Using LinkedIn for Effective Sales Prospecting

LinkedIn has now passed the 225 million mark of users, with 40% being in the North America. It has become the number one business social media site by a large margin. It is one of the best, up to date and most compelling databases of individuals known in the business world.

If you are not using it as a Salesman to find leads, qualify prospects and promote yourself, you are missing out. For B2B, LinkedIn is the critical tool that can make your prospecting faster, smoother and, ultimately, more profitable.

So how do you turn LinkedIn’s vast database into a steady stream of leads that can negate the need for you ever to cold call again?

Get Your Profile Right – Your online Business Card.

More and more, business professionals will view your profile on LinkedIn prior to a meeting to gain a better insight into whom they are having a discussion with. What you have on view is a dynamic and involved business card; it tells who you are, what solutions your company offers and what makes you stand out. Make sure your profile is professional and informative and will impress. Photo, Headline, Summary, Contact and details of your experience.

Photo: Make sure you have a solid, business-like picture of yourself up. It’s nice that you are proud of your kid’s baseball team or your partner, but this isn’t Facebook. Ensure that it is good shot of head and shoulders and you are dressed appropriately; after all a picture tells a thousand words.

Headline: Your headline should be a summary of who you are. Imagine you are at a party and someone asks what you do. In one short line tell them. That’s the Headline. LinkedIn will automatically define this as your job title at your company name – not that inspiring and not too informative. Rather than “Salesman at Acme”, what about “Solution provider for Packaging Lines” or “Custom Systems specialist for B2B Cloud Service”.

Summary: Still at that same party, but now you are going to give them a little more information. Get out your Elevator Speech. Who you are, what you do for you company, what your company offers customers; one paragraph and punchy.

Contact: If you are a salesman you want people to contact you, so make it easy. Make sure you have phone numbers and email address. By the way, you may have signed up for LinkedIn using a personal email address, make sure your contact information reflects your business email. Nothing worse than seeing John@ILikePonies.com (unless you work for that company of course!) 

Experience: If you are promoting yourself as a provider of solutions for your customers, rather than just a seller of goods, then this can reflect your skills and capabilities. Keep it brief and pertinent (unless of course you are looking for jobs, then more is needed) OK, so you’ve set your profile up and you look like a professional solution provider that is trustworthy. So how can you use LinkedIn to your advantage?

Connections – the Heart of LinkedIn

Connections breed connections. Your first level contacts open up a route to a wide range of second and third level connections. This is how you scale your network. Whenever you meet anyone (online or off) always follow up quickly with a connection request while you are still fresh in their minds.

Having said that, there is a common mistake made by lots of people on LinkedIn and that is to make a connection with everyone. The more names you have the more successful you are. Wrong! Choose your connections wisely. Your realtor or hairdresser is not a connection you need frankly (unless you are in that business). Keep your personal and business lives separated. Remember that LinkedIn is for helping you connect with the right people to further your sales career. I have seen too many people with connections that are out of control and don’t assist them in doing business.

Groups are Critical

As a sales professional this can be your lifeblood; a great place to go fishing for new leads. Ask yourself why anybody joins a specific group? Because it is relevant to their needs and interests. One of the standard ways of finding leads is to profile a specific customer who you have sold to and then go out and find individuals and companies similar to them. That can be very time consuming. However with LinkedIn, just look at the Groups that your customer belongs to and search within that Group for more like them (only possible if you pay for a premium LinkedIn account). It is a great way to pre-qualify prospects.

Follow Companies and Find out More

Similar to making connections with individuals, you can make a connection with a company by Following them. It’s a good way to stay in touch and find out what they are doing. Many companies will constantly refresh their company pages with information on new products, events, news jobs and more. It is an automated way to keep informed provided the company has an active policy of making changes on an ongoing basis.

Pay for It for Success

Simple logic here – LinkedIn is a business. If you want to release the full potential, you have to pay. A Business Premium account is going to set you back a miserly $20 a month. If you can’t afford that for the benefits that it provides then you are destined never to be a successful salesman and you need to focus your career aspiration a little different.

So what are the benefits?

• Expanded Who viewed your profile
• Full Profiles available
• InMails
• OpenLink
• Premium Search

Of these, the two most important are InMails and Premium Search.

InMails – Connect with Ease

InMail is LinkedIn’s internal email system and allows you to send an email to any LinkedIn user without requiring an introduction. It is especially useful for 3^rd degree and out of Network connections. Basically, it ensures your email gets through to their inbox.

I have heard all sorts of statistics on the effectiveness of InMails from 30 to 50 times more successful than a cold call or a standard email contact in getting through but I would claim much higher in my experience.

InMails are only available on paid accounts. The higher level the account you have, the more you get. On Business Premium account you’ll get three InMails each month. This means you’ll want to reserve them for when everything else fails. But the good news is that if you do not get a response to an InMail within seven days, your credits are refunded.

Search – the Power Tool

The key for LinkedIn in finding new prospects. You only get out what effort you put in so you need to be sensible about how you search. This is no different to working with Google or Bing – you have to be smart with your search keywords and methods.

With LinkedIn’s advanced search you can find people by title, company, location or keyword. If you have a paid account the you can add company size, type, and seniority level too and most importantly search by Group. By intelligently mixing the different filters you can get really deep and identify key individuals quickly and easily. You can also save your search criteria and get a weekly report listing anyone new who matches the customers you’re looking for.

Who’s viewed You – New ways to Connect

With LinkedIn, you can see who’s looked at your profile. Unless visitors have set their profiles to anonymous, you can click on the “Who’s viewed your profile?” link and see a list of them.

This can work for you as a method for contacting people.

The fact that someone looked at your profile is a good excuse to reach out with a connection request. Furthermore, if you look at other people’s profiles, a certain proportion will always look back

Even when you get visitors described as “Procurement Professional from the Pharmaceutical Industry” you can still click on them. LinkedIn will then give you a list which will include the actual visitor. It then takes just minutes to quickly visit each profile to show you’ve looked back.

Use Google as an Additional Tool

So you’ve done a search and you have found some interesting people to contact and you want to know more. If the person is a 3^rd Degree connection often you will get a picture and then a name that is just “Linda W.” and the only way to connect with them is via a precious InMail credit. How do you overcome this? Simple, use Google.

You know some basic information – a first name, a company they work for and a job title. Put it all into Google and hit search. Hey presto a URL link to that person on LinkedIn. Click on it and now you are seeing the full details of the individual plus you can now just “Connect” to them saving your InMails for others. Get used to using LinkedIn together with Google to find out more on a potential prospect.

Steal from your Competition

I wrote about this in a previous Blog (Stealing Customers though LinkedIn). This is a critical part of using LinkedIn’s ‘hidden’ capabilities. There is nothing wrong with it and you should use this tactic ruthlessly. You will be surprised how much information you can gain and how many more leads you can garner using this technique. As the blog details, just don’t let it happen to you.

You will be surprised how many sales people are totally ignorant on LinkedIn and how to use it effectively. Make sure you are aware of the power of this important sales tools and how to use it to find and qualify prospects, Investigate contacts, find out what customers and companies are doing and most importantly generate leads and sales.

Happy Hunting!