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

B2B Marketing Leads Converted into Sales Transactions

HubSpot Blog

One of my favorite blogs to follow is the Hubspot Inbound Marketing Blog – I get lots of ideas on how to drive sales leads and referrals from this blog.

Katherine Derum described her experience of going into a retail store as an example of B2C marketing/sales integration that could be applied at a B2B level. She makes the following points in her blog article:

All too often I hear of marketing teams and sales teams running in different directions.  A marketing team could do an excellent job of bringing in leads, however if the sales team is not prepared or educated on how to take a lead further down the sales cycle, there is no gain.  While a retailer doesn’t necessarily drive leads, they can be a perfect example of marketing and sales working well together.

Before you jump to the conclusion that lead quality is the problem, first find out what your sales team is doing with your leads.  How are they opening the conversation?  What suggestions might you offer that would open up the discussion?   You know your potential customer as well or better than sales.  You might find augmenting what’s happening AFTER the lead is generated can increase lead quality opposed to adjusting how it was generated.
My only frustration with the article was that I wish she had thrown in a few examples of B2B sales/marketing integration that tied back to the metaphor she was painting of a retailer’s marketing/sales function working together. She does raise some excellent points about what happens with leads and how they are acted upon in many companies.
What examples could offer of how well your lead generation/sales effort works in moving leads into close transactions? This becomes an even bigger issue as more companies start to drive sales leads by marketing through social media.
Barry Deutsch