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Want to Turbocharge Sales in 2104? Use LinkedIn Properly
February 3, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Many salespeople already use LinkedIn, but, in my experience, a very small fraction--less than 5%--use it well. And that 5% is making a killing. I find it instructive that several sales people I know that use LinkedIn really well happen to sell two to three times as much as their peers. These super salespeople understand that LinkedIn can accomplish two things for them that they can’t get elsewhere: They can find more prospects and they can use multiple methods to establish themselves and introduce themselves to the those prospects.
I had an “aha!” moment with LinkedIn when I realized it was a database of every possible business to business customer. Period. Oh, there are quite a few underrepresented and poorly represented companies, and of course the data gets pretty thin for smaller companies with handfuls of employees, but those prospects are in LinkedIn. You have to use some imagination and you have to be persistent, but you'll be rewarded.
Most salespeople don’t realize that a gold mine of potential customers is right at their fingertips. One company executive told me that there were around 8,000 possible customers for his company’s products in North America. Two hours work on LinkedIn told me the number was more likely around 28,000. Unless you're selling A380s for Airbus, you probably have a lot of prospects you don’t know about.
The second aspect here is the ability to use LinkedIn to wander around a prospect organization and build your own organizational chart. You can see how people fit together, you can see gaps in your information, you can see how different people in a prospect company use LinkedIn, and you can then draw up a plan to take advantage of this knowledge.
LinkedIn allows you to identify those you want to introduce yourself to or develop a relationship with. No going through a switchboard to find out. Not only that, LinkedIn allows me to read their profile and find out a lot more about this person--their career path, experience--all kinds of useful information. I can look for common interests or experiences, or something useful to spark a conversation. The result is less cold call, more warm call.
And that is just using the relatively static information provided on individual LinkedIn profiles. Next, I can gather intel on the company by checking out their LinkedIn company page. I can look at status updates for company news, I can look at people who have left the company: The LinkedIn profiles of ex-employees can provide all kinds of information. Many ex-employees will talk about accomplishments on projects that are supposedly still under wraps. I look at the job positions the prospect company is trying to fill. I can read all the employees profiles in a department to develop a feel for what they are doing and what they are working on.
Lastly, I can check the activity of the prime candidates I want to approach in LinkedIn groups. Are they active? If so, in what manner? Is there information here I can use?
LinkedIn allows me to find more prospects than I ever could before, and armed with the results of some investigative research, my approach to these people will be anything but “cold.”
Sales is fundamentally about risk and reward. I'm stunned that many salespeople don’t get this. If you cold call someone and they have never heard of you or your company the odds of them buying from you are approximately zero. What most salespeople don’t think through is why this is the case. It is because if I don’t know you I am assuming a huge amount of risk in buying from you. And the only way to mitigate that risk is if I get a really good price from you. And now you are selling based on price. Great start.
One of the great advantages to using LinkedIn is in using it as a vehicle to increase your visibility and credibility with possible customers. Note that visibility and credibility are two different things. Visibility will result in someone recognizing you as someone they have seen or heard of somewhere. Credibility will result in someone remembering you and doing so in a positive manner. A good way to improve credibility is to add value and demonstrate knowledge in LinkedIn groups to which your prospects belong.
LinkedIn also allows multiple ways of reaching out to a prospect. You can do so via InMail, introductions from mutual connections, through commenting on something they have said in a group, or even a status update.
You can also decide whether or not you want to approach this person directly or through someone else at his or her company. There are times where this is the best route to take. If a prospect has 50 LinkedIn connections, he is hardly a power user. So finding a colleague with 500+ connections may be a better place to start. By the way, did you notice how we are talking about going to the right person or his or her colleague right away, and not going through their secretary, admin person, or other doorkeeper? With LinkedIn, doors disappear.
Based on the research you have done on LinkedIn through reading your prospect’s and other profiles and their LinkedIn company page, you can differentiate myself from your competitors. And here's the interesting thing: Where in another context it might be thought of as snooping, reading a person’s LinkedIn profile and understanding their background before contacting them is seen as “doing your homework.”
And if the timing is not right for this approach, it is easy to back off and keep a low-level presence with a prospect by occasionally sending articles or other information of interest. It is easy to keep a relationship percolating using LinkedIn.
LinkedIn allows you to find out an amazing amount about prospective customers; it's a tool you can use to demonstrate your credibility from a distance and then finally approach a prospect and introduce yourself.Bruce Johnston is a sales consultant specializing in social media and especially LinkedIn. He has over 25 years experience in high-tech sales and management. He can be reached at brucej@practicalsmm.com or through his profile on LinkedIn.