How to Add LinkedIn to Your Sales Process and Boost Sales
From 2012 to 2013, the number of pages that LinkedIn viewers interacted with grew by a whopping 63%. Because of the potential for more growth, and its positioning as more “serious” than other social media platforms, LinkedIn has become a prime hunting ground for business professionals in every market.
Here are a few tips on how you can incorporate LinkedIn into your sales process to get more leads.
Qualifying Prospects
One of the most frustrating aspects of sales is being given a list of potential prospects and knowing next to nothing about them. But adding LinkedIn to your sales process provides you with the opportunity to gain perspective on your next big sale. Why are they buying? How much and how often? Are they searching for your products from a competitor? Use LinkedIn to learn more about your best customers, and create a narrow, specific profile in order to discover their main traits. That profile will help you find other prospects with similar traits and help you strategize an approach.
Networking
The next part of your LinkedIn sales process should be interacting with your top clients. Now that you know more about your customers through profiling, it’s time to ask them questions. Use LinkedIn to find out exactly what you do for them, and exactly what you can do for them better in the future. Join one or two discussion groups that they’ve joined and become a conduit of information. When you’ve closed a sale, use the timing in order to gain some momentum; ask for a referral.
Since you have a profile of who your best customers are and what they’re after, and because you now know better how to sell to them, use that knowledge to find new prospects that need the same product. LinkedIn has an advanced search function for exactly this reason; use it. One business leader suggests using LinkedIn to keep tabs on the competition as well. Find out exactly what your prospects are up to, and you might find that they’re interacting with your competitors instead of you.
Active Participation
By now you have gathered a lot of information on potential prospects, so now take care to put plenty of data about yourself and your company on your own LinkedIn page. When putting together your own profile, insert a strong call to action, such as asking them to visit your website, give you a call, or send you an email. Tell them exactly what you would like them to do next and what value you deliver to the people you serve — don’t be a mystery!
Another area of participation is groups. Don’t underestimate the value of starting your own, or joining one in your industry if it has a great number of participants. This will make the prospecting part of your sales process much easier.
Of all the social media platforms out there, LinkedIn is still king when it comes to business-to-business interaction and sales. Many of the people we train do extremely well using LinkedIn, and so can your company.
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