ModumUp - Social Selling for B2B

How do you build trust in strategic accounts before the first sales conversation?

Irina Chernova, Demand Marketing Manager EMEA & LATAM at NetApp, and Olga Bondareva, Founder of ModumUp, walked through a year-long case study at our online event on July 8.

Below is a recap of the session.

NetApp sells into enterprise accounts with long sales cycles and large buying committees. New roles keep showing up on those committees too: AI, DevOps, and cloud leaders. For NetApp, ABM came down to figuring out who actually influences a deal and connecting with them through people already inside the company. They treated it as customer experience and sales alignment, not a standalone marketing program. The pilot ran across 10 strategic accounts in finance, oil and gas, services, and telco.

Olga walked through how Social Selling fit into that. The team already had a target account list, so the next steps were finding buying committee members on LinkedIn, picking the right internal profiles to represent the company, and using content and events as a natural excuse to open a private conversation. The rollout started with Irina's own profile, then moved to exclusive content, an executive profile, and eventually BDRs.

They tested the approach around NetApp Insight, warming people up before, during, and after the event. Irina then shared gated research where people had to comment or message to get it. That soft mechanic, paired with an already-warmed audience, brought in people from target companies who could be handed to sales as SQLs. Seeing that human layer between marketing and sales work is what convinced the team to scale it. From there they added an executive profile for peer-to-peer outreach with decision-makers, and a lot of C-level prospects went straight to DMs. BDRs joined last. One of them said social media gave him access to people he never could have cold-called, because they already recognized his profile.

The result: around $20M in deals tied to large AI deployments, and roughly 3x growth in leads.

Watch the full session: https://youtu.be/AX51HlQ5c3E
Read the detailed recap: https://modumup.com/blog/netapps-approach-to-social-selling-and-abm

On our team call last week, we discussed how Social Selling supports RFP-related work.

One robotics client actively participates in RFPs. When they weren’t on the invite list, our team reached out to procurement to check if the process was open (even though we already knew it was ) - and the client got invited to participate. We also help this client find potential partners on LinkedIn by checking who has bid on similar public RFPs and suggesting collaborations to strengthen proposals.

For another project in the automotive industry, the project manager noted, “our client doesn’t participate in RFPs. We asked several times.” We responded that asking sales reps is one perspective - the budget owner might see things differently. With AI, we can pull open RFPs in that industry in about ten minutes and provide real examples instead of just debating it.

Another client in retail automation chose not to participate in RFPs at all, since the process could last a year with no guarantee - and they don’t have the resources for that.

So yes, it’s a choice - participate or not, invest or not. But if you do choose to participate, procurement and sourcing should be part of your Social Selling plan. Published RFPs are usually just the last visible step.

Wishing everyone success in Social Selling!

Our AI-native system keeps growing, and we're integrating it into more of our daily workflows at ModumUp. It saves hours of time for our team.

At the core is an internal operating system paired with a database. We gather information from multiple sources, process it, and provide it to agents. The team can also work directly with the data and generate outputs.

Security is a priority: local LLMs handle sensitive data, while cloud models process everything else.

For instance, during a client Zoom call, the system collected notes from the conversation, chat history, project files, and external research. It then built a target company list for ABM outreach on LinkedIn, suggested approaches for each account, and identified contacts inside those companies. The list can go directly into automation tools, but we usually review it manually first.

We also developed a quality control system for LinkedIn posts. It checks over 100 parameters and flags anything that doesn’t match our content guides and best practices.

There are additional applications with our CRM and other workflows.

With an AI-native setup, almost anything that once seemed too complex is now achievable — limited only by time and focus.