How To Leverage LinkedIn For Sales

In the B2B market, where there’s often a long cycle from first touch to sealing the deal, trust and rapport are critical to the sales process.

Colleagues who can vouch for your quality of service, and be a source of leads, help grease wheels too.

It’s all about creating relationships.

In-person interactions are important — think about how many deals are made on the golf course or in swanky supper clubs — yet you can lay groundwork online through LinkedIn. It’s an ideal platform for developing and maintaining business relationships.

Here are tips on how to leverage LinkedIn for sales purposes.

A LinkedIn profile is a sales pitch for your personal brand

LinkedIn profiles offer an easy way to present professional credentials.

Sales prospects you’ve met with may use LinkedIn to check you out. People may search LinkedIn to find reputable persons purveying your particular product or service.

Tailor your profile with these possibilities in mind. Include relevant keywords to attract anyone searching for your sales offering. List pertinent certifications. Post presentations, and link to a blog (if you happen to write one) to showcase your know-how.

Get recommendations. They’re testimonials for your personal brand. Have co-workers, colleagues and satisfied customers sing your praises. Point to these endorsements if a prospect needs reinforcement regarding your quality of service.

Let the profile to do legwork on your behalf. Add a link to it in your email signature: Without precisely saying so, this sends a message to look you up on LinkedIn.

Don’t just create the profile, work it.

Find out who knows who

One of the most powerful aspects of LinkedIn is the connections feature, which let’s you see the network of your personal connections. You can peruse the connections of direct contacts; however, that’s not necessarily the most efficient way to go.

Get into search mode. Look up names of prospects using LinkedIn’s people search, where results show connections to your network.

Advanced search enables hyper-targeting through keywords, industry, company, relationship to your network and more.

People who know people open doors

Whatever method you choose, the next step is to pick the best mutual connection and ask for an introduction. This can be done through LinkedIn’s “Get introduced” wizard. Or, call or email a direct contact to work things out.

A connection may vouch for your expertise, and/or the quality of your product.  This helps establish trust and familiarity with a prospect. Talking about how you’re both acquainted to a shared connection makes for a nice icebreaker and serves as a short-cut to a more congenial relationship.

Note: It’s a good idea to determine how well an intermediary knows your prospect. If the direct connection hasn’t spoken to your prospect in a long time, or they’re not well acquainted, see if there are other options within your network.

Warm-up strategies for a targeted sales pitch

Canned cold calls have a high degree of failure, and for good reason — they’re impersonal and are often irrelevant to the person on the other end of your line. Having background details about a prospect changes that dynamic. Now you can defrost a cold call.

Read a prospect’s LinkedIn profile and use that information to craft a targeted sales pitch.  Look for commonalties, such as having attended the same college or shared certifications (perhaps you’re both Six Sigma Black Belts). Shared experience are opportunities to build rapport.

Read recommendations to glean insights about a prospect’s personality. If you know someone who wrote a recommendation for a prospect be sure to bring it up.

Look into company dynamics

Note how long the prospect has worked at a current employer. Pay attention to who he/she is connected to within the company to get a sense of internal political capital. If the person is relatively new you may have to sell more up the ladder.

If you need to deal with multiple people at the same company look up everyone’s profile. Use LinkedIn’s company pages to see how the business is organized and be sure to view names and titles of others within the company – it’s possible there’s a connection you weren’t aware of.

The more you know about who you’re dealing with the better able you are to map out a comprehensive sales approach.

Build visibility and reputation

LinkedIn Groups enable you to connect and engage with professionals based on common interest, experience and affiliation.

Groups offer advantages right off the bat, including the ability to see profiles of members who are not part of your network, and they’re an entrée to making connections (the default option is all members can contact one another directly).

That’s the tip of the iceberg. The real meaty value of groups is derived from discussions, which you can either create or comment on — either way gets your name out and provides opportunity to showcase expertise.

While you may be tempted to do a hard sales pitch as part of a group discussion, soft-sell is preferential in this environment. Share insight and be helpful. You’ll develop a reputation as a go-to person in your field. It’s another tool for personal branding.

Same goes for Answers, where you can ask a question to your network, or all of LinkedIn.

Engagement is the name of the game

Be prepared to wait a while before seeing success on LinkedIn. As in real life, it takes time to develop trust and prove you’re a knowledgeable engaged participant.

Remember that word engaged. The more you work LinkedIn the more it will work for you.

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About the B2Bblogger
Deni Kasrel is a seasoned (slightly spicy) strategic communications specialist. She helps companies build their brands and engage with communities so they can sell more stuff. Having enjoyed a fruitful eclectic career, Deni is versed in both traditional and digital communications, with special emphasis on content strategy, website development and social media marketing. You may contact Deni via LinkedIn, follow her on Twitter @dkasrel, or visit her blog: The Communications Strategist.

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