LinkedIn Offers Powerful Tools for your Sales Team

LinkedIn for Sales

Are you training your sales professionals in how to use the advanced features of LinkedIn for marketing, introductions, and relationship building? If not, are you potentially ignoring a tool that could dramatically leverage your time and effort? If you have not gone down this path yet, what’s holding you back?

Here’s a few ideas:

  • Does everyone in your company have a LinkedIn Account?
  • Has each person input their entire contact list to check who they know is already on LinkedIn?
  • Have your sales professionals used their own contact list and that of everyone in the company to identify potential buyers at target companies who already know someone in your company – through which a warm introduction could be obtained?
  • Do your sales people use the profile manager and tagging to sort, manage, email, and nurture potential contacts?
  • Do your sales professionals all have impressive profiles fully filled out and an extensive LinkedIn Company Page?
  • Are your sales professionals using the advanced features of LinkedIn, such as blogging, presentations, video, reading lists, and others to engage with potential clients?
  • Have you brought in or hired a LinkedIn Sales Trainer to teach and train your team?
  • Have you sent your sales people to online e-courses/webinars to learn how to adapt LinkedIn to their unique selling approach?

Do you have a precise plan of how to bring your entire sales team up to speed on using LinkedIn to improve sales?

Barry Deutsch

Do Your Customers or Clients view you as a Trusted Source?

Reputation to Revenue Blog

I was reminded how important it is for your potential customers to view you as a trusted source of information in re-reading this blog article in my archive from the Reputation-to-Revenue Blog.

Study after study has shown that a large percentage of buying decisions (both for products and services) are being done through web searches. On these web searches, your content, reputation, references, and recommendations all surface.

Are you establishing yourself as one of the top trusted sources of information for your customers/clients?

Are you producing enough content to establish yourself as the “authority” within your niche or marketplace?

Could you honestly say that for the service you provide – you’re one of the most trusted sources of reliable, non-biased, objective information within your industry or niche?

If you’re not in the top 3, you’re leaving money on the table. Social media – places like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other social networking venues – now give you the opportunity to build your own brand, become your own content publisher, and market precisely to your target audience on a very cost-efficient basis.

Are you taking advantage of these new tools and sites to establish yourself as a leading producer of good quality information about the products or services (which you provide) in your niche or market?

Here’s a good case study: My partner, Brad Remillard, and I have systematically developed our reputation as being one of the top voices in hiring and retaining top talent. We generate an abundance of referrals and leads for our executive search practice, speaking engagements, and hiring process improvement consulting business. We’ve put together one of the best collections of FREE content on the web for hiring and retaining top talent. We’re laser focused in distributing that content to our target audience – CEOs of small-to-medium size businesses. We generate a tremendous number of leads and referrals simply by publishing high quality content related to finding, interviewing, assessing, and keeping great talent.

Anyone can do this. There is no barrier to entry other than the time investment required to write and publish your content. Within a very short period of time, you could become one of the most trusted sources of information for your target audience-niche market. Our blogging and social media activity comprise approximately 1 hour per day of time including writing the blog articles, distributing the articles, projects, responding to our audience/connections, and networking on-line.

The future battle for the attention of the buyers of your services or products will be increasingly fought on the field of establishing yourself as a trusted source of information. This approach applies to Chairs, Consultants, Companies, Speakers, and Sales Professionals. How are you establishing your business as the most trusted within your niche?

To read the entire article, click the link below:

Marketing as media: Are you in the top five?

Barry Deutsch

Can Social Media Improve Your Sales Lead Generation?

Social Media B2B Blog

Umberto Milletti, in his post on the Social Media B2B Blog, describes the value that using social media tools in the sales process can bring to improving or enhancing lead generation activities for your sales team. He describes some of the key benefits as:

  • If they are not the decision maker, identify decision makers within the prospect’s company
  • Leverage your social connections to identify a common SENIOR connection between you and the decision makers
  • Tap into social intelligence to listen to what the decision makers care about or talk about
  • Learn enough about your prospect’s current business challenges and needs to convince the common senior connection to agree to an introduction
  • Discover which other executives might be involved in the decision making process

I wrote a comment back to Umberto’s post and below is a summary of my response to how he indicates/perceives that social media can improve the sales lead generation process. I have a few major concerns – especially among entrepreneurial-to-middle market companies:

It seems that many senior executive decision makers are NOT using social media. They are not on Faceback or Twitter. They are not actively using LinkedIn. Forget for a moment senior executive decision makers. Most senior sales professionals are not using social media tools in their own sales efforts. We’re still very much in the early adopter phase for most social media practical B2B uses – outside of very young professionals and those in the tech sector.

Has this been your experience? How much are you using social media in your sales function? Are all your sales professionals trained in the latest techniques of using Umberto’s ideas to improve lead generation?

To read the full article on improving B2B lead generation, please click the link below.

Can Social Media Be Used to Improve Lead Qualification

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Is it time to take our Social Media in Sales Self-Assessment to determine if your sales team is leveraging social media and networking to the fullest potential in your company?

Are You a Resource to Your Network?

Be a Resource to Your Network

Be a Resource to Your Network

Jason Jacobsohn, writing on his blog, Networking Insights, one of our featured feeds on the Sales Management Tab, talks about a powerful networking strategy of becoming a resource to your network. The title of his article is “Become a Resource to Grow Your Network“.

I originally wrote this blog post for our Vistage Chair Blog. After writing it, it seemed like it would also apply very easily to Members, Speakers, and Trusted Advisors – so I repost it here with a few modifications.

Jason makes the case for helping others BEFORE THEY ASK to become a focal point within your network. This is a major leap that most networkers don’t get or are unwilling to accept. If you want to be seen as someone in your network that others go out of their way to help, make referrals, work your referrals for you, and generally populate your pipeline with turned-on excited prospects, you’ve got to go above and beyond the call of duty in proactively helping others before they ask you for help.

The term I use for these people are “connectors”. They naturally put people together in their networks.

When was the last time you did this without being asked?

How often do you do it?

How do you determine if someone in your network requires help from you?

Everyone complains that their network is not giving them enough referrals for potential members. Perhaps, it’s time to step back and revisit one of the basic tenets of effective networking:

You must be a giver before a taker. You must give and give and give. I guarantee it will ultimately come back to you beyond your imagination. However, like many things in life, most give up early and don’t want to do the hard work required to turn their network into a referral machine.

Barry Deutsch