LinkedIn Can Be Your Best Friend

LinkedIn is a powerful tool that you can use in order to improve the sales of your business. It is a social network for salespeople and business owners. Some people use it to find employees, but it can also be used in order to streamline your sales method. The first part of taking advantage of this process is making sure that you understand who your customers are and what type of mindset they have. With that in mind, here are 5 sales tips that you can use in order to take advantage of LinkedIn.

1. Create a Clear Profile

It is surprising how common it is to find profiles that don’t really explain what a company even does. More than boasting about the benefits of any particular company, a LinkedIn profile should make it clear what service it provides to its clients or customers. It should go on to explain what results you can provide for your clients, and how things will improve for them if they work with you rather than somebody else or nobody at all.

2. Do Your Research

With LinkedIn, you have access to all of the information that you need in order to find the right person to get in touch with. It makes it possible for you to know everything that you need to in order to have a good business relationship before you even begin speaking with them. All of this makes it much simpler for your first sales call to go much more smoothly than it otherwise would.

3. Build Lasting Relationships

This is one of the sales tips that often goes ignored, but it is perhaps the most important. In order for a company like LinkedIn to be useful for you, you absolutely must use it on a regular basis. It is a good idea to use the system for about twenty minutes every day, keeping in touch with your business contacts. This ensures that your clients and business contacts don’t forget about you, so that you will be one of the first people that they get in touch with if something comes up that you have the skills to help them with.

4. Write Recommendations

If you work with somebody and you feel that they were legitimately helpful, be sure to recommend them. If you already have a working relationship with somebody who has an account, offer to write them a recommendation as well. In many cases, you will get a recommendation in return.

5. Recommendations

It is also a good idea to request recommendations from clients. Don’t get pushy about it, just realize that most people don’t think to do it without some prompting.

Bettercloser.com - Social Selling Works

Social selling seems like a silly label to put on any sales concept. Any sales person’s natural reaction would be, “no kidding.” Many of your “fluff” meters just sounded the alarm. And my battle hardened sales folks reading this are about ready to move onto the next thing on their task list.

I ask you to stay with me two more minutes. I’ll be brief.

Social selling is a label I am increasingly fond of using. It’s growing on me. Here’s why…

Reminds Us What Really Lands Deals

I’m not sure where I heard it first (I think it was Jeffrey Gitomer), but it is so important to remember: “People don’t buy from companies they buy from people” and ultimately they buy from people they like.

Now I don’t know about you, but I don’t have too many friends on my Christmas card list that started our relationship with a cold call. However, I do have several friends on my list that I have bought things from.

The big point here is that most deals happen because there was some social aspect in the deal.

You’re coach Bob’s daughter in soccer, why wouldn’t he buy insurance from you. You met Sue at a conference and you are both passionate about the same charity, why wouldn’t she come to you for a new design on her blog. You sold David a network security software solution from your previous company (It protected them from a huge denial of service attack), why wouldn’t he come to you for network performance monitoring solution (even though you’re at a new company).

Is this making sense? Isn’t this how the best deals happen?

Makes Getting Started So Much Easier

Now granted, these kinds of scenarios aren’t enough to meet your monthly sales quota. They may not scale. But, maybe we can get close.

Today’s Web makes most people’s life more open. We’re sharing, collaborating, and asking questions all in a very free and trusting way. Sort of the same way that we do at a baseball game, a conference, a Rotary meeting, or when we have already been a customer.

This makes it a lot easier to get started on a sale. You can easily observe people you want to sell to: Learn what they like to do for fun, who they hang out with, how they like to communicate, what makes them upset, what makes them enthusiastic, and what you might be able to help them with now or in the future.

Do you see how you might be able to do this with most of your target accounts? Much more scale to this kind of online social selling, right? Don’t you think this will make the first contact much easier?

Dramatically Increases Our Referrals

Here’s the big deal. Some people on your target account list are just not going to be ready to buy, but they all have friends. If you do social selling right, not only will you be getting referrals from past and current clients–you will be getting referrals from prospects that fall out.

Try it. It’s amazing.

Here is a presentation I just gave on this topic. See if anything clicks.

Do you have any social selling success stories?

One of the biggest myths in blogging is that if you write great content audiences will flock to you. Wrong. Remember the old adage, “if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it…” That’s precisely what happens to a great blog without some promotion or visibility.

Now you could hope on Twitter and blast out your latest post everyday. You could confuse all your friends and family on Facebook with business posts, when they were looking for new pictures of little Bobby. However, let me tell you a little secret about growing a huge (relevant) audience for your own blog.

Go where the eyeballs already are and impress the heck out of them.

That’s right, guest posting is one of the leading ways top bloggers get there. Do you doubt the formula? Check out what used to get Chris Brogan excited. Here is the subtle irony—guess who is the big dog now—the host or the guest?

Okay, so I’ve made my case for what you should be doing as a business blogger to grow and maybe even one day make some money with all that blogging. But, there is one thing I failed to mention—sometime getting a shot at guest blogging is hard. The blog publisher is taking a risk on you with their readership.

Today is your lucky day!

My friends over at Bloggertone.com in partnership with BizSugar.com are giving you a shot at the big time. They are going to let you post on Bloggertone.com and promote on BizSugar.com—tens of thousands of eyeballs are going to focus on your best. All that for FREE.

Not to sound like an Infomercial, but I’ve got to say it…”Wait there’s more!”

They’re going to give tons of prizes to the best. $6921 in prizes to be exact! The best part is that even the prizes will help your business grow. Check these out:

• Lead Page Machine – a software to automatically generate squeeze pages so that you can use this to tailor your squeeze pages to specific audiences, to build your email subscribers and increase your sales conversions. Valued at: $5200
• Animoto – a year’s membership to this easy tool which creates videos from photos.  Valued at: $249
• Traction Call – a 45 minute call with the Traction Coach Gary Barnes to help you to quickly get some “sand under your wheels” so you can move forward toward the life you want to live. Valued at $175
• ClickMillionaires – 2 x 6-month membership to Scott Fox’s social network helping business owners upgrade their marketing to make more money online. Valued at $174
• 5 Critical Tactics for Business Blog Success – this CD and report by Denise Wakeman reveals how you can easily make your blog a winner. Valued at $97
• Start.Grow.Run – 8 x a software package with 45 essential tools and services for the 3 different phases of your business. Valued at $49.95 each
• Plus there are 2 books for both the winners of the Top 10 Titles and the Top 10 Commenters. And the books include:
• Wordtracker Masterclass: Blogging For Business – 50 Steps to Building Traffic and Sales by Chris Garrett. 5 books valued at $39 each
• Sociable by Shane Gibson & Stephan Jagger. 5 books valued at $25 each
• New Community Rules by Tamar Weinberg. 5 books valued at $16.49 each
• Guest Posting by Chris Garrett. 5 ebooks valued at $10 each

So, are you in? It’s easy to win…even if you don’t have the time to whip up a guest post you can do the next best thing—leave a pity comment and win too!

There’s really nothing more to think about. Not putting this on today’s TODO list is going to cost you money one way or another. Find out more and get started now—>Sugartone Sweet Business Blogging Contest.

P.S., You didn’t think I was going to sit on the sidelines did you? Check out my entry: 5 Ways Small is Beating Big for Flagship Clients.

Vote it up on BizSugar: http://www.bizsugar.com/sugartone/5-ways-small-is-beating-big-for-flagship-clients-|-sales/

Give me a ReTweet (copy & paste): RT @billrice 5 Ways Small is Beating Big for Flagship Clients | Sales http://bit.ly/9t2atg

P.S.S., I wouldn’t ask you to do something I wouldn’t do. Leave me a link to your article entry and I will do the same. That gives you another 6500+ eyeballs on Twitter. Why are you still here? Go submit your article!

Here is a huge advantage of social media I hadn’t really thought about—hiring people you already know. Finding the right talent to fill out your team has always been one of the biggest challenges of making a business successful. I have always believed that most of that challenge is in the vetting of good talent. It is really hard. Many companies spend tons of money on trying to get the process right. Most still fail.

This morning, into my RSS reader popped what I think is the perfect answer. It’s evolving right in front of our eyes—social media and networking. Jim Keenan, blogger at A Sales Guy, pointed out so clearly the HR benefit of getting engaged in social networking communities—hiring people we know.

Go take a look at his suggestions for where to plug-in for hiring.

I think everyone wants to work with or hire friends. Unfortunately, in the past our local (offline) social networks are not large enough to necessarily include the right talent. Social networks immediately solve this problem.

Are you using social media to not just vet new prospects, but actually hire people you know? Please leave some examples or explain how you use social media for HR.

I have long used FriendFeed as my “friend” filtered news. It is less noisy than my RSS reader and I have been used it not to build an audience, but rather a living newspaper.

Twitter on the other hand has always been my social selling tool. I mixed in personal and professional engagement to build a powerful business development environment and a great marketing audience.

However, all of that changed when FriendFeed made joining from Twitter a click of a button and then all of my Twitter audience literally flooded in.

This is going to require some rethinking of how I, and others are using FriendFeed. This seems to create almost a complete overlap of features and functionality. This yields several questions:

• Do you use one or the other; or continue with both?
• What is your “friending” strategy?
• How does this new change affect you business use?

Open Floor and Mic to Readers

I am just beginning to think about these changes. I would love to hear your viewpoints, observations, and strategies for FriendFeed and dealing with the new flood of users and subscribers. So, what do you think?

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• Use Google for Real-Time Web Search (labnol.org)
• Google Reader Still Trying To Figure Out This Whole Social Thing. Still Failing. (techcrunch.com)

This is a discussion I have been having with a lot of my friends in the online lead generation and B2B sales. The survival attitude is definitely in the air. My theory? That is the number one killer of businesses.

Back in in my Air Force days I went through SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) it taught me a lot about Survival, but what it really taught me was how to Escape. You see, we learned in Vietnam that Survival is a death march–the inspiration for the modern SERE training.

So, let’s tie it back to the current business and economic environment. There are too many people looking for ways to survive, instead of escaping. The result is a tightening spiral of failure.

Let’s see if we can find a productive path out of this conundrum.

Survival

Survival is about conserving resources, slowing your movement, and hoping no one notices that you are dying. Escaping is doing something about it!

Certainly a business runs on cash, but you will be amazed in this Web 2.0 what you can do for free. Are you buzzing through social media? Are you writing about solutions? Are your spitting out positive messages in a “doomed” world?

Evasion

Evasion is not about going unnoticed–it is about avoiding the crowd. Let me explain…

I will never forget one of my instructor’s sage advice during my training:

“People are inherently lazy, your enemy will hang out on roads and paths, not trek the terrain–stay away from roads!”

This is exactly what you should be doing. Make your own way and avoid the “death march,” down well traveled roads.

This concept is reinforced by one of my favorite creatives, Hugh MacLeod, in his seminal eBook–How to Be Creative:

“Don’t Try to Stand Out From the Crowd; Avoid Crowds Altogether.”

By the way, he has a book coming out, I can’t wait to get it: Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.

Resistance

This was my favorite part of SERE, both as a student and later as an instructor. Battling wits with a competitor is exhilarating and the feedback is dynamic. Like a game of chess, the moves may be finite and well defined, but the moment you put a couple of humans into the equation–nearly infinite permutations evolve.

Why is this important? Because the crowd, like an interrogator, will try to convince you to follow their lead. They will try to convince you that your thinking and actions are hopeless, dangerous, and doomed. Sound familiar? Read the newspaper (sorry those are going away)–Google News.

They are the interrogators telling you there is no good news.

Make your own good news. Resist the pull. Make your business give people what they want right now–hope! (Worked for Obama, right?)

Escape

This is the core of this post: Learn to make Escaping the objective, not Surviving.

Start thinking more, talking to smart people more, reading more–try a few innovative projects. Let your software engineers give a few of their passionate ideas a whirl, let the marketing folks get a little edgy, call a client you think you will never land.

Escaping is usually finding the simplest, smallest chink in the wall that can weaken the whole fortress.

Ask Bill Gates about a visual operating system, Marc Andresseen about browsing the Internet in a mouse driven world, Mark Cuban about broadcasting baseball games on the Web, Michael Dell about building custom computers, or Steve Jobs about a little hard drive that plays music through “white” headphones. All escapes from other dark and gloomy economic times.

Leave a comment below tell us what you are doing to Escape. Leave a link to your new Escaping Project. And, forward the post to someone that keeps trying to convince you to survive!

Also, since I am on a quest to talk to more smart people–follow me on Twitter: @billrice and lets chat.

P.S., Jay Weintraub thanks for the inspiration, the nudge, and the chat with a smart person.

Watching people in the news allows us to evaluate individuals on the merits of how they present themselves, what they say, and what they are “selling”. People may not be selling a product or a service to an end user, some may actually be selling themselves.

Because of this, we can garner important lessons for how we should, or should not, portray ourselves to clients in our own industry. Here are five people that are selling themselves, either in a good way or…well, not so good.

• Barack Obama– Senator Obama is, as they say, selling the dream. Substance–unimportant. Experience–unimportant. When you sell the dream to your clients, you are taking the focus away from yourself, away from the reality, and asking them to see the castles in their mind…and then buy those castles. Whipping clients into a frothy furor can be extremely effective. You are selling on top of someone’s already lofty expectations and simply helping them to believe it. Effective? It can be. Dangerous? Probably. Here’s why- let’s take selling a home, for instance. No one would say no to the house that is twice as large as the one they are getting, in a better neighborhood, has more amenities. So when you sell the dream, you take the risk of putting them out of their price range because no longer is your client dealing in reality, but rather they are dealing on hope. At best, your client’s chances of improving their financial situation to afford the “hope” are 50/50–a risky bet for you as a sales person.
• John McCain– Senator McCain is selling experience. Diametrically opposed to the previous sales strategy, this focuses completely on YOU. The intent of showing a client your experience is to remove all necessity of worry, concern, or fear about your decision. It is to say, “I have seen this before…follow me, and I can show you the right road to travel.” This is effective when you have the ability to back up your experience with fact and example. Selling insurance? Show your client examples of past clients that were worried or had trepidation about choosing whole vs term life and how your expert guidance paid off. This is a sales strategy that is high in risk/reward. If you can show your experience and communicate it effectively, the reward will be great. If you can’t, then there is no differentiation strategy and the sale is probably lost.
• Hillary Clinton– Senator Clinton is selling fear. While the Senator from New York is no longer in the race (maybe…not sure–I guess we have to wait for the convention), her campaign was focused on besmirching the competition and in some cases, fear-mongering. The purpose of a technique such as this is to drive the client away from the competitor, not necessarily to drive the client to YOU. While this can be effective when legitimate (“look–our competitor is struggling financially–I don’t want you to end up without long term support”), it is a risky gamble because it makes you look bitter without the ability to stand on the merits of your product. Not a recommended method if it isn’t coupled with a solid product differentiated on your part.
• John Edwards– Senator Edwards is (was) selling the lie. By far the riskiest move outlined because, as we know, it is a complete career ender. You may sell one, two, even a lot of deals based on a lie, but all it takes is one slip, one misstep, and your credibility is gone. There is no repeat business, there is only massive amounts of vitriol, anger, and mistrust. Find another profession once this happens to you because it is quite doubtful anyone will put you in the same position again. Ask some recently unemployed hedge fund managers.
• Bob Barr– Congressman Barr is selling the outsider. As a Libertarian, Barr is using a position of “outside the norm” to drive his sales. This can be effective when your product is significantly different than the typical choices (think Coke vs Pepsi). however, selling a product from this vantage point usually means you are in an underdog position and can be very difficult to carve out a slice of the market. In place of this strategy, it may sometimes be better to just sell the dream! (see Obama)

How you represent your product needs to align with your strategy in the market. Make sure it’s the right strategy so you don’t end up on the outside looking in. Later this week we will look at 5 people in sports and what we can learn from the way they sell themselves.

Whether you are talking about a MLM network, a social network, or an online community success depends on the same question: Are you giving people a reason to join your network?

Give Value First

The question is simple, but few networkers and community builders make it their core objective. That is why many fail.

Successful network or community building is dependent on joining, participating, and promoting. These activities imply that people are devoting time and resources to your network. This only happens effectively and sustainably if your network quickly returns personal value to your members.

Teach Success

The best way to return immediate value in any community is to teach success. You are appealing as a network and connector because you have already achieved some level of success. Teaching the formula for success will show your prospective members that you value them.

Reduce your teaching to simple, easy to understand, bite-size morsels of knowledge. Remember most members are less experienced in your area of expertise. They expect you to add value by giving them the most direct path to success. Which means simplifying the complex.

Give Actionable Examples

Achieving results fast is the secret to stimulating the growth and promotion of your network. Design action-oriented examples that attack typical low hanging opportunities, common mistakes, or guaranteed big wins.

These early wins will motivate your members to learn more, understand deeper, and participate. It also turns on the referral machine. Pride in their early successes and immediate results will drive them to show others.

Motivate Action

You can share benefits and teach brilliant pearls of knowledge, but without action there will be disappointment. Motivating your network to action is an individual sport.

Don’t simply cheer the group or the network as a whole, but try to touch and motivate individuals. Ask individual members about their specific goals, objectives, and results. Then motivate and keep them accountable. Often creating a super community member is as simple as motivating that person to meet their own goals.