LinkedIn is just one of a myriad of popular tools available in today’s rapidly growing and evolving social media world. So how do you justify the effort required to sow and nurture your presence on LinkedIn, especially the time and resources that could be invested elsewhere?
In this week’s #B2BChat, we’ll share ideas and thoughts about LinkedIn. To help lead the discussion, we’ll be joined by three leading LinkedIn pros, Lewis Howes (@lewishowes), Viveka von Rosen (@linkedinexpert), and Eve Orsburn (@linkedinqueen). Some questions we’ll pose to help guide the conversation include:
- Do you have a LinkedIn strategy?
- How much time do you spend on LinkedIn each week? Is it enough?
- Do you maintain both a personal and company profile on LinkedIn? Why or why not?
- Do you use LinkedIn for prospecting?
- What automation tools do you recommend using with LinkedIn?
- Has your investment in LinkedIn (time, money, or other resources) paid off? How?
- What’s the greatest benefit of your activity on LinkedIn?
- Do you plan to increase or decrease your LinkedIn activity in the coming weeks and months? Why?
- What’s your best advice about how to get the most out of LinkedIn?
Join us for this week’s #B2Bchat about LinkedIn on Thursday, June 10 at 8:00 p.m. Eastern (5:00 p.m. Pacific). Follow @B2B_chat for updates.
About the B2Bblogger: Kent Huffman is the CMO at BearCom Wireless, America’s only nationwide wireless equipment dealer and integrator. Kent is the Co-Publisher of a new digital publication for marketers,
Social Media Marketing Magazine. He is a published author and has been featured in Forbes, Marketing News, BtoB, Computerworld, and Texas Technology magazines. Kent also serves in advisory roles for the CMO Council, MetricsBoard, and Social2B. You can follow him on Twitter at @KentHuffman.
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.
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.
As you are planning your social media efforts, here are five things to consider.
1. It’s not a panacea or a magic pill that will cure what ails you.
Your problems will remain your problems. Social media can help, but if are struggling to generate leads or have slow response times in your contact center, social media alone won’t fix that. On top of that, Twitter gives your customers another vehicle to communicate with you. If you are not prepared to listen and respond, think twice before creating @yourcompanyname.
2. If you are doing it, because that’s what the “cool kids” are doing, you are bound to fail.
Yes, there are B2B companies succeeding with social media. Your company can too, but only if you make social media part of an overall marketing strategy tied to specific goals. Facebook, Twitter, You tube…there all just tactics. If you’re only thinking about creating a Facebook page because your main competitor did…slow down and consider how the use of social media can help you achieve your overall goals. If you are doing it for any other reason and you don’t have it tied to specific goals, you’ll likely be wasting your time (not to mention that you will have no way to monitor and measure your success).
3. If you are the internal champion or evangelist, roll up your sleeves, you are in for the fight of your life.
I can almost guarantee the moment you sit down for your presentation with your boss and you pull up Twitter – you’ll see a post like this one I sent last week:
@MarketingVeep you can always use a paper towel in a pinch -Jeremy
“How can something like that help us,” she’ll say. Followed by a few minutes later, “Facebook, my kids are on Facebook 24×7, I’m always telling them to stop wasting so much time on there.”
If the executives in your company are new to social media, you’ll need to be prepared to use every opportunity to consensus build. Without the support of the entire management team, your social media road will be much harder to travel. [BTW- @Marketingveep needed coffee filters on a Monday morning.]
4. You have already underestimated the investment in time by at least half.
While the majority of social media tools and web sites are free to use, they all take time to manage. Lots of it. A blog can be especially time consuming due to the writing involved (at the same time though, it can be the most rewarding). You and your staff are likely stretched pretty thin already, it is important that you don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start slowy and measure time spent to help you plan better for future initiatives.
5. Don’t let fear cripple you, you will make mistakes.
Write this down – I will send a tweet with a typo. I will not panic.
While there are best practices in social media, much of your success will come through trial and error and learning what tactics work best for achieving your goals. Like any marketing program, not everything will work or go as planned. Don’t let that stop you from trying. The benefits far outweigh the typos.
What else should B2B marketers know about social media?
