sales teams start to generate leads to deliver on a much larger scale.

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The collaborative nature of the solution means that AMPED can provide their clients with hands-on, 1-2-1 real-time training for sales individuals at all levels.

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“As we are part of the Slack channel, we can hop in and out to check on progress and comment on responses. This means we can provide constant support and guidance to our clients. There’s a very real art to responding to someone when you’re not being your true self, and this is something that requires practice. ‍It's not just about the words you use, it’s about the research you do into that prospect and the way you offer information or ask for their thoughts. Some get it sooner than others, but with the Dux/Slack platform we have built, the teams we work with are almost on a constant training programme, to develop their skills in line with their business’s needs”.

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In many cases, AMPED’s approach has led to the company becoming an integral part of a client’s ongoing sales and marketing strategy.

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“With a deeper understanding of our clients’ sales and marketing targets, we are better placed to guide content in the right direction. If we can see what LinkedIn posts have led to engagement, we can produce lists for our clients to direct their outreach and help them to build the right campaigns - we couldn’t do any of this without Dux-Soup”.

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The client advantage

The ultimate value for the business is not just in the collaboration capability that the Dux-Soup and Slack solution provides. It allows small teams to operate from any device at any time on behalf of multiple profiles - at scale. The reach this facility gives to smaller businesses is phenomenal - it’s game changing.

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