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Part I: Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?

Written by: Jill Konrath

Article Overview: Wondering if social media sites like LinkedIn are worth your time & effort? If so, you've come to the right place. When you read this article, you'll discover how others leverage this unique tool to connect, create opportunities and more. Make sure to check all four articles in this series.

Part I: Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?

As a self-professed technophobe, using social media such as LinkedIn is not second nature to me. I force myself to experiment with these new mediums knowing that ultimately they'll have an impact on the selling profession, but unsure what it might be.

About 2 years ago, I set up my profile on LinkedIn. It was sterile & boring, conveying only enough to be able to say I had an online presence. Then last year I read entrepreneurial guru Guy Kawasaki's LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover and felt compelled to redo mine based on what I learned.

Since then, I've accepted numerous invitations to connect, yet fretted over if I should since many came from total strangers. I wrote a few recommendations and received a few.

Mostly I was a passive observer – waiting for some sales miracles to happen. Of course, they never emerged and I began to doubt LinkedIn's ability to deliver real tangible results.

Not wanting to quit too soon, I began answering sales and business development questions on LinkedIn. Why would I help total strangers? To demonstrate my expertise, as well as to get exposure with potential prospects for my services.

Nothing happened, but still I suspected that I'd barely tapped into the power of LinkedIn. So when I discovered I'm on LinkedIn. Now What? by Jason Alba, the CEO of JibberJobber, I was ready for help:

Immediately I discovered that I was a "promiscuous linker", willing to hook up with anyone who approached me. (Please don't tell my mother; she didn't raise me to be like that.) But I also learned it was okay.

In his book, Alba shares a whole slew of uses I'd never even thought of – including why & how to ask a question on LinkedIn. That intrigued me. And, since I was still trying to discover how to best leverage this social media, here's the question I posed:

Question: As a seller, how do you use LinkedIn to increase your sales?

Explanation: I'm writing an article for my Selling to Big Companies newsletter on this topic. I'd like to include specific examples to help my readers learn how they can leverage this tool. Since I'm a bit of a technophobe, my experience with Linked In is rather limited. If you can tell me how you've used LinkedIn to open doors, create opportunities and grow your business, I'd really appreciate it.

Social media guru Scott Allen, coauthor of The Virtual Handshake and managing director at Link to Your World, was the first to respond. Here are his invaluable suggestions:
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LinkedIn can be used to support the entire sales lifecycle: lead generation, sales acceleration and solution delivery. Let's look at each of these pieces: 



Lead Generation

• Find and be found. Search by title and industry for the ideal contacts at your ideal customers. Search by title and company name for specific target customers.

• Be sure your profile is complete and contains the appropriate keywords for your business so that people looking for your solution will find you.

• Endorsements/recommendations count for a lot -- get them from people who have actually been your clients if at all possible. 



Sales Acceleration

• Search for people at your prospect who are not closely involved in your deal - preferably 2nd degree contacts, not 3rd degree. Ask for an informational interview. This is where strong, trusted relationships count for a lot - "light linking" breaks down here.

• Ask your interview subject about the priorities that are going on at the company -- what are the high-level factors that might be influencing the buying process. Be completely open/transparent.

• If you have a good solution and a really good referral to a true "friend of a friend", you will very likely find an internal champion in that person. This is the #1 technique that LinkedIn supports better than any other tool. 



Solution Delivery

Quite often, especially for small businesses, you can't do it all yourself. LinkedIn is invaluable for finding partners with particular skill sets who can help you deliver the total solution. In addition to searching, you can post questions asking about the solution area you need expertise in and use that as a way to attract potential partners. 

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That was just the start of my learning. Numerous LinkedIn users responded to my question. I'll be sharing their success stories in my upcoming series of four articles articles on this topic.

In the meantime, if you don't have your profile up on LinkedIn, get going. If your profile is mundane and skeletal, flush it out and inject some personality in it.

Social media can have a significant impact on sales. You don't want to let these opportunities slip through your fingers.

Related Articles
  Part IV: Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?
  Legal Marketing: More LinkedIn questions and answers
  Legal Marketing: LinkedIn's professional growth
  The Referral Habit - Sales and Marketing Training
  Growing Your Business Using LinkedIn – Interest and Participation

Article Tags: business development, ceo, development questions, extreme makeover, guru, guy kawasaki, invitations, jason alba, jibberjobber, leverage, linkedin, mediums, miracles, passive observer, profession, promiscuous, prospects, second nature, tangible results, whole slew



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Re: Online Sales and Marketing vs Traditional - [quote="ltrahan":31w9r2iz]Hi Evan, I am noticing that many of the posts in the Sales/Marketing section deal with online marketing, SEM and and SEO and Affiliates. I was wondering if it might be a good idea to separate that section into two; 1) Online Sales and Marketing; 2) Traditional Sales and Marketing[/quote:31w9r2iz] I second the request...
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