Professional Sales

LinkedIn is the one network we're asked about most often. Some business professionals are more comfortable in that space because it appears to be, well, more professional. The problem is, LinkedIn’s users aren't nearly as conditioned to click on ads on LinkedIn, making mass marketing more difficult. But all is not lost.

Yes, it's a powerful tool. Several of our business's accounts came through our LinkedIn profiles, and our clients receive messages on the network with valuable opportunities. But we haven't found it to be effective beyond one-to-one sales and hence, not scaleable.

That said, LinkedIn can be very effective for authority positioning and for making one-to-one sales, so we do recommend using LinkedIn’s free tools to help grow your sales.

Repeat after me: “Free qualified leads are good.” The following five easy tactics can help you use LinkedIn to draw in prospects and land sales.

1. Get introductions.
To quickly build your prospect list, utilize your network tree by leveraging LinkedIn Recommendations. These ensure that your client or customer really knows the person you're asking for an introduction to. Here’s how:

Make a list of your top customers and/or clients.
Go to their LinkedIn profiles.
Check to see if they have any recommendations.
Make a list of those who recommended them to see if any of them would be worth having a sales conversation with.
Write an email to your customer and/or client asking for a simple introduction to this other person.

2. Start a conversation.
Scroll through your newsfeed for postings about job title changes, career moves, and work anniversaries. Post a positive comment publicly to these people, then dive into a private conversation using LinkedIn messaging. Ask additional questions about the change, what the person’s role is, and what the plans are for the future. Start this first email just talking about them. As the person responds, work to identify opportunities where you might fulfill needs. Do not sell in LinkedIn though. Instead, request to have a conversation offline and begin your sales dialogue there.

3. Use "People You May Know" to find more prospects.
Scroll through the list of “People You May Know” suggested connections, and as you're adding to your network, jot down those you’d like to be in your sales pipeline. Each day, message five of these new contacts to thank them for their connection and ask about their position and role at their firm. Again, do not sell on LinkedIn, but instead, request to have a conversation offline. LinkedIn’s built-in CRM is a powerful tool for managing this process.

4. Have a posting frenzy.
Take advantage of LinkedIn’s Long Form Posts to promote your authority to your entire network. Do this quickly, so you can focus on selling and not writing. Simply breathe life into old content. Start by writing an introduction to a blog post or article, and post the introduction as the "Long Form Post."

We repost our blogs in the LinkedIn Long Form Post and include links in the articles to opt-in to our mailing lists. This has moved LinkedIn up into our top ten source of mailing list opt-ins.

5. If you want to try advertising, sponsor an update.
Using “Sponsored Updates” from LinkedIn’s advertising platform can get your messaging in front of key contacts quickly. These updates are run from your company page. You can focus your target market based on geographic location, industry, title, and keywords, just to name a few. To see if this is worth ongoing investment for you, start small and analyze your results before spending a lot. With the analytics report, you'll receive metrics for: Impressions, Clicks, Interactions, Followers Acquired, and Engagement.

Source: entrepreneur

About LaraNet: We are a web design firm focused to help you to grow your business and communicate with your customers and prospects using two simple but powerful tools: 1) Interactive Website and 2) Internet Marketing Strategy on social networks like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc …
Whether you want to work with just a web page, or launch or improve your presence on Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or communicate with your customers through newsletters, or improve the location of your business in the search engines through Search Engine Optimization, or start marketing your products or services online, in LaraNet we can help you.

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