4 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Boost Sales

4 Ways to Use LinkedIn to Boost Sales:

With more than 120 million users & two new ones added each second, LinkedIn has become the de facto tool for professional networking & selling. For many, it seems challenging to keep up with and even a bit overwhelming, but it’s time to cross that chasm. Here are a few reasons you should pay more attention to LinkedIn for selling. Included are tips on how you can do that easier:

1. Your targets are on LinkedIn, but you’re not connected to them. Most sales reps keep a digital rolodex for their contacts, whether it’s a CRM product like salesforce.com or simple contact manager in their email system. From our studies, we’ve seen that on average, 60-80% of rep’s contacts in B2B Technology have a LinkedIn profile, but that they are only connected to 10-20% of them. (Tip -Tie your mail system to LinkedIn so that you can see the landscape of your connections. Auto-request a batch at a time and watch the acceptances come in. Some sales intelligence tools can allow you to do this

2. Your targets are changing jobs and positions, but you & your CRM are not finding out. LinkedIn’s alert system can be a bit overbearing, and often doesn’t cut to the meat of good information. Additionally, the system doesn’t sync changes to your CRM. (Tip – Change your LinkedIn settings to only show pertinent updates on your dashboard and through the daily email. A good sales intelligence offering can automate and make job change information actionable. The systems can also help bring changes into your CRM.

3. Your prospects are asking about your offering, but you’re not hearing them. Through working with sales teams, we’ve found that one of the most underrated sales assets of LinkedIn are LinkedIn Groups. We’ve found however that many user get turned off to this feature fast because the oversubscribe and get too many emails, or they don’t even know how to use the feature. (Tip – Join only the best 1 to 3 groups where your prospects are to see their updates. Do not oversubscribe because the updates will burn you out. Get the daily email and review it for keywords that match what you are selling. Reach back out to prospects with good advice or recommendations on people they can talk to about solutions. Be careful not to put the heavy pitch on here, this forum is very guarded to heavy-handed selling.

4. There are people in LinkedIn who are right for your offering, but you’ve never heard of them. With 2 people joining LinkedIn every second, its not a surprise to know that you could be missing out on great prospects. Specialty tools will allow you monitor LinkedIn and learn when people join that match your profile. In the meantime, regular search updates help you to stay in the know about your prospect universe.

All in all, LinkedIn is a fun and effective way to improve understanding of your prospects and to uncover the trigger events that lead to smoother sales. Sales intelligence promises to add significant value to this landscape so that you can mine more value out of LinkedIn.