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Eight Ways to Generate Sales Opportunities Using LinkedIn
July 28, 2014 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
One of the reasons why I like LinkedIn as the best social network for companies in the B2B space is the numerous ways it can be used to generate sales opportunities. Here are eight examples:
1. Examine Your LinkedIn Company Page Followers
Anyone who has clicked on the “follow” button and wants to receive updates from your company is someone you should investigate further. At the top right of your LinkedIn company page, just click on the number of followers shown.
2. Examine Your Competitor’s LinkedIn Company Page Followers
Clicking on the number of followers will reveal all of those followers on any company page on LinkedIn, not just your own. So why not go through your competitor’s follower lists and see who's there? You might be surprised.
3. Use Your LinkedIn Profile to Send Readers to Your Website
There are a number of ways to do this on any LinkedIn profile. Under publications, have a link to your company blog on the website. Add content through the “rich media” feature and have links back to the website. If your company has 40 employees, why you don’t have 40 LinkedIn profiles all sending people back to your company website is beyond me.
4. Issue Status Updates and Link Back to Your Website
Each employee of a company can issue their own status updates on LinkedIn. So why not have employees mentioning blog posts, offers, and company news and link back to the company web page?
5. Use a LinkedIn Company Page to Direct Visitors to Your Website
One of the features of a LinkedIn company page is that a company can add updates to it. And updates can have embedded links. Let’s look at how this can work: A company posts the header and link for a blog post that is on their company web page. Once the reader goes back to the website, the blog post can include a call to action where the reader can receive or have access to more content such as an online webinar, a how-to guide, or an e-mail newsletter in return for their email address. Someone who was interested enough to come back to a company website for more information, and then signed up for even more information sounds like a sales lead to me.
6. Use LinkedIn Long-form Publishing
This is a new feature from LinkedIn and is still in the process of being rolled out. Some people have this ability, some don’t yet. Long-form publishing allows LinkedIn users to write blog posts that are saved and archived by LinkedIn. The archive is searchable. Think of what this means: You write a blog post on a topic like very high-speed PCB design tips and using LinkedIn’s long-form publishing, you post it on LinkedIn. Embedded in the post is a link back to your company website. Anyone on Linkedin who searches for “high-speed PCB design tips” finds your post. Anyone. This week. Next week. Next month. Six months from now. (But not a year. Currently the archive only goes back one year. If a post proved powerful, I would just re-post it next year. Who said this social media stuff was hard?) If you have a unique value proposition or a strong competitive advantage, this is the place to showcase it.
7. Participate in LinkedIn Groups Where Your Customers Hang Out
Participating in LinkedIn groups and talking shop is a great way to meet potential customers, ask them questions, answer their questions, and build relationships. Note that you should do this in groups where your customers hang out, not your peers.
8) Start Your Own LinkedIn Group
This is the single most powerful sales strategy on LinkedIn and the one that gets mishandled the most often. Building a group composed of potential customers where you can display your expertise takes a lot of work, both in inviting members to join and in running the initial discussions. But a well-run group is a license to print money. Imagine having 1,000 potential customers in your group, talking about issues that you are uniquely positioned to help them with. And because you control the membership there are never any competitors to worry about. I run one group for a client that once it hit critical mass of about 900 members more or less started running itself. The members came up with the discussion topics and carried the conversations with no input from me required. I just have to give the group guidance, answer questions, and screen people who want to join. The group’s owner is ecstatic, as the group has surpassed its goals. It took a little while to build and get going, but the results are better than they could have hoped for.
Note that the capital outlay for all of these LinkedIn ideas is zero. The cost is in your time (or in the last case, my time, which my client pays for). But what is a good sales lead worth to you? What is a stream of good sales leads every month worth to you?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.