We collaborated with Steve Richards at Vorsight on this experiment, which strongly suggests that Social Selling actually works. We tested 'touching' (viewing the profiles of) prospects on LinkedIn in combination with cold emailing those same prospects. It worked shockingly well...
We tried three different tests:
1. 'Regular' cold email sequences
2. Cold email sequences + viewing prospect's LinkedIn profiles
3. A new cold email sequences mentioning 'Shared Connections' on LinkedIn
The results are truly amazing. See them for yourself here:
http://blog.vorsightbp.com/outbound-lead-generation-best-practices-a-b-test-results