PROSPECTING ON LINKEDIN
Imagine a Rolodex with more than 500 million names at your fingertips. In addition to the names of the top business professionals in the world, you have a list of the employees of every major business segmented by the companies they work for. You have access to the top employees of such companies as Google, Facebook, IBM, Costco, Target, and every other Fortune 500 company. If you don’t sell to large companies, you have access to thousands of small and medium-sized businesses instead. You even have access to consultants, coaches, and other solopreneurs who are members of LinkedIn.
Never before has prospecting been so easy for a salesperson. In the past, you would have to purchase lists from list brokers and cold-call hundreds or thousands of people. Most of the time you reached a gatekeeper and spent countless hours on the phone trying to get five minutes of the decision-maker’s time to persuade them to meet with you for 15 minutes.
If you weren’t buying lists, you were scouring the phone book or business directories, looking for the contact numbers of your target businesses. Prospecting was a lot of work and not for the faint of heart. You were essentially a telemarketer with a 99 percent rejection rate when you reached out to prospects.
LinkedIn makes prospecting a lot easier. Using the Advanced Search features, you can find your target audience in seconds. Advanced Search is a fantastic tool, but there are even more ways to find new prospects on LinkedIn. By learning how to use other tools like publishing and Groups, you’ll learn your prospects’ frustrations and hot buttons so you’ll know exactly how to approach them and get their attention.
The key to successfully prospecting on LinkedIn is to network the same way you do in person. Listen before you talk. Get to know someone who is struggling or frustrated and could benefit from your product or service. You’ll know how to approach them with your solution when the time is right. The key is to stay in the background and observe before reaching out.
Prospecting in LinkedIn Groups
You can use Groups to find prospects because they have discussion boards where people reach out for support. The discussion boards in Groups are similar to the now-defunct LinkedIn Answers, but the discussions are more focused. Since Groups are often dedicated to companies or specific products made by a company, the questions and discussions go much deeper.
For example, someone might ask a basic question about Photoshop on a marketing-related Group, such as “How do I crop a photo in Photoshop?” However, if you join the Photoshop Group, the questions will be about the more advanced features of Photoshop, and the answers will be very detailed. You may get three or four great answers that show you how to accomplish the same task using different techniques. A typical question in that Group might be something like: “JPG and RAW, of course we all know the advantages of RAW. Is there anyone out there who will still use JPG format for professional work?” This question received 251 comments in one month—with many varying opinions—and continued without any signs of slowing down. You see active discussions like this frequently on the Groups focused on specialties and specific products. I highly recommend joining the Groups related to your product, industry, and the vertical markets that use your product or service so you can get a bird’s-eye view of what people in your industry are talking about.
You can also learn about industry trends and your competitors’ advances in Groups. Companies often use LinkedIn Groups to announce new products and services and to gather feedback from customers by conducting surveys. LinkedIn no longer uses its Polls feature, but you can post a question and lead people to an external survey tool like SurveyMonkey.
The same prospecting rules apply here as when networking in person. Be genuinely interested in helping others, and spend time listening to their issues before you reach out. You can also monitor the Groups to find top professionals in your industry. If you notice a certain person reaching out consistently and providing excellent advice, you can contact that person to see if they want to connect on LinkedIn. If they are located in your area, you could invite them to meet for coffee or lunch to talk about industry trends or to see if they want to join a local networking group you belong to. Building relationships with other experts helps extend your professional network, which will help you gain more sales.
LINKEDIN COMPANY GROUPS
In addition to Groups related to specific topics and products, most companies have Groups dedicated to the company along with their company page, so join both if you can. You can learn a lot about your competitors, your industry, and the vertical markets where your product or service is used. People always ask me if it’s appropriate to join your competitors’ Group. Now that all requests to join a Group must be approved by the manager, they will deny our membership request if they are paying attention. Occasionally, you can slip through the cracks, and they will grant you access. If that happens, I recommend being a silent participant and just observing so you can learn as much as possible about the issues your competitors are having with their products or services. You can use this when selling against your competitors, which gives you a huge advantage. If you start participating in discussions, they will become aware that you are a competitor and will remove you from the Group.
You should be able to join industry-related Groups and vertical market Groups without difficulty. If you aren’t monitoring those Groups, you are missing out on a lot of relevant discussions that will help you discover potential sales opportunities. Remember, LinkedIn is one of the largest business intelligence databases available to you, so use it to your advantage to gather competitive information.
LinkedIn Pages
I’ve already mentioned LinkedIn Pages several times, but it’s worth noting that you can use them as much for sales goals as for personal or hiring tasks. LinkedIn lets you “follow” companies similar to how you can “like” a company page on Facebook. Once you follow a company on LinkedIn, anything it posts on its company page will be visible on your newsfeed. This is an easy way for you to monitor prospective companies (and your competitors) to learn about new product announcements and other news. If one of your prospective companies hires a new CIO, it may be a perfect opportunity to get your foot in the door because that often means a clean slate, open to new vendors.
You can also monitor their LinkedIn Page to see what job openings they have. If you see a lot of new job openings or promotions in a certain department, it may be a great time to test the waters, as the company and the new hires might be looking for new products or services.
You can infer a ton of great information from LinkedIn Pages, if you take the time to dig into the job postings, news items, and new product announcements with a sales-oriented set of goals in mind.
LinkedIn Jobs
I touched on this in the previous section, but you can learn a lot about a company’s strategic direction by monitoring their job postings. You know your target companies and perhaps even their key decision-makers. Spend a few hours a week (or have your assistant do it) monitoring their job postings. Use the Advanced Job Search feature to home in on the current job openings in the departments you sell to. When you see new job postings for key positions or a lot of listings for similar positions, it’s a sign that you may have an opportunity to sell. If they are suddenly hiring 50 new C++ programmers, there must be a huge new product being developed that could mean a big opportunity for you. With a Sales Navigator account, you can save your search criteria in Saved Searches so you can easily replicate your best searches on a regular basis.
LinkedIn Newsfeed
The newsfeed is where you can subscribe to popular news sources such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and industry-specific news. You can also follow LinkedIn Influencers, who frequently post industry-related articles. I never logged into LinkedIn on a daily basis until it added features like Pulse, which has now evolved into the newsfeed. Now I can see the latest industry and financial news and keep up with my professional network from my LinkedIn homepage.
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p; I use the newsfeed to learn about the latest trends in my industry and business news in general. When I see a breaking news item, I add my commentary and share it with my network, which makes them think of me as a trusted source of information. When I regularly share other people’s content, they subconsciously associate me with those people.
LinkedIn Mobile
The LinkedIn mobile app has improved dramatically since it was initially released, as I discussed in Chapter 16. The app lets you easily access your LinkedIn account from your cell phone. Before you meet with a prospect in person, you can quickly review their profile, see the latest news from their company page, and check the latest industry news just before the meeting by searching for content in your newsfeed. You will be well prepared and make a good impression.
Using LinkedIn Ads
You will learn everything you need to know about LinkedIn advertising in Chapter 20, so I won’t go into great detail here. But I do want you to know that you can run very targeted ads to promote your business brand and advertise white papers, webinars, videos, and workshops for lead generation. The advanced targeting ability of LinkedIn advertising makes it one of the most efficient advertising platforms online today. Your ads will only be displayed to the appropriate companies, industries, job titles, and keywords, as well as many other advanced targeting options.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Of course, LinkedIn provides premium packages designed for business professionals and sales representatives. These are designed to help you generate leads and manage your LinkedIn network. Figure 18–3 on page 209 shows you the features and pricing of the different Sales Navigator packages. I will talk about Sales Navigator in detail in the next chapter.
InMail
I’ve talked about the pros and cons of InMail throughout this book, so I won’t get into the details here. In Chapter 12, you can learn how to use InMail to effectively reach out to your 2nd- and 3rd-degree connections. With Premium Business or Sales Navigator, you can send up to 30 InMails every month, depending on which package you choose. There are many ways to connect with others without using InMail, but sometimes it’s easier and faster to just contact them directly via a personalized InMail message.
Premium Business Account
A LinkedIn Premium account offers you significantly more features than a free account. LinkedIn Premium offers two tiers of service, Premium Business and Executive. With Premium Business you receive 15 InMail messages every month and you receive 30 monthly InMail messages with the Executive account. Business Insights show you detailed demographics about a company including their growth rate and hiring patterns. With your premium account, you also receive full access to the training courses on LinkedIn Learning.
FIGURE 18–3. Premium Packages for Sales Professionals
One of my favorite premium tools is Who’s Viewed Your Profile which I describe in detail below.
Figure 18–4 on page 210 shows you the other options you will receive with the LinkedIn Premium account.
As you can see, it’s worth upgrading to LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator just for the additional prospecting tools. Being able to filter and save your searches will save you time and provide more targeted leads.
Who’s Viewed Your Profile
This vital feature lets you see who’s been viewing your profile, which can tip you off to potential customers. As you participate in Groups and establish yourself as a subject-matter expert, people will click on your profile link to learn more about you. This simple act is better than if they opted in on your website to download a white paper. You’ll find out a lot more about a potential client from their LinkedIn profile than you would from the name and email address they provided when they opted in on your site.
FIGURE 18–4. LinkedIn Premium Account Options
More Monthly Searches
I touched on this feature of premium accounts earlier. With a free LinkedIn account you are limited to an unspecified number of searches per month. Nobody knows the exact limit, but some of my clients say it’s around 50 per month. With a LinkedIn Premium account, you have no limits.
Let Anyone Message You for Free with Open Profile
You are on LinkedIn to connect with as many prospects and customers as possible. Some people lock down their profiles so it’s almost impossible to connect with them, but this completely defeats the purpose of being on a business networking site. As you know, I’m all about opening up my profile so it’s easy for people to connect with me and see that I’m an expert in my field. When you get any of the premium subscriptions, you can enable Open Profile, which allows anyone on LinkedIn to send you a message. If you start getting too many unsolicited messages from people you don’t want to connect with, you can disable it at any time. I only receive a few messages a month, and most are relevant opportunities. Remember, LinkedIn is a higher-quality network than most online networking websites, so you don’t have to worry about being bombarded with spam.
CONCLUSION
LinkedIn offers many free and paid subscription levels. If you are in sales and serious about surpassing your numbers every month, you need to invest in Sales Navigator to get the most out of LinkedIn. As the site continues to grow at a staggering rate, you will need as many automated tools as possible to help you track down qualified leads. The premium accounts are worth the nominal fee, and your ROI will be exponential.
In the next chapter, we’ll explore Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s flagship product for sales professionals, in detail. It is a hugely useful tool and has enough moving parts that I wanted to showcase it in its own chapter so you can dig deeply into how it works.
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Chapter 19
Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn on steroids: a completely separate application designed to meet salespeople’s needs. Subscriptions range from $64.99 per month for an annual personal subscription to $99.99 per month for an annual team subscription. Some people balk at the price, but even at $1,200 a year, unrestricted access to the entire LinkedIn membership and specialized tools for prospecting and follow-up make it worth the money. Bluntly, if you can’t earn at least $1,200 a year from your LinkedIn network, you are in the wrong job.
The heart of Sales Navigator is its advanced search engine, with detailed filters that let you pinpoint your ideal prospects. You can search for leads or for accounts. Figure 19–1 on page 214 shows you the multiple lead search filters available when you do an advanced search. These are the most popular search fields that will help you find an unlimited stream of prospects for your products and services.
To save time, you can set up your sales preferences, or default search settings, under your Sales Navigator Settings. You can set geography, industry, company size, function, and seniority level, as shown in Figure 19–2 on page 215.
Think of sales preferences as your starting point when you are prospecting. They should include the characteristics of your top customers. Once you have created advanced searches that are reliably finding great prospects, you can save them so they are running 24/7. You can be notified of new leads daily, weekly, or monthly, or you can manually check for new leads from those searches.
FIGURE 19–1. Advanced Lead Search Filters
As you scroll through your list of search results, you have a few options. You can:
■ Save. This lets you monitor a person to see how active they are on LinkedIn and get notified when they post or share content. You can send them a message without being a 1st-degree connection or using InMail. You can also save their company as an account lead.
■ Connect. Use this to send the person a personalized invitation to connect on LinkedIn.
■ View Profile. You can view their profile to see if they are a good fit for your network.
■ View Similar. LinkedIn’s algorithm will show you 99 other professionals who are similar to the person you are looking at. This is a very p
owerful feature.
FIGURE 19–2. Defining Your Sales Preferences
■ Add Tag. You can flag a prospect using preselected categories like Follow-up, Customer, or Decision Maker, or you can create your own tags like Cold, Warm, or Hot leads.
■ Message. You can send a message without using InMail, even if you aren’t connected. This is a huge benefit of subscribing to Sales Navigator.
Once you’ve started growing your sales funnel, it’s time to spark up some friendly conversations with your prospects and begin building relationships. I prefer the slow and steady approach, but I’ll leave it to you to decide how aggressively you want to move them through your sales funnel. Over the years, it has worked better to slowly build trust through short interactions before engaging in sales conversations. I have many long-term customers and repeat buyers who love to refer me to their networks because I’ve earned their trust over time.
ENGAGING YOUR LEADS AND CONNECTIONS
Now that you are following some leads, Sales Navigator will give you a lot of great information about their LinkedIn activity. Figure 19–3 on page 216 shows you information about the people in your network. As you can see, 755 people in my 1st-degree network changed jobs in the past 90 days. This gives me an opportunity to congratulate them and start a conversation. I could ask them about their new roles, which might lead to an opportunity to help them as a consultant as they are getting established in their new positions.
FIGURE 19–3. Engaging Your Network
Forty-five people have been mentioned in the news in the past 30 days. This is another opportunity for me to congratulate them. More than 6,000 posted on LinkedIn in the past 30 days, so I can view their posts and be one of the first to like, comment on, or share their content. I’m always looking for ways to start conversations on LinkedIn, and Sales Navigator offers ways for me to reengage my connections or prospects.
Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business Page 19