LinkedIn has become the place to network with professionals online. There is no doubt about this, and over 200 million profiles later, we all agree that networking with like-minded people has reached entirely new heights.
As a result, hundreds of training organizations worldwide teach valuable skills on how to use LinkedIn effectively as a search engine. Doing a simple Google search on LinkedIn training reveals this. Teaching the ins and outs of the tool is an important service and one that can aid in using the tool with efficiency.
That said, LinkedIn training does not equate to Social Selling.
Only a few elite organizations can claim that they teach a proven and tested methodology for filling the top of your sales funnel using social media channels. Imagine having Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) filling your funnel on a daily basis. Sounds too good to be true, right? Social Selling delivers on this vision. Prospects raise their hands and indicate that they would like to learn more about your products and services. You just have to be there to see it through.
By learning how to take advantage of the inherent sales platform that LinkedIn has become, sales professionals can now begin to add value to interested individuals as early and as often as they like. Clearly, this is very different than just learning how to use LinkedIn.
Our clients routinely share success stories with us about how net new meetings are generated within days of learning our tactics. Social selling using LinkedIn helps these organizations generate more meetings than ever before each month. They’ve learned to use their Sphere of Influence, identify solid trigger events, use competitive intelligence, and more, in such a way that makes them deadly in any vertical or market.
The Bottom Line
Should you learn to use LinkedIn for all that it has to offer? Absolutely. Will it help you in your sales efforts by filling your pipeline with qualified prospects? Most likely not.
Your ability to use LinkedIn effectively is important, but the biggest return on your time will come when you discover how it can help in your daily sales efforts. With repeated practice, one can perfect the art of the Triple Right: sharing the right information with the right people at the right time. This will make all the difference in being able to find prospects and deals that you may never have known about before.
If you’d like to learn more about how to start generating more meetings today, our hotly downloaded 42 LinkedIn Tips teaches proven methods which you can start to use today. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me by booking a meeting below.
