Social platforms, including LinkedIn, have become a huge asset for businesses of all sizes to build relationships with their audiences – consumers or B2B prospects. It’s taken the need away from cold calling and “salesy” advertising and opened up an inexpensive way to present a relevant message on the channels where your audience consumes content. Your sales or marketing team can provide value to potential customers as part of their daily scrolling instead of being “in their face,” which people may find irritating. For B2B oriented companies, LinkedIn is the place to show the value of a product or service within the organic flow of content or directed conversation.
How important is Linkedin to growing your brand awareness and increasing your sales?
There are 55 million companies on Linkedin and 4 out of 5 of those millions connected to a company are leaders considered important “drivers” of business decisions at their company. This means that if you’re able to connect on a personal level with a potential lead.
Regardless of the success of other social media platforms, Linkedin – the oldest social network – is still the best when it comes to finding and connecting with other businesses.
How can you best use Linkedin to maximize your success for sales prospecting?
The simplest way to use Linkedin for sales prospecting is to research companies that would be optimal customers for the product or service you’re trying to sell. From there, study their Linkedin page to find the keyholders who would be interested in learning more about your brand and make a decision. These people would have their job titles somewhere along the lines of “buyer,” account executive, relationship manager, or business development. Sometimes these titles sound serious or complicated but they’re actually your go-to person for connections.
Ask to “Connect” with your potential leads and always leave a message letting them know who you are and why you’re reaching out. Don’t be misleading, but you can word your message to be less “salesy” and more focused on the intention of building a relationship with another like-minded professional who may be of interest to work together.
Instead of immediately hitting them up with requests for sales once they’ve connected with you, start building that relationship organically while presenting the value of your business.
Benefit from Linkedin Sales Navigator
You can further benefit from using Linkedin to find and communicate with leads by making use of Linkedin’s sales solutions. According to Linkedin, using its sales dashboard known as Sales Navigator, “get sales insights for more effective selling. Stay informed and up-to-date on your accounts and leads to turn cold calling into warm conversations.”
Take Advantage of the LinkedIn Email Finder
LinkedIn and Sales Navigator are wonderful tools to find and make a connection with business prospects, but you can boost performance with a LinkedIn Email Finder. Sending a message on LinkedIn has a high probability of connection, but when someone is slammed with daily tasks, he or she may ignore your offer to connect.
Honestly, how many times have you skipped redundant messages from recruiters?
I admit skipping messages on social media, especially with a “salesy” tone. The optimal solution to increase conversational conversions is through another channel – the email. People go over their emails on daily basis especially business emails.
Searching the web manually for someone’s email is a tedious job that is counter-effective to sales performance. With Outlasted Data’s email finder extension you will get a list of phone numbers and emails just a few clicks away. Our email finder is the only one that delivers business and personal emails. All you need is a bulk list of URLs uploaded to our dashboard or you may find individual emails while browsing on LinkedIn with our Chrome extension.
Optimize Your Linkedin Profile
Treat your Linkedin profile as your professional resume that will open doors and leave than stellar impression on your prospects. Take the time to really complete your profile to 100% and use optimal keywords and an attractive voice that will keep visitors to your profile wanting to do business with you.
You can do this by:
- Choosing a Headline that catches the eye and intrigues visitors to know more about you. You don’t have to keep it as your job title. Instead, try to answer the question “what’s in it for you?”
- Use a photo that is professional, high-resolution, and only has you in it. You want people to know who you are.
- Choose a cover photo that is relevant to you, your business, or your industry.
- In your Summary, stay clear from just listing your job tasks and responsibilities. Use it as an opportunity to show some personality, dive deeper into your role and your favorite parts about doing what you do. And, of course, strategically insert how great your product or service is and why it would benefit the reader to learn more.
- Utilize your Projects & Media to highlight what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved while in your current role as well as anything notable you’ve done before that will impress readers. Make sure you use great pictures to highlight your product and service while showing examples of how you’ve provided incredible customer service through your job position.
- Ask previous and current customers, as well as team members, to leave endorsements on your Linkedin Profile. These are amazing ways to have real people vouch for your skills and abilities. Have terms such as “customer service,” “reliability,” and others related to your field added.
Share Content of Value with Your Audience
Scrolling through Facebook, Instagram, or even Tik Tok can take quite a bit of your time. We often zone out and an hour has passed by. Sounds familiar? Linkedin is a little different. We tend to scroll over what we don’t think is relevant while we look for news, updates, and interesting stories.
When you’re sharing content on Linkedin you have to make sure that your content is going to stand out. Use real images (not stock photos) and relevant hashtags, but further than that give your readers a reason to keep reading, trust your leadership opinion, and therefore trust that your product will be just as valuable.
You can post blogs on your website and then reshare them onto Linkedin. If you don’t have access to your company blog, even making an account on Medium or a similar platform is a great way of growing your presence online while remaining professional – and possibly a way to bring even more sales from those platforms as well.
More is Less
You could post twice a day with the belief that it will increase your impact and the number of users who view your posts, but in reality, it does the opposite. Instead, keep it to once or twice a week while ensuring each piece is memorable and provides value. Sharing too much as getting no impressions will increase the chance that Linkedin’s algorithm will push your posts into the background.
If you’ve let your Linkedin profile go recently by dedicating more time to other social media platforms, it may be time to take a second look. There’s likely a wide girth of possible leads and customers just waiting for you to connect and start building long-term, meaningful, and professional connections. If you are active on LinkedIn, it’s time to enrich your business data and increase revenue with outlasting data services.
