Want Customers Calling You? Smart Salespeople Use LinkedIn
May 13, 2013 |Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
LinkedIn should be part of your sales strategy--it's the place where customers and prospective customers go to exchange ideas and discuss problems. Salespeople who really understand how to use LinkedIn have potential customers cold calling them.
You read that correctly: I’ve had sales reps copy me on messages they have received out of the blue on LinkedIn, like this one:
“I read what you wrote on (insert technical area here) and I’d like to talk to you about how you can help my company.”
These are reps selling 50, 75, and even 100% more than their peers. If you think that’s preposterous, look at it this way: How much success will you have with 10 cold calls? Now, how much success will you have with 10 messages like the one above?
But what if you're already using LinkedIn? You may even consider yourself a "power user": You participate in groups, you have 500+ connections. The reason, quite simply, is you’re doing it wrong. Fix this one mistake and you will use LinkedIn more effectively and be a large part of the way to having customers cold calling you:
You do not establish social media credibility.
Social media credibility is different from regular credibility. On LinkedIn, and all social media, the principle of paying it forward is king. If someone calls me with a question on using LinkedIn, I don’t present them them with a fee schedule, I help them. Maybe it will lead to some business down the line; maybe it won’t. But if I adopt this attitude with everyone I encounter word will get around that I really know what I’m doing and business will come my way.
I see salespeople botching this concept on LinkedIn all the time.
Someone in a LinkedIn group asks a question, “I’m having problems with delamination on my boards. What could be causing this?”
And here are the responses you see:
- “Our customers don’t have problems with delamination.”
- “We’ve been in business 30 years...call me.”
- “We’ve been in business 35 years...call us.”
- “My company has a new process that prevents delamination.”
This guy has a problem. How do you establish credibility with him? Not by saying how great you are, but by actually trying to help him solve his problem. I don’t see anyone helping this poor guy with his problem. Instead, I see a pack of pitbulls trying to sell him something. Meanwhile, the sales rep who understands LinkedIn sends a private message along these lines: “There are several possible causes for your problem. I have some experience with this and may be able to help you identify the cause in your case. May I give you a call to get more background information?”
Out of all the responses, whose odds do you like in this situation? The person who tries to help and doesn’t try to hard sell the guy will usually win. The “winning” sales rep will usually just help the questioner and leave it at that. And, a couple months from now, when this fellow has another problem, he’ll skip the cattle call and contact his new expert. And the next time he or his company need boards, I like the expert’s odds of closing the deal.
You establish credibility on LinkedIn by showing your expertise in helping people do their jobs better. Your prospects know the players in the market, and because of all the bragging, all those claims tend to cancel each other out. LinkedIn presents an opportunity to actually do something that helps a user do his job better. Making a habit of planting enough of these seeds and pretty soon you start harvesting sales, and those sales tend to be good ones, as someone who is perceived as a leader gets less argument on price.
This is what happens on LinkedIn every day--over and over. The sales reps who legitimately try and help prospects, without the hard sell and without expectation of a purchase order today, get multiple purchase orders down the line.
Smart salespeople are using LinkedIn to get prospective customers to cold call them. How are you spending your day?Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media. He has over 25 years' experience in high-tech sales and management, most recently as general manager of a PCB manufacturer. He can be reached through his website www.practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.