Are you using LinkedIn to sell? LinkedIn is a valuable selling tool for salespeople when you know how to use it. Here’s how one sales leader uses LinkedIn for selling and recruiting
Target your prospects.
Georgine Muntz,is a fintech company leader that has held sales and other leadership roles at fast growing SaaS companies. She is currently a board member and angel investor. She chose to use LinkedIn to scale up the company. Previously the sales efforts were led by the founder of the company. Prospecting was limited to the founder’s contacts. The sales leader realized that the lack of the right contacts for her outbound communication was a challenge to make the transition successful. That’s where LinkedIn came in.
The market they were targeting was financial technology. LinkedIn has a strong presence with many companies represented in that market segment. The sales leader knew the titles of the decision makers she wanted to reach. A simple search of the companies and then job titles quickly identified the company’s new prospects. Her company chose to use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator feature to link the salespeople together. This allowed viewing each other’s contacts to expand potential contacts.
Make it easy for customers to find you.
Your LinkedIn profile is especially important when you want customers to find you. The sales leader hired a LinkedIn consultant to advise how to create an effective profile that would attract prospects and customers.
The consultant’s recommendation was to use only professional pictures on LinkedIn. Include more than just your job title in your profile. Your prospects may search differently even though prospects often search for suppliers by job title. They may search by a product name, a certification, or other keywords. Include those words in your profile description. Your bio needs to include the relevant experience that a prospect might searching for. When you use the words your prospects search for in your profile you are going to come up in their search for services.
Build your reputation.
Consider your time spent on LinkedIn as part of your selling time. It’s not enough just to write a good and effective profile to get more business. You have to be an active LinkedIn user to generate the best selling results. Some companies will focus on building their credibility and use LinkedIn as the tool to accomplish that. They write white papers and post them. They will read other posts in their newsfeed links and like them. They’ll send their press releases out using LinkedIn as well as their own website.
Other companies want to build their reputation as a great place to work and will post photos of company events. They’ll share stories of their employees on LinkedIn. Some use videos which can be very effective. One company included customers at its company party. They had a monkey at the event. Many guests took photos with the monkey and the posts drew a lot of views.
Know your clients and prospects and what appeals to them. Your LinkedIn posts will be either more or less formal depending on what attracts your prospects and customers.
Use LinkedIn strategically.
LinkedIn can be a very effective recruiting tool. You can post the jobs you have available. This sales leader posted her job openings to her connections as well as on the company website. Then she asked her connections to “Please tell your friends that we’re hiring.”
What happens is that this will drive many candidates to your company’s LinkedIn page. Just be sure that the profiles of your employees are ready for the scrutiny. Candidates may be looking at the profiles to evaluate your employees’ expertise, qualifications, and company culture. You want to be sure that none of your employees have inappropriate content or photos posted. You do want them to showcase their skills and talents.
Are you looking for a better way to find prospects? As of December 6, 2018 there are 260 million active monthly users on LinkedIn. Surely some of them are your prospects.