"People say to us, ‘You guys are blowing up, you’re everywhere.’ LinkedIn is an absolutely free vehicle to create a brand and an image for years.”
Growing up and watching her father in his role as Hasbro’s Vice President of Sales, Maureen Longoria had no desire to pursue a sales career. However, after earning a marketing degree, she joined a small relocation firm in what she thought was a marketing role, only to discover it was pure cold calling. Introverted and hesitant, she quickly reframed the task, saying, “It’s only a cold call once, because after you talk to them, it’s never cold again.”
That grit carried her through two other sales stints and then to Beltmann, North American Van Lines’ largest agency, which recruited her to build an end-to-end relocation management division. Three years later, the unit was profitable enough to sell, marking Maureen’s first experience building a revenue engine from scratch.
After stepping back to raise kids, she returned to leadership roles at Orion Mobility and Moving Station, where she learned the pain points of senior living moves. When COVID froze the market, she designed a tech-enabled service that would simplify downsizing for seniors and boost occupancy for community operators. She eventually joined forces with industry friend Lisa Burns, and together they launched LivNow Relocation, blending decades of relocation knowledge with a modern, tech-first approach.
A few years later, LivNow’s lifetime revenue is well into the millions, built on the team’s strong sales skills and exceptional use of LinkedIn to build and nurture its funnel. We spoke with Maureen to learn how she turns LinkedIn into an authentic (read: not spammy) relationship engine.
Lay the Groundwork: Build, Listen, Label
“Your prospects are spending time on LinkedIn, so you should be where they’re spending time.”
Maureen recommends a simple three-step framework for founders crafting an initial LinkedIn strategy: Build, Listen, Label.
Build your personal profile first. First-time founders can be shy about posting their startup on LinkedIn, yet doing so adds legitimacy and begins a public track record. When you launch a company page, invite every real-life contact. When connecting with individuals, include a short personal message that reminds them where you met and prevents your note from feeling like spam.
Listen by following target company pages before you approach new people. Your feed will surface expansion news for clients, RFP announcements, and hiring sprees that create natural touchpoints for outreach. When an update appears, Maureen comments publicly, then sends a tailored connection request that references the news.
Label prospects Hot, Warm, or Cold in a CRM or shared spreadsheet. Hot identifies an immediate need or budget pain you can solve; for LivNow, this might be a new senior living community breaking ground or a soft housing market. Warm means potential interest, but no deadline. Cold means nurture and monitor.
Get in Touch with the Right Prospect
When Maureen hunts for a new account, she begins with old-school sleuthing, bypassing LinkedIn Sales Navigator and instead pulling up the prospect’s website to locate the Senior Vice President of Sales or Marketing, the role that is most often her buyer within the company. If the roster is blank on their website, she pivots to the LinkedIn People tab under their company page, identifies the buyer, and checks whether the operator already uses a service like LivNow, saving herself from chasing the wrong fit. With the name in hand, she scans for mutual contacts and asks any shared ally for a warm introduction, convinced a peer hand-off beats a cold pitch every time.
Channel selection for outreach depends on the buyer’s digital footprint. If their LinkedIn feed is active, she sends a concise connection note or a LinkedIn message noting an expansion or market trigger, swearing that she gets better response rates on messages sent in the evening versus during the day when her targets are swamped with other work. If they look dormant, she finds a work email and avoids bulk platforms like Mailchimp and HubSpot, instead sending a personalized message from her own inbox so it lands in the Primary folder rather than Promotions.
Tailored Messages > Generic Blasts
Maureen refuses mass-blast tactics. She studies each prospect’s breadcrumbs, scrolling company pages and personal feeds for live projects, hiring spikes, or local headlines. Once, when she saw a client break ground on a new senior living community after months of silence, she led with, “Congratulations, let’s talk about how we’ll help you fill those units,” and landed a meeting because the note proved she was tracking their world.
Maureen treats follow-up as a paced mini-campaign. “They say it’s the fifth or sixth outreach, it’s crazy, you have to be consistent,” she laughs. After her first note, she may send a short case study, then share an article or white paper tied to the prospect’s market shift, each touch scheduled to feel relevant rather than nagging and tracked in the CRM. She often inserts a phone call between emails, and if the thread stalls, she pauses for a quarter before resurfacing with fresh insight, a cadence of polite persistence. During Florida’s recent housing cooldown, for instance, she sent prospects a real-estate market recap that opened with, “This slowdown may stall your move-ins, here is what we are seeing and how we can help,” a value-first gesture that reignited conversations with two large operators.
Projecting Scale and Credibility Through Brand
“We’ve done a really nice job of branding ourselves as the leading authority in this industry, and it was free because of LinkedIn,” Maureen says, reminding founders that paid ads are optional when you have consistency and a point of view.
Content is split strategically between personal and company pages. Maureen’s personal feed carries photos from trade shows and conferences alongside human moments, such as a post advising, “When your parents want to give you something from their house, take it,” which outperformed every previous post and reactivated idle prospects who interacted with it. On the company page, LivNow runs Testimonial Tuesday, dropping a new customer quote each week to reinforce social proof. Both channels lean on photos from events and site visits because pictures of people often outperform data graphics.
Her advice is simple: activate both pages, keep the voices distinct, and post something useful or personable at least once a week. The payoff is prospects telling her, “You guys are everywhere,” proof that disciplined posting can manufacture scale long before headcount catches up.
Maureen’s LinkedIn process for LivNow is a reminder that scrappy founders can punch way above their weight if they treat the platform as a place for brand building and individualized connection. LivNow utilizes signals that already exist in the public domain, hitting prospects with context they cannot ignore, and showing up in their feeds often enough to catch buyers whenever their minds turn to thinking about a better solution for their business.
“The fact is, they’re watching your stuff, so now people say to us, ‘You guys are blowing up, you’re everywhere.’ LinkedIn is an absolutely free vehicle to create a brand and an image for years.”