The LinkedIn Social Selling Workshop — 90-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings

What the workshop is and why it matters

This is a facilitator-led session, not a webinar. Ninety minutes, 4–12 reps in one room (physical or video), everyone logged into their own LinkedIn account with a screen shared at the front. The output is not knowledge — it is three real warm touches sent per rep before anyone leaves, plus a written commitment they read aloud to the group.

The problem it solves is narrow and specific. The default rep behavior on LinkedIn is: find a title in Sales Navigator, fire a blank or pitch-stuffed connection request, and DM a calendar link the second it is accepted. Buyers have been trained by years of this to ignore it. A pitch in the first message reads as spam. A blank request from a stranger converts poorly. The rep concludes "LinkedIn doesn't work for my market" and goes back to voicemail.

The diagnosis this Workshop makes is that the failure is one of *order*, not of *volume*. The wrong order is Connect → Pitch → Get ignored. The right order is Engage → Connect → Converse → Earn the ask. Warmth is built before the request, not after it. Every module in the 90 minutes exists to install that reordering into muscle memory.

Why it matters commercially: for a mid-market seller, LinkedIn is often the only channel where the buyer is reachable, discoverable, and already talking about their problems in public. Email deliverability degrades, phone connect rates fall, but a prospect who posted last Tuesday about a broken forecasting process has handed you a reason to exist in their inbox. The Workshop's whole thesis is that the reason-to-exist is what converts, and that it is available for free to any rep willing to spend fifteen minutes a day reading before writing.

The scope fence matters too. This is not a personal-branding course, not a content-creator bootcamp, and not an automation setup. It is sales Training for people carrying a number, and every exercise is graded on whether it produces a logged CRM activity by the end of the session.

The 90-minute run sheet, block by block

The session is built as six timed blocks. A facilitator who follows the clock finishes on time; one who lets the profile teardown run long will lose the live-touch block, which is the only block that actually changes behavior. Protect minutes 40–65 above everything else.

Block 1 — Why spray-and-pray fails (5 min). Open with a question, not a slide: "How many connection requests did you send last week, and how many turned into a real conversation?" The honest answer is nearly always "a lot" and "almost none." Write the wrong order and the right order on the whiteboard and leave them up for the full 90 minutes. Close the block with the rule for the day: you never ask for time from someone who does not yet know your name.

Block 2 — The framework (15 min). Five components, roughly three minutes each. Profile as a resource rather than a resume. The Social Selling Index as a habit tracker rather than a KPI. The warm-touch sequence. Content cadence. Trigger-based outreach. Teach only; do not let the room start doing yet.

*Profile as resource.* The headline names who you help and the outcome you create, not your title. The "About" section opens on the buyer's problem, not your career history. The banner and featured section carry proof — a case study, a useful guide, a short demo. Test: when a prospect clicks your name after seeing a comment, does the profile make them think "this person gets my world" or "this person wants to sell me something"?

*The Social Selling Index.* LinkedIn scores you 0–100 across four pillars — establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. It correlates with pipeline because the behaviors it rewards happen to be the right behaviors, not because the number itself has magic in it. Use it as a weekly checkpoint. Never put it on a comp plan; reps will game it within a week.

*Content cadence.* Two to three posts a week keeps your name in the feed of the people you want to reach, so recognition precedes the DM. The goal is familiarity, not virality.

*Trigger-based outreach.* Reach out when something changes — a new role, a funding round, a product launch, a public complaint about a problem you solve. A trigger gives the message a reason to exist, which is the entire difference between "warm" and "weird."

Block 3 — Verbatim scripts (15 min). Read each script aloud, then have the room repeat the structure back. Brackets are the only thing reps personalize.

*The connection request note* (under 300 characters, references real engagement): "Hi [First Name] — your post on [specific topic] hit home, especially the part about [detail]. I work with [role] on [problem], and your take lined up with what I keep hearing. Would love to follow along. No pitch, promise."

*The no-pitch first message* (after acceptance, zero ask): "Thanks for connecting, [First Name]. Not here to sell you anything — I just keep seeing [their team type] wrestle with [specific problem], and your post made me think you'd have a strong opinion. How are you currently handling [the problem]?"

*The value-first follow-up* (3–4 days later): "Hey [First Name] — circling back. We put together a short breakdown of how [comparable company] cut [metric] without [common tradeoff]. Want me to send it over? Genuinely no strings; just thought it might be useful given what you posted."

*The comment-to-DM transition*: "Really appreciate you engaging back, [First Name]. Rather than clog up the comments — mind if I DM you the one resource I mentioned? Two-minute read, no ask."

*The meeting ask* (only once value has landed): "[First Name], this has been a genuinely useful back-and-forth. I think a focused 20 minutes would let me show you exactly how [comparable company] solved [problem] — and if it isn't relevant, you'll know in five. Worth grabbing time next week?"

Block 4 — Live exercise (25 min). Part A, ten minutes: reps pair up, pull up their own profiles, and rewrite three things live — the headline, the first two lines of "About," and one featured item. The partner reads it as the buyer and answers one question only: does this make me want to reply, or does it make me feel sold to? Part B, fifteen minutes: each rep opens Sales Navigator, picks three targets, and runs the front of the sequence for real. One genuine comment on a recent post. One connection request using the verbatim note, personalized to what they just commented on. One no-pitch first message to an existing connection who recently posted. Every touch gets logged in HubSpot, Salesloft, or Outreach as a social-selling activity so it lands in the same pipeline view as calls and emails.

Block 5 — Content and measurement debrief (20 min). Covered in its own section below.

Block 6 — Commitments (10 min). Each rep writes and reads aloud three commitments: profile fixed by end of day, the 20-minute block on tomorrow's calendar, one post drafted this week. Then book the two-week check-in on the calendar before the room disperses.

The warm-touch sequence in detail

The sequence is the technical core of the Training and the piece reps most often shortcut. Walk it slowly.

Step one is identification. Pull a target list in Sales Navigator filtered by title, headcount, and geography, then narrow to people who have posted in the last 30 days. A prospect who never posts cannot be warmed by engagement; they go to a different play. Twenty to thirty active posters is a workable weekly list for one rep.

Step two is engagement — two or three thoughtful comments on their posts before any request goes out. A thoughtful comment adds a point of view, a counterexample, or a specific number from your own experience. "Great post!" is worse than silence because it marks you as a farmer of reciprocal likes. Budget 60–90 seconds per comment: read the whole post, find the one line you have a real reaction to, respond to that line.

Step three is the branch. If they reacted or replied to your comment, send the connection request with the referencing note. If they did not, wait roughly a week, engage again, and re-check. Two failed engagement cycles on the same prospect is the signal to drop them from the social play and move them to email or phone.

Step four is the connection request itself, with the note referencing the specific thing you engaged with. Step five is the no-pitch first message on acceptance. Step six, three to four days later, is the value-first follow-up. Step seven — and only step seven — is the meeting ask.

If the request is declined or ignored, leave it. Do not double-text, do not withdraw and resend, do not follow up in InMail. A withdrawn-and-resent request inside the same month is the single loudest spam signal a rep can send.

The coaching point to hammer: the meeting ask is earned, not scheduled. When a rep wants to send it on touch one, that is the spray-and-pray habit talking. Make them name out loud the specific value they delivered before the ask is allowed.

Content, comments, and the numbers that tell you it worked

Posting is half of it. Commenting is the engine. Ten thoughtful comments a day on target prospects' posts puts your name in front of the right people repeatedly and earns profile views — the cheapest top-of-funnel available to a B2B rep. Comments should add a point, not applaud.

Three post formats carry almost all of the useful output. The lesson: a short story about a customer problem and how it got solved — teaches and signals expertise without bragging. The contrarian take: a respectful disagreement with conventional wisdom in your space, which drives comments and therefore reach. The proof: a specific result with a real number and a named or anonymized customer. Rotate these three and a rep never has to wonder what to write.

On timing, weekday mornings in the buyer's time zone generally outperform evenings and weekends for B2B audiences, but treat every published "best time to post" chart as a hypothesis. Test against your own posting data over four to six weeks before you commit the team to a slot.

Track exactly three numbers weekly, reviewed at the two-week check-in and then monthly:

• Reply rate — replies divided by first messages sent. Spray-and-pray sits in the low single digits; a properly warmed sequence should be visibly, materially higher. The absolute number matters less than the delta against the team's own pre-Workshop baseline, which is why you capture the baseline before Block 1.
• Meeting rate — meetings booked divided by conversations started. This isolates whether the ask is being earned or blasted.
• Content-to-profile-view — profile views from target accounts in the 48 hours after a post. If this stays flat across six posts, the content is not reaching the intended audience and the targeting, not the writing, is the problem.

Set the review cadence at two weeks for the first check-in, then monthly. Two weeks is long enough for the sequence to produce replies and short enough that a rep who quietly stopped doing the routine gets caught before the habit dies.

Cost, effort, and realistic timelines

The direct software cost of running this Workshop is zero. It relies entirely on LinkedIn's standard features — profile, search, messaging, and content engagement. No third-party automation is required and none is permitted during the session. Teams that already own Sales Navigator will use it for targeting in Block 4; teams that do not can run the exercise on free LinkedIn search with a narrower target list.

The real cost is time. Ninety minutes of a full team's selling time is the up-front investment: for eight reps, twelve labor-hours in one sitting. The ongoing cost is 20 minutes per rep per weekday — roughly 1.7 hours a week, or about 4% of a 40-hour week. Facilitator prep runs 30–60 minutes: pull the team's current reply-rate baseline, confirm everyone has Sales Navigator access, and pre-check that no one's profile is set to block connection requests.

Optional tooling sits outside the workshop but inside the motion. Scheduling and drafting tools such as Taplio reduce the friction of a two-to-three-post cadence. Analytics tools such as Shield surface which posts drove profile views from target accounts. Trigger sourcing through Clay, Apollo, or Sales Navigator alerts feeds the top of the sequence. None of these are prerequisites, and buying them before the routine is habitual is a common way to waste budget.

On timelines: expect essentially nothing in week one. The sequence deliberately front-loads engagement before connecting, so the first touches sent in the room will not convert into meetings that afternoon. Replies typically begin surfacing in the two-to-four-week range for teams that hold the daily routine, with meeting volume following after. The honest framing for leadership is 30–60 days of sustained execution before the pipeline contribution is measurable, and that framing should be set before the Workshop runs, not after week one disappoints someone.

Group size drives the economics of delivery. Four to twelve reps is the workable range — below four the paired teardown gets awkward, above twelve the facilitator cannot walk the room during Part B and the live-touch block degrades into unsupervised scrolling. For a 30-person team, run three cohorts rather than one large session, or train two managers to deliver subsequent cohorts using the same scripts and run sheet. The materials are built to be repeatable without the original facilitator, which is the point.

Where teams get this wrong

Letting the live block collapse. The most common facilitation failure is allowing Block 4 Part B to become fourteen minutes of "research." Reps will happily read a prospect's entire career history rather than write one comment, because reading is comfortable and publishing is not. The facilitator's job is to walk the room and force sends. Three clean touches per rep is the bar; a rep who leaves with zero touches has attended a lecture, not a Training.

Attaching a pitch to the connection request. When you see it happening — and you will — stop the rep and make them read their own note aloud as if they were the buyer. This single intervention, repeated three or four times across a session, does more than any slide.

Automating the human touches. Tools that send connection requests and messages at scale exist and are actively marketed to sales teams. They put accounts at risk of restriction, they violate LinkedIn's user agreement, and they scale the exact behavior the Workshop is designed to eliminate. The rule to state explicitly in the room: automate the research and the reminders, never the human touches.

Skipping the CRM log. If the touch isn't in HubSpot, Salesloft, or Outreach, it did not happen — not because of bureaucracy, but because unlogged social activity is invisible in pipeline review, which means the motion gets defunded the first time a VP asks what LinkedIn is producing.

Treating the Social Selling Index as the goal. Reps who chase the score connect indiscriminately and comment reflexively. The score goes up, the reply rate goes down. Track it, never compensate on it.

Running it once and never revisiting. A one-time Workshop with no two-week check-in produces about ten days of behavior change. Book the check-in during Block 6, on the calendar, in the room.

Handling the three predictable objections badly. "I don't have time to comment ten times a day" — it is fifteen minutes, and it replaces the cold calls going to voicemail. "Posting feels like bragging" — teaching is not bragging; post lessons and proof, not selfies. "My buyers aren't on LinkedIn" — pull the Sales Navigator data on your top 20 accounts before deciding that; they usually are. Have these three answers ready verbatim, because they will come up in every single session.

Deciding whether this workshop fits your team

Not every team should run this Training, and forcing it on the wrong motion produces a room full of reps who correctly conclude it doesn't apply to them.

Use these decision rules. ACV band: below roughly $15K, the per-touch labor of manual social selling rarely pays back against a volume motion; above roughly $250K, social selling is a supporting play inside a multi-threaded account plan rather than the primary motion, so sequence the account-planning Training first. Buyer presence: check, don't assume — if fewer than half your top 20 accounts have contacts who posted in the last 90 days, the engagement step has nothing to engage with. Rep tenure: the Workshop assumes reps have a basic profile and are simply not using LinkedIn strategically; it does not assume expertise, and a rep who rarely opens the app can follow the scripts. Manager buy-in: if the reps' manager will not defend the 20-minute block against pipeline-review creep, the routine dies in week two — get that commitment before scheduling the session.

Delivery format is flexible. The requirement is a shared screen and every attendee logged into LinkedIn, which works virtually or in person. For remote delivery, breakout rooms handle the paired teardown cleanly, and the facilitator should ask reps to share their screen during Part B so the "about to attach a pitch" moment stays catchable.

Related questions

How long is the workshop and what group size works best?

Ninety minutes, delivered as six timed blocks, for 4–12 reps. Below four the paired profile teardown is awkward; above twelve the facilitator cannot supervise the live-touch block. Larger teams run multiple cohorts using the same run sheet and scripts.

Do reps need Sales Navigator to participate?

No, but it helps. Sales Navigator makes targeting and trigger alerts faster in Block 4. Teams without it can run the live exercise on free LinkedIn search with a narrower prospect list; the sequence, scripts, and daily routine are unchanged.

What should reps do in the 20 minutes a day after the session?

Five minutes engaging with three genuine comments on target-prospect posts, five minutes sending three personalized connection requests, five minutes moving one accepted connection forward with a no-pitch or value-first message, and five minutes logging every touch in the CRM.

How do you know the training actually worked?

Compare reply rate and meeting rate against the baseline captured before Block 1, reviewed at the two-week check-in and monthly after. Also watch profile views from target accounts in the 48 hours following each post as a content-effectiveness signal.

Can a manager deliver this instead of an outside facilitator?

Yes. The run sheet, timings, scripts, and exercises are designed to be repeatable by any manager who has run the session once as a participant. The only prep is pulling the team's reply-rate baseline and confirming Sales Navigator access.

FAQ

Can this workshop work for any B2B sales team?

It is designed for teams selling in the $15K–$250K ACV range. Reps closing much larger enterprise contracts or selling low-ticket volume products will need the cadence adjusted — enterprise sellers should layer this on top of an account-planning motion rather than run it standalone. The core principle, earn the conversation before pitching, applies broadly, but the specific touch cadence fits mid-market and commercial sellers best.

Do reps need to be LinkedIn experts before attending?

No. The Workshop assumes reps have a basic profile but are not using LinkedIn strategically. It covers profile optimization, the engagement-first sequence, verbatim scripts, and a daily 20-minute routine. A rep who rarely opens the app can follow the scripts step by step and start producing replies within a few weeks.

How long until results show up?

Plan for 30–60 days of sustained execution before pipeline contribution is measurable, with first replies commonly appearing in the two-to-four-week range for teams holding the daily routine. The sequence builds familiarity through engagement before connecting, so same-day bookings are not the expectation. Set this timeline with leadership before the session, not after.

Is it delivered virtually or in person?

Both work. The requirements are a shared screen and every attendee logged into LinkedIn. For virtual delivery, use breakout rooms for the paired profile teardown and have reps share their screen during the live-touch block so the facilitator can intervene before a pitch gets attached to a connection request.

What if the team has more than twelve reps?

Split into cohorts. The 4–12 range exists so the facilitator can walk the room during the 25-minute live exercise; beyond that, supervision breaks down and the block degrades. For a larger org, run consecutive cohorts or train two managers to deliver using the same materials — the run sheet is built to be handed off.

Does the training require any paid software?

No. It runs entirely on LinkedIn's standard features. Sales Navigator speeds up targeting and Taplio, Shield, Clay, or Apollo can support the ongoing motion, but none are prerequisites. Buying tooling before the 20-minute daily routine is habitual is a reliable way to waste budget on a habit that never formed.

Sources

• https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/social-selling/the-social-selling-index
• https://www.linkedin.com/legal/user-agreement
• https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator
• https://www.gong.io/resources/labs/
• https://blog.hubspot.com/sales
• https://www.salesloft.com/resources
• https://www.outreach.io/resources
• https://hbr.org/topic/subject/sales

Related on PULSE

• [The Multi-Threading Strategy Workshop — 90-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings](/knowledge/st247)
• [The Closing Techniques Bootcamp — 90-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings](/knowledge/st245)
• [The Forecasting Calibration Workshop — 60-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings](/knowledge/st250)
• [The Pipeline Review Workshop — 60-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings](/knowledge/st244)
• [The Enterprise Account Planning Workshop — 120-Min Training — Pulse Sales Trainings](/knowledge/st243)
• [The Social Sell: Template for a Team Workshop on LinkedIn Prospecting](/knowledge/st0672)