Sales Confidence
The founder spent three and a half years at LinkedIn, advising FTSE 100 executives on how to leverage the platform to scale their businesses. Recognizing the limitations of traditional social channels for reaching busy professionals, he launched Sales Confidence, the largest community of sales leaders and salespeople in Europe, with a mission to help sales people and sales leaders at each stage of their career with their mindset, well-being, and performance.
In January, the founder made a deliberate pivot to TikTok as a growth channel, launching on January 10th. Within 50 days, he had accumulated 6,000 followers—a pace he described as uniquely fast compared to other platforms. The breakthrough came when a VP of Sales, his exact target demographic, discovered him on TikTok. The VP commented on one of his videos: "James, your handsome face keeps popping up on my TikTok, mate...can we have a conversation?" A week later, the founder closed a $3,000 package sale. Crucially, the VP had been ignoring his LinkedIn messages and emails for months; TikTok served as the icebreaker that triggered engagement.
The founder's TikTok strategy centered on three insights: (1) Post-5pm is when professionals browse social media, even in B2B—they're thinking about their day jobs and pain points; (2) Video is a competitive advantage in B2B because so few competitors use it; (3) TikTok's algorithm spreads content faster and cheaper than Instagram or LinkedIn. He spent $100 on TikTok ads to test reach and achieved 10,000-50,000 views per video, far cheaper than other platforms. He used Hootsuite to schedule content across all channels with captions and employed virtual assistants to manage production, proving that scale doesn't require a massive team or budget.
By the time of this SaaSOpen conference talk, the founder was targeting 100,000 TikTok followers by year-end 2023 (he had 6,000 at the time of speaking). He had transitioned from doubting TikTok's B2B potential to going "all in" because direct revenue generation proved its value. His LinkedIn following (30,000+, built over 10 years) paled in comparison to the velocity of TikTok growth and engagement. He positioned himself as "the TikTok guy" in B2B—a novel positioning that stood out in a crowded, competitive space.
- •By posting on TikTok during off-hours (post-5pm) when professionals mentally disengage from work, the founder reached his target audience in a mindset primed to recognize their own pain points rather than filtering through professional gatekeeping.
- •TikTok's algorithm-driven distribution and lower ad costs ($100 for 10,000-50,000 views) enabled rapid audience building at a fraction of the cost of LinkedIn or Instagram, allowing the founder to achieve 6,000 followers in 50 days and prove ROI before scaling.
- •By being nearly alone in B2B video content on TikTok, the founder created a defensible competitive advantage and novel positioning ('the TikTok guy in B2B') that made him memorable and differentiated in an oversaturated LinkedIn ecosystem.
- •Using TikTok as an engagement icebreaker bypassed the friction of cold outreach channels—when the VP of Sales had ignored months of LinkedIn messages, TikTok's casual, algorithm-driven exposure triggered the initial conversation that led to the first sale.
- 1.Identify the time when your target professional audience is mentally disengaged from work (typically after 5pm) and schedule short-form video content for that window to catch them thinking about their pain points.
- 2.Test TikTok ads with a small budget ($100 or less) to measure cost-per-view and engagement velocity compared to your current channels before committing to a full strategy shift.
- 3.Create and post short-form video content regularly on TikTok focused on your expertise or domain, then use LinkedIn messaging to follow up with engaged viewers who interact with your videos rather than cold outreach.
- 4.Use scheduling tools like Hootsuite and virtual assistants to manage video production and posting across platforms at scale without building a large internal team, keeping overhead low while testing channel effectiveness.
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