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LinkedIn

12 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is the finest social media network for B2B marketing out of the many social media platforms today. According to one survey, LinkedIn creates more than 80% of B2B leads generated through social media. Businesses are clearly discovering leads on this large social network, but are you sure you’re optimizing its features?

Whether you’re just getting started on LinkedIn or want to step up your LinkedIn lead-generating game, there are a few important steps you should make to get the most out of your LinkedIn B2B marketing.

The best ways for optimizing your LinkedIn profile

B2B decision-makers, like everyone else, conduct research online. And they frequently find up on LinkedIn while looking for information about possible clients, sellers, and a service or product they may acquire for their business. It’s also a reliable referral source. As a result, these changes to your LinkedIn profile might have a tremendous impact.

Fine-tune your settings. 

If you want your account to help you produce leads, you need to make sure that those leads can discover you. Begin by making your LinkedIn profile public and creating a unique URL for yourself.  Go to your account and click “View profile as”, then “Manage public profile settings” to make sure your profile is public.

You may also create a custom URL on this page. It’s preferable to include your entire name here so that others can discover your profile quickly. 

Showcase your profile

Target leads with your language. 

If you want to optimize the lead production potential of your LinkedIn profile, you should make each modification with a specific demographic in mind. Consider the buyer personas of the most valuable leads for your company and ensure you’re speaking their language.

Summarize what you do. 

You must provide a precise and straightforward summary of your profile right away. The easiest place to do this is in your profile’s title and summary. Use terms that are immediately related to the prospects you wish to attract. 

Optimize your photo. 

While you may not believe that your LinkedIn photo has an impact on lead creation, it most certainly does. According to one eye-tracking research, LinkedIn profile visitors spend over 20% of their time on a profile looking at the photo, so make sure you look your best.

There are several tips and Do’s and Don’ts for LinkedIn profile images available, but suffice it to say that it should be as crisp and presentable as possible. You are considerably more likely to be desirable as a seller or partner if you present a professional image.

content is key

If you don’t publish, you’ll perish.

One of the greatest methods to attract high-quality leads to your account is to create excellent unique content. The same holds for your LinkedIn profile. The site’s publishing tool, LinkedIn Pulse, was just recently made available to the entire public. Your LinkedIn friends will be alerted when you post on LinkedIn Pulse, and it will appear on your profile.

Achieve a higher participation grade. 

You will not produce as many leads as you might if you do not properly participate in the LinkedIn network, no matter how good your profile seems. Every possible business and specialization has a plethora of organizations and groups to choose from. The organizations and groups you join will be visible on your profile, allowing prospective leads to learning more about your experience and interests.

participate, lead, showcase

Ask for recommendations. 

This is a fantastic approach to display your skills and reputation to your coworkers, clients, and other connections. A recommendation should be as detailed as possible.

Some people opt to make recommendations for others in the hopes that others would reciprocate. Simply asking nicely for a recommendation is the best way to obtain them.

Take the lead.

Being a regular participant in famous LinkedIn groups can help you generate leads faster, but launching your group can be much more successful. That’s because, as the administrator of a group, you may utilize LinkedIn announcements to send emails to your members. Use this feature to start conversations about important industry subjects, develop thought leadership, and cultivate leads.

Make your slides available. 

SlideShare was bought by LinkedIn in 2012, making it simpler than ever to distribute your B2B presentations as LinkedIn content. You can quickly urge visitors of your presentations to provide you with their contact details and opt into your marketing activities, thanks to its built-in lead-generating function.

Put together a portfolio. 

The LinkedIn portfolio feature is perfect for exhibiting your efforts, such as presentations and larger-scale projects on which you have worked. This establishes your authority and might entice potential clients to visit your website and eventually become leads.

Build your company profile.

A company LinkedIn page is a must-have for B2B lead creation. Your company page serves as a storehouse for relevant content about your business and may serve as an extension of your homepage, demonstrating to potential clients your brand and what you care about.

A business page may also be used to provide inbound marketing content, such as whitepapers and ebooks, as well as webinar invitations. The LinkedIn Showcase page functionality allows you to establish several LinkedIn pages for different brands and companies under your umbrella brand, making it easy to split your lead generation strategies even further.

Don’t brag about your rivals.

You’ll see a section labeled “People Also Viewed” on the right side of your LinkedIn profile page if you go to it. The pages or accounts mentioned there are visitors of your page who have also looked at their profiles. You’ll note that the majority of them work in the same business or industry as you or have the same job title. Instead of clicking away to one of those persons, you want those who are looking at your account to learn more about your expertise. So turning off this feature is advised. 

Conclusion

If you know how to utilize LinkedIn for B2B lead creation, it may be a very powerful tool. You may get a lot more out of your LinkedIn profile by investing a bit more time in it. Start with these suggestions and see how they influence your lead generation game.

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LinkedIn

How to Use LinkedIn to Attract the Best Sales Talent

The era of the Great Resignation has arrived. In April of 2021, 2.7 million people resigned from their employment, a record-breaking number for more than twenty years. By July, it was reported that there were 10.9 million job openings, with employers scurrying to fill them.

Recently, however, the job floodgates have opened as a result of more people being inoculated against COVID-19 and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions. Now, employees are feeling more in control than they have in years.

To attract these talents employers have been offering flexible work hours, competitive compensation, and other perks and benefits regardless. However, job seekers are increasingly searching for more. They want to work in environments that share their values and provide them meaning.

In a talent-driven employment market, top candidates will accept offers from companies that share their goals, purpose, and vision. This makes the ongoing talent exodus an issue that affects not just recruiters and human resource specialists, but sales leaders as well.

Things to consider when attracting the best B2B sellers

As a sales leader in a company competing for top talent, there are several factors that you have to consider: your corporate brand, the quality of the work you provide, and the purpose or meaning the position will deliver.

Measuring success begins with determining where a candidate’s journey starts and which touchpoints drive them to you as a potential employer. When it comes to developing relationships with potential prospects, every touchpoint is crucial.

Using LinkedIn to find and recruit the finest people

Your sellers play a crucial role in your B2B company’s expansion and development. They work to build and keep your company’s client base and improve revenue by recognizing and chasing new leads, spotting upsell possibilities, and offering a great customer experience. Sellers must have outstanding communication skills and a thorough understanding of a company’s offers to successfully steer prospects toward the solutions they seek.

This means that when hiring the best talents out there, you will need all the help you can get to be successful. Here are some LinkedIn tools and resources to assist you in hiring the best people available:

Career Pages

Career Pages is a branding tool for employers that highlights your company’s culture and vacant positions.

Recruiter

The Recruiter platform assists you in locating, connecting with, and managing the individuals you want on your team.

Talent Insights

Employment Insights is a workforce planning tool that uses real-time data to help you make intelligent talent decisions.

Using LinkedIn as a hiring platform may assist your company whether you invest in recruitment tools or simply comply with best practices. It is also a good way to nurture your corporate image, make the most of your network of connections, and locate the top active and passive applicants than any other job board.

As a B2B business, attracting talent isn’t always simple, but leveraging LinkedIn’s capabilities may help you battle for top talent on an equal footing with your competition. 

Keeping your sellers on board

Keeping your sellers on board

More than hiring them, keeping sellers continues to be a major difficulty for businesses across all industries. The COVID-19 epidemic has created several obstacles, but it has undoubtedly reached a tipping point for many sellers, prompting employers to reconsider their whole employment model and the importance of keeping their best staff. 

To overcome this, your company should devise ways to aid the Great Retention, allowing it to recruit and retain your sellers.

While the top sellers and other business professionals these days desire better compensation to remain in a company, they also want more flexible work schedules and conditions, a better corporate culture, and more incentives to be interested in their job and inspired to come to work every day. If you don’t want to comply with these expectations, you may soon find yourself in the same situation as many other businesses: a slew of resignations.

Top sellers now seek more from their companies because they want to be fulfilled. It’s critical to build retention programs like these to guarantee that you’re satisfying your talent’s present (and likely future) demands.

Here are some ideas for keeping your greatest sellers:

  • Recognize that recruitment methods are the foundation for long-term retention.
  • Offer a pay and benefits package that is competitive (naturally).
  • Create flexible job possibilities.
  • Provide opportunities for professional growth.
  • Create clear routes to success.
  • Insist on — and cultivate – a pleasant work environment.
  • Keep your employees motivated by engaging them.
  • Ascertain that they have the resources and tools they need to thrive in their jobs.
  • Be a mentor, not a watchdog!

Today’s sellers are involved in their lives as much as their jobs. They don’t want to work for organizations that they see as ‘dead ends’ on several levels. As we have seen again and again throughout the pandemic, time is important and life is all too fleeting. Your company may contribute to Great Retention by devising ways to recruit talents who share your purpose and encourage them to commit their time and skill to your company for the long haul.

Conclusion

Businesses and companies will have to compete for the top talent as the large talent movement is expected to continue over the next year or more. Good thing LinkedIn offers several solutions that can assist your company at every stage of the process of attracting and retaining top talent, from prospect to applicant to a new hire.

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LinkedIn

The 10 Most Popular LinkedIn Features for Sales Professionals

The sales environment has been changed by social selling, which has made it simpler than ever to engage with prospects and uncover leads organically. LinkedIn has long been a popular and successful platform to identify and nurture sales prospects since it is the common social media site for networking opportunities and partnerships.

Many LinkedIn features are aimed at helping you save time, build your network, and achieve your business objectives. Here are several LinkedIn features you may not be aware of that might help you increase your business revenue.

What are the hottest LinkedIn features I should use as a sales professional?

Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales teams, even more, control over how they find prospects and manage their pipelines. It’s a sales management tool that aims to make it easier for sellers to connect to LinkedIn’s vast network and, as a result, secure more (and better) transactions.

Members can get access to monthly InMail messages, stored leads, sophisticated lead and company searches, and custom lists. Alerts for leads and accounts, as well as notes and tags, may also be utilized.

These make it simpler to manage sales pipelines and guarantee nothing goes through the cracks.

Shared Experiences and Commonalities

Users can already store leads in Sales Navigator, but the “Share experiences with you” feature makes it simpler to find possibilities inside that database. By bringing together all the potential clients who have at least one thing in common with you, the feature gives you a great base for building trust and rapport.

When you contact out, highlighting this point of commonality will increase your odds of getting a reply.

Account and lead suggestions

With automated lead and account suggestions, LinkedIn can help sales teams maintain their pipeline filled.  Sellers should use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Sales Preferences feature to ensure that their suggestions are as near to their buyer profiles as possible. Location, industry, role, and seniority level may be among these factors.

Showcase pages

Showcase pages on LinkedIn are an excellent approach to categorizing your incoming LinkedIn visitors. Developing a Showcase page can greatly assist you in creating a business unit that is closely connected to a specific audience

As a company, you can use this feature to target distinct buyer personas by creating single pages dedicated to certain items, product offerings, and services.

Users may also follow individual Showcase pages without needing to follow the company’s primary page or any of its other Showcase pages on LinkedIn. You may also alter the page based on the actions and interests of that specific audience.

These were created specifically for B2B businesses to help them generate more leads.

Save the results of your searches

Do you spend much time on LinkedIn looking for prospects, articles, or courses? You should save your results in case you want to come back to them later.

You may keep their searches, articles, and learning programs on LinkedIn. The stored things are listed under “My items” on your profile.

You can also use this LinkedIn function to get weekly or monthly email alerts whenever a new user of the network or a job meets your stored search criteria.

Advanced Search Option

LinkedIn Advanced Search Option

The Advanced Search Option gives you a more efficient search experience. It’s the most effective technique to locate and contact someone as part of a focused search.

You could wish to discover if you’re related to someone who works at a certain business, for example. You may also refine your search by region, industry, prior employer, school, profile language, and interest in nonprofits.

LinkedIn Education

LinkedIn provides several excellent courses that may assist anyone in developing important skills. Individually, you may utilize LinkedIn Learning to develop your business or selling abilities, or you can purchase courses for your revenue team.

Live on LinkedIn

Livestreaming has exploded in popularity across a variety of social media platforms. Even though LinkedIn has this feature, few businesses use it as part of their content promotional campaign.

LinkedIn Polls

LinkedIn now has a tool that allows you to build polls that your audience may participate in. This is a fantastic approach to increase immediate interaction while also learning more about your contacts. You may utilize LinkedIn polls to pose lighthearted, hypothetical questions to engage your audience.

Before this new option, if you wanted to share a sequence of photos in a post organically, you had to publish them as a gallery, which was difficult to manage. You may now share a multi-page PDF document and have it displayed as a scrollable carousel on the platform. This approach makes telling a clear, compelling tale or collection of suggestions a lot simpler.

Conclusion

LinkedIn, like any other network, is always experimenting and developing new features. While these LinkedIn features aren’t as well-known, they may be game-changers if used correctly.

These LinkedIn features are the ultimate hack to LinkedIn success, whether it’s driving more traffic, increasing exposure, or even generating viral branding. LinkedIn analytics tools may also be used to boost social media metrics such as engagement, impressions, and followers.

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LinkedIn

How Can You Fully Utilize Your LinkedIn Sales Navigator Investment?

With nearly 800 million members worldwide, LinkedIn’s status as the world’s largest professional social network is indisputable. Though LinkedIn gained popularity as a way for job seekers to connect with hiring scouts and get potential recommendations, it has also become an international hub where global professionals can expand their networks and form industry-shaping connections. As time went on, sales professionals learned to leverage the platform to improve their bottom line.

With an ever-climbing percentage of companies using LinkedIn for sales and networking, can your organization keep up in today’s increasingly competitive social selling environment? To own your place in the digital sales ecosystem, you need to be serious about your LinkedIn strategy–starting with your usage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

All About LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The free version of LinkedIn can be used by any member of any company to find leads, reach out to prospects, and close deals. However, its capabilities are severely limited. If you want to take full advantage of what LinkedIn can do for your revenue, you should invest in Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s roster of features is specially developed with sales professionals in mind. It allows users to search and reach out to more leads and companies, keep track of changes within your prospect accounts, and engage with your network in bold and different ways. 

The most popular function of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is probably Advanced Search, which makes prospecting on the platform a breeze. There are over 20 filters you can apply to narrow down your search to get the most promising leads. You can also perform boolean searches in keywords, title, and company fields, allowing you to find the people who fit your ideal customer profile to a T.

Let’s take a look at some other features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

  • LinkedIn InMail: InMail is an incredibly useful tool for any sales professional, but it’s not available on the free version of the service. However, the basic version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes with 20 InMails per month. The Team and Enterprise tiers of Sales Navigator add even more opportunities to reach out, giving you up to 50 InMails per month. The more InMails you can send, the more potential first connections you can make with prospects of interest. 

  • Extended Network Access: The free version of LinkedIn imposes a monthly commercial use limit on the amount and extent of the searches you can run. Only being able to search a limited number of profiles every 30 days can seriously impede your ability to generate leads and follow up with potential prospects. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales professionals access to an unlimited number of profiles, increasing your potential to generate new leads. You can also save your searches and create alerts to keep track of any changes within your target accounts.

  • Integration with your sales tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed to integrate seamlessly with your revenue team’s daily sales and relationship workflow. That’s why it has certified integrations with the most popular CRMs in the market, including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle CX Sales, Pega, SAP, and SugarCRM. You can access Sales Navigator as a viewable embedded profile within your CRM, or you can actively sync it with your existing software to efficiently move important data like leads and accounts from one platform to another.

Given all these benefits, you might think that the next logical step is to get Sales Navigator accounts for your entire revenue team. Let’s get one thing clear: Sales Navigator is absolutely worth it—but only if your team knows how to properly use it.

What You Should Consider Before Investing In LinkedIn Sales Navigator

 Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth investing in? All signs point to “yes.”

According to data that LinkedIn has gathered from usage reporting, Sales Navigator users have reported experiencing the following benefits:

In an industry where connections are so powerful, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a worthwhile investment that can maximize your potential for lead generation. If used correctly, there is no doubt that this purchase can make your company’s sales strategy skyrocket in terms of efficiency. 

But just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you should buy it for your whole team.

Process Before Platform

A lot of sellers would ask us if they should invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts for their entire revenue teams. Would it be a worthwhile investment, or would a mix of free and premium accounts make more sense?

The answer will depend on your organization’s unique situation. The key, says our CEO Jamie Shanks, is to remember that your process should dictate your platform.

“If your team does not have a process for using the tool, it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to have terrible seller utilization,” says Shanks.

He compares it to giving a sports car to every member of his team because they all need to get to work early, only to find out that not everyone can maximize it. Some people use different forms of transportation, so they can’t take full advantage of the car. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who can’t even drive in the first place, rendering the car useless.

“If your own team is not socially surrounding your customers, not developing robust social networks, and not altering their own social platform profiles, then what is Sales Navigator going to offer them from an account-based sales development standpoint?” asks Shanks.

“Yes, you can organize accounts and create lists and save these lists in more structured ways, but if they can’t do the fundamentals…why do you need to give them a Porsche?”

That said, Shanks’ advice is to give Sales Navigator access to only the sellers who can really maximize the platform: your business development representatives and your key account executives with robust total addressable markets (TAM). Sales Navigator will allow them to efficiently analyze, segment, and contact the most qualified leads to speed up their sales process.

Conclusion

Always remember that an effective sales process is the key to maximizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Getting the most out of this investment is a whole process that requires dedication, attentiveness, and a perceptive eye for sales opportunities.

Sales Navigator offers tremendous opportunities for prospecting, so don’t be afraid to integrate it as tightly as possible with your existing sales strategy. When your sales goals are properly defined and aligned with your strategy and tools, your sellers can propel your company onto the top of the market.

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LinkedIn

How To Create Better LinkedIn Message Ads

At its core, social selling is about building relationships and helping others. You need to convey empathy, interest in collaboration, and a problem-solving mindset—and these characteristics can be reflected via LinkedIn and its message service, LinkedIn Message Ads (formerly known as Sponsored InMail).

What are LinkedIn Message Ads?

As most professionals know, LinkedIn is one of the best places to connect with other people in your industry. An active and helpful presence on LinkedIn can help you gain familiarity among B2B buyers, making it a goldmine whether you’re trying to expand your reach or generate new leads. It also helps that the platform provides plenty of tools to make your sales activities even easier.

One such tool is LinkedIn sponsored InMail, which has since been rebranded into LinkedIn Message Ads. Message Ads allow users to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action. The service offers users a means to reach out to potential buyers outside their network and capitalize on opportunities. It’s a great way to reach industry experts and generate new leads, making it an indispensable communication channel for B2B sellers. 

There are three main reasons why LinkedIn Message Ads work:

  1. It delivers a targeted message with a single CTA: The straightforward, no-fuss layout allows you to communicate clearly and effectively with your prospects without worrying about character limits or broken email layouts. 
  2. It lets you see the impact of your messages: LinkedIn Message Ads, like any other digital ad platform, offers analytics to keep track of ad performance. Users can track campaign metrics such as sends, opens, open rate, clicks, clickthrough rate, cost per lead, and more.
  3. It drives stronger engagement compared to traditional emails: Message Ads are prioritized in the recipient’s inbox. They are highlighted and delivered in an uncluttered environment so your brand stands out. According to LinkedIn, more than 1 in 2 prospects open a Message Ad—and that’s a huge statistic.

Email vs InMail 

We often get asked if LinkedIn InMail should or has replaced email as the most effective communication medium for B2B sales. For certain buyers, certain markets, and certain companies, this is definitely the case. 

One of the biggest problems with sales prospecting emails is that they often arrive in your inbox from out of nowhere, with generic messaging that bears minimal relevance or value to the recipient. And since they are unsolicited (not to mention usually part of a sequence), they tend to be more annoying.

On the other hand, Message Ads are exchanged on a platform that your prospects are already using to converse and network professionally. The relevance and purpose are built-in. Plus, they can see your name and face and can click on your profile to learn more about you.

In an impersonal world of digital interactions, this goes a long way.

Another thing that makes LinkedIn Message Ads better than email can be attributed to the principle of double potency. When someone sends you a message on LinkedIn, you’ll also get an alert in the email connected to your LinkedIn account. The sender hits you in two spots because you’ll see the message in both your LinkedIn inbox and your email, increasing your awareness of the message.

Making Your Message Ads More Potent

how to send better LinkedIn Message Ads

Before you fire off another LinkedIn message, be mindful of the best practices you should follow in order to maximize the impact your message will make.  

  • Consider your first message to be a conversation starter. Don’t sell your service immediately at the first point of contact—that’s too much, too soon. Use the platform to build a relationship with your prospect the same way you would do so in a non-virtual world: By offering them something that will help them in their professional lives. This is the most natural way to get the recipient to warm up to you and your company.
  • Be brief and to the point. Keep your messages as simple as possible. The decision-makers who’ll be reading your messages (probably on their phones) don’t have the time to read too-wordy messages. Optimize your messages for mobile, try to limit the word count to around 100 words (less is best), use bullet points and short paragraphs to keep the reader’s attention, and have a written CTA.

    The same logic goes for the subject line. Keep your subject lines short and personal—aim for 5 words or less
  • Adopt a conversational, enthusiastic tone. It’s tempting to use a formal, overly polite tone when conversing on LinkedIn—you’re representing your company on the platform, after all. Shouldn’t you put your best foot forward?

    However, it’s highly recommended to keep your LinkedIn messages polite yet informal. Your recipient shouldn’t get bored while reading about the benefits of your products or services, and a soulless message that reads like a formal introduction can drive them away.
  • No credits, no problem: You don’t always need to buy more Message Ad credits to be able to send messages to the people you need to sell to. By joining the LinkedIn groups where your ideal customer profiles (ICPs) can be found, you’ll have access to everyone within those groups and you can send them messages for free.

Conclusion

LinkedIn’s promoted message service allows you to easily reach out to leads within your ICP, making it a B2B seller’s best friend. But if you don’t use it well, you’ll end up being ignored by potential leads, wasting time and money.

Take the time to build a worthwhile campaign. Craft messages that resonate with your audience, optimize them for maximum impact, and use the platform’s analytics tools to track your results.

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Blog LinkedIn Social Selling

LinkedIn for Sales: 4 Tips to Build Your LinkedIn Network

Modern problems require modern solutions. If we’ve learned anything from the past year, many professionals, especially salespeople, are pondering how to increase their LinkedIn connections and whether they are doing everything they can to improve their profile.

The fact is, LinkedIn can help you attract new business prospects, keep you in front of existing clients and vendors, generate more introductions and referrals, receive invitations to speak at events or conferences, among other things.

But having a savvy LinkedIn network doesn’t just occur naturally. Despite LinkedIn’s best efforts to assist you in developing a smart network, you must still do your part to generate relevant and meaningful relationships.

Here are 4 tips on how to build your LinkedIn Network:

1. Treat LinkedIn as a Primary Channel to Gain Connection

Many salespeople today regard LinkedIn as a mere secondary tool for business growth and sales efforts. That is simply not a good idea.

You don’t want to wait to speak with someone on the phone or send them an email before connecting with them on LinkedIn. Instead, you must begin considering LinkedIn as a primary channel through which you want to make connections and build confidence before returning to the phone and email.

You’re effectively spreading your sphere of influence by engaging with folks on LinkedIn. When you connect with additional individuals on LinkedIn, particularly those with whom you’d like to conduct business in the future or with whom you already do business, you’re slowly but steadily influencing them by sharing your ideas, insights, and education.

The whole point of trying to expand your LinkedIn network is to share your ideas on a broader scale.

And that’s something that current salespeople have never had before. You can certainly achieve that level of scale via social media sites.

2. Set a Target for the Expansion of your LinkedIn Connections

In addition, modern salespeople should consider how many LinkedIn connections are reasonable and how many they should have.

According to LinkedIn data, the average salesperson still only keeps one to three contacts in a single account.

This needs to change.

The fact is, to make the most of an account, you’ll need an average of eight individuals or relationships because that’s the number of people who are currently actively contributing to a buying decision.

In today’s world, a purchase decision is made by an average of eight persons.

You don’t have to get them all right away. But set a goal and a deadline for yourself. For example, let’s assume you set a goal of connecting with or sending at least three connection requests on LinkedIn every day, and you give yourself one quarter, maybe two quarters, to achieve that objective.

More contacts or stakeholder connections in an account boost your prospects of renewals and expanding business because the more contacts you have, the more sales interactions you’ll get.

But you must go out there and find people in all of the major accounts, connect with them, and start having discussions with them carefully and with intention. Do that, and establish a goal of increasing your network size with critical people in accounts by at least three people every single day. If you do that, your renewals will appreciate you.

3. Customize your LinkedIn Connection Message

Now that we’ve demonstrated the need to build your network consistently, we must consider connecting with people on LinkedIn effectively. For example, how can you persuade them to approve your request for a connection?

Never send someone a blind connection request.

On LinkedIn, you may just click the connect icon and send a request to anyone. Unfortunately, most people who receive connection requests like that on the site will simply ignore you.

Sending customized messages is what you should do instead. There are two rules that you should follow when creating those messages.

  1. Give Them a Good Reason to Connect
    Offer to learn from that individual. Don’t just say you’d want to connect with them for this or that reason and then proceed to your sales pitch. Instead, mention that you’re hoping to interact with industry thought leaders so you may learn more from them and expand your skillset. Find your own words—no need to be too fancy.
  2. Offer Them Value in Exchange
    Second, keep your message humble. Offering to be a resource for them is a terrific way to do this. When you message someone, they’re giving up something like their privacy or inbox space by engaging with you. As a result, offer to be a resource for them in exchange. Let them know that you, too, have unique information and specific knowledge that they can tap into and that you’re willing to offer it.

Your chances of connecting with more individuals on LinkedIn will naturally increase as a result of these strategies. And whether you want to connect with CEOs, critical people who are managers or directors, or anyone in between, this is a great approach to expand your LinkedIn network.

4. Take Advantage of the “Executive Network Effect”

Finally, make it possible for salespeople in your company to connect with you and make your profile and network visible to them.

Allow your team to assess who in your network is worth meeting for them to utilize you and an introduction from you to go out and start a sales conversation.

This phenomenon is called the Executive Network Effect. Every organization that does it sees an immediate rise in sales opportunities, and they do it regularly as part of their strategy of identifying future opportunities and prioritizing them.

Interested in learning more tips on how to use LinkedIn for Social Selling? Read The Ultimate Guide to Social Selling now.

These simple steps will help you expand your network on LinkedIn. They do not only increase the likelihood that a contact will do business with you, but an expansive network will also allow other industry insiders to see your profile and consider you as a business connection.

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Blog LinkedIn Social Selling

12 Hacks To Increase Your LinkedIn SSI Score

While there are opinions around the validity of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) Score, I can definitively say my SSI accurately reflects my progression as a social seller. I am now at the point where I’m growing my network rapidly, connecting with the right people, and creating new opportunities from social on a weekly basis. In fact, since I began my social selling journey at Sales for Life, my LinkedIn SSI Score has gone from 63 all the way to 96!

But why is your LinkedIn SSI score so important in the first place?

What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score?

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Blog digital sales campaign growth strategies LinkedIn sales performance sales-leaders

3 Tactical Plays Every Sales Leader Needs to Run to Crush 2019

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b2b marketing Blog Develop Sales increase sales leads LinkedIn marketers marketing tips Sales Sales Advice Sales and Marketing sales for life sales transformation salespeople Social Selling

Why do Sellers Lose Key Accounts?

One of the worst nightmares faced by sellers in B2B sales is when a key account goes from an active stage to a closed stage, in other words when it is lost to a competitor.

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Artificial Intelligence Blog LinkedIn market intelligence Marketing Management Technology

FREE Data & Market Intelligence tools to prepare your sales engagement

Buyer hate when you begin a discovery call asking them a series of questions that’s CLEARLY available information in the public domain.This constant eye-rolling scenario is played out countless times a day.The seller acquires knowledge, but the customer gets nothing out of the 30 minute call.