LinkedIn is extremely effective for sales people to make connections and get leads because of its innate business atmosphere. People join LinkedIn looking for targeted professional communication and connections and this drastically increases the likelihood of gaining warm leads for your sales team.
While LinkedIn has made it easy for members to share information and posts, it is important to know that there is a huge amount of content getting put out to your audience at all times. That is why it’s necessary to understand that your message will only get through to your audience about 20% of the time. Because you don’t know which 20% will see your message, each post you make should add some sort of value to the reader.
1) Create Your Voice and Personal Brand
You likely have a good amount of material that you or the company has created in order to make your close easier. This can include sales sheets, presentations, research papers, and anything that you use in a meeting or sales call. We already saw how LinkedIn offers a variety of places to share all of that information with your audience.
Create a SlideShare or BrainShark presentation from your sales deck and share it in industry groups, on your profile, and send it to individuals that may be interested. Take your sales sheet and create an infographic or interesting white paper.
Because your content is only getting consumed about 20% of the time, it’s important to not use sales information for all of your broadcasts. You can leverage your company’s blog and posts to create credibility for yourself by sharing frequent updates. This will give you content that is industry related but not necessarily sales related.
All of these things offer value to a potential lead while also giving you a positive voice and personal brand perception. Those things gain trust and will increase traffic to your brand page or website and increase your warm leads.
2) Get Connected and Manage Relationships
Sharing good content is only the beginning. Remembering that only 20% of your content is getting consumed by those seeing it, it’s important that the reach of the content be large enough to make that 20% worth working for. What does that mean?
That means you need a large enough network of people to see your message to make the time spent worth the effort. For example: if you have a small network of people you broadcast information to, say 500, your 20% is only 100 people and may not increase your sales enough to justify the time spent reaching them. However, if you increase your network, your 20% increases and so will your leads and sales. LinkedIn and traditional sales efforts are all based on the same thing, connections.
Making sure to import your contact list from your phone or email is the first step to increasing your connections. They are already connected to you in some way and are an easy connection to make. This will increase your connection number and will add to your “connection value” or the perceived value of being connected to you.
Use OpenLink to send messages to people you're not connected to. LinkedIn only allows you to send messages to people with which you share a first-degree connection. The ability to be part of the OpenLink network is only available to premium account holders, but it allows them to be available for messaging by any other LinkedIn member if they choose to be.
Transfer your LinkedIn connections to another contact management system. Just click on "Contacts," "My Connections," and then scroll down and click "Export Connections." You have the option of either exporting as a .CSV or .VCF file. This will allow you to track these connections in a familiar CRM.
3) Give and Get Answers
Answers is one of the best-kept LinkedIn secrets. Answers allows members to enter a question and select the members of their network who they believe may have the answer to this question. Members can answer and receive answers from their first degree and extended connections. The possibilities of this are almost unlimited.
When creating material to share to your groups and connections it’s extremely important to make it useful and meaningful to the person your targeting. What better way to find out what they want to know than by asking? The answers section of LinkedIn allows us to ask important questions about our industry or brand and receive feedback or opinions that give us insight to the way we should be marketing our company.
As a marketer, blogging is a large part of our business but sometimes we are looking for material our audience wants to read. One of the best places to find material for the blog is in Answers. Find out what people want to know and write a blog about it. Then promote that blog and watch as all of those looking for that answer flock to your page. Because you can see who visited your page, reach out and connect or message for a meeting to discuss how your product or service can help.
Answers offer a great amount of market research in one place. This is a place you can gain market insight, blog material, connections, and even connection value. It’s all in the way you use it.
4) Follow “News Feed”
Your connections and groups are constantly sharing updates and links. Your news feed displays these and offer you opportunities to reach out and touch base with some of your connections. IF someone shares a link you find interesting, make sure to comment and tell him or her what value you found in their share. This will help keep you top of mind. This is also a good place to see if you’ve missed something.
5) Leverage your company’s group
While sales teams are working to tow the line for a company’s revenue, they often feel the need to create materials for gaining leads and pitching business but they often forget about the materials their marketing departments are putting out as efforts to drive brand awareness, especially on LinkedIn.
Companies often invest great efforts to build and develop groups in LinkedIn. This is a great place for sales people from that company to gain warm leads and pitch material. Members of groups are often looking for relevant and valuable information on specific topics a group may cover. This means the company groups are putting out discussion materials to gain market insight and feedback.
A savvy sales person will not only join the group and add comments or discussion material but will use the discussions from their marketing team to gain leads. This is a fairly simple process. Marketing puts out a discussion topic and the marketing team puts effort into gaining traction, the sales team monitors comments on that discussion and use comments as a point of entry to a connection or meeting.
First let me say that I apologize for the lack of blogs recently. I could list a series of excuses but I know you'll just tell me that moving to another state, having a small child, and working from another city is just part of life and I should suck it up; so I won't do that. I'll just say that I was inspired by something and I'm going to do better.
