We Covered...
- What is LinkedIn Selling?
- LinkedIn Selling Steps for Success
- #1 Your Efforts Should be Relationship-Centric
- #2 Stay Client-Focused on Your LinkedIn Profile
- #3 Research Comes Before Sales
- #4 Playing the Role Your Target Audience Wants to See
- #5 Work With the Right Tools
- #6 Work Your Existing Leads and Connections
- #7 Ambition and Curiosity Drives Sales
- #8 Never Close Without a CTA
- #9 How to Start Good Conversations with Your Prospects
- What are Some of the Basic Elements of a Good Conversation?
- LinkedIn Selling Guide
- Building a Great Reputation as a Thought Leader
- Utilize Tools for Prospecting on Social Media with Your LinkedIn Strategy
- Utilizing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- Finding Prospects Through LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- FAQ
We want to make your life easier. Whether that’s by helping you implement a new social media blueprint for your business, finding a new cheap or free Canva alternative, or helping you find a new, more powerful and unconventional way to make new sales on LinkedIn through B2B LinkedIn selling, we want to be the social media marketing agency with the answers.
And that’s why we’re putting our focus on social selling on LinkedIn today. It’s a hot button topic right now, (and with good reason!) which makes it easy for misinformation to spread and for bad practices to be adopted by businesses with the best intentions.
What we want to give you today is a predictable, easy and effective way to make more sales. Something that goes beyond the basics of the LinkedIn algorithm, which would include things like an updated head shot, an optimized profile, etc.
Having had some incredible success when it comes to social selling, we’ve been able to investigate each step to find out what *really* has the potential to become something big and what doesn’t.
Are you ready to dive into 15 of the most powerful and important LinkedIn selling steps for more sales ASAP? Let’s get started!
1) LINKEDIN ADS: THE ONLY #1 GUIDE TO YOUR BRAND VICTORY
2) THE BEGINNERS GUIDE TO YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE OPTIMIZATION
3) LINKEDIN STORIES: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE
4) LINKEDIN SOCIAL SELLING INDEX: 5 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW
5) 7 EPIC LINKEDIN SOCIAL SELLING EXAMPLES FOR ULTIMATE VICTORY
What is LinkedIn Selling?
LinkedIn selling is all about leveraging your brand in a way that allows you to steadily fill your pipeline with your target customer, insights and brand new relationships. To be successful, it’s important to remember that LinkedIn selling isn’t just about staying consumer-facing and making new connections. It is, but not in its entirety. It’s also about proving to your current prospects that you are a thought leader in your industry and working to build a stronger bond through mutual trust and hard work.
It’s about finding new prospects and showing them how you can help them become a better version of themselves or build their brand larger through charts, graphs and case studies. It’s proving one point: why they need you now.
LinkedIn Selling Steps for Success
Step #1 Your Efforts Should be Relationship-Centric
When it comes to LinkedIn social selling steps for success, making every effort relationship-centric is perhaps one of the most important.
In our modern era, buyers don’t want to be sold to, but rather given something that could be useful to them and for their business- with no strings attached.
Whether you’re offering congratulations for their latest achievements, commenting on their recent articles or sharing some educational resources or information that will be beneficial to their business, your connections will be much more open to chat if you are providing value to them.
As a sales professional, you should be doing your best to start great conversations, and LinkedIn is the perfect place to do that.
Step #2 Stay Client-Focused on Your LinkedIn Profile
Your prospects don’t care about your business, they care about the solutions your business could potentially provide. In many cases, looking for solutions is how potential clients find your business to begin with.
The #1 focus of your LinkedIn profile should always be your current and future clients. The goal should be to demonstrate to your prospects and clients that you have the solution to their problems.
You can create a LinkedIn profile that is client-focused by asking yourself questions about your clients and what they need from you, as well as information that could be potentially useful for them in their particular journey.
No one wants to read a LinkedIn profile equivalent to a boring bio. Instead, provide actionable steps, graphs, examples, reels and recommendations that your audience can benefit from. Make your profile an educational hub around your industry and you won’t be in want of potential clients to connect with.
A few great questions you can ask yourself might include:
- What kinds of people make up your target audience?
- Who is your ideal client?
- What is the typical language of your target market?
- What are the problems your target audience experiences on a daily basis?
- How can you best provide the answers your target audience is looking for?
As mentioned, a content reel can be an incredible way to showcase the work your company can do for an individual or business. Make it short, sweet and fun. As an example, we’ve provided our own short content reel below!
Step #3 Research Comes Before Sales
One of the key ingredients to driving success through LinkedIn selling is doing your research before hardcore selling to a prospective buyer.
Make yourself as familiar with their product as possible and find ways to pitch THEIR product so that you can leverage it to sell your product to them.
LinkedIn allows you to do this in a new and creative way through everyday interaction. What appears to be a regular pain point for them? What kinds of conversations are they having with their audience?
When it comes to making more sales through social selling on LinkedIn, research is a key ingredient.
Step #4 Playing the Role Your Target Audience Wants to See
There aren’t many salespeople who won’t admit that they use a “fake it till you make it” mentality on a regular basis. And however much you might not like the idea, there is a bit of information you can pull from this that can powerfully play into your outcome.
You see, with research comes a better understanding of what your target audience is looking for. And more specifically, what kind of thought leader your customers are looking to look up to.
Through research, you can take advantage of this by crafting the content you share around the type of content they’re looking to see from thought leaders in their industry.
And to take it a step further, you can work to present yourself in this light by engaging with similar audiences in order to win the sale faster.
When it comes to LinkedIn selling, sometimes just playing the role your target audience wants to see is an incredible way to quickly and effectively get your foot in the door.
Step #5 Work With the Right Tools
This one is perhaps one of the most crucial because the tools you use can make or break your overall experience with LinkedIn selling.
LinkedIn makes expanding your opportunities and insights easy with add-on tools that come with premium membership.
For only a fraction of the cost of most tools, you’ll be able to get access to high-level profiles with no mutual connections, see insights and get information about the effectiveness of your current LinkedIn selling routine and get a visual representation of your network to identify more and greater LinkedIn selling opportunities within it.
One of the best ways to find out how effectively you’re using LinkedIn is to look into your personal LinkedIn social selling index score.
Step #6 Work Your Existing Leads and Connections
It might sound a little backwards, but your current customers and leads are actually the very tool you need to get to a place with new connections and prospects.
When you’ve identified a new prospect, you’ll be able to see which connections you have in common, which means you might be able to use the connection you currently have as a way to get introduced to a coveted prospect.
Genius, right? Just make sure you’re providing value to ALL of your connections in the process. You don’t want to earn a reputation around only sticking around for the introduction.
Step #7 Ambition and Curiosity Drives Sales
Truly driving sales requires you to catch the eye of your target audience and stay one step ahead of the competition, right?
One of the best ways to do this is to use curiosity to your advantage. Crafting messages, email subject lines, comments and even articles in a way that cultivates the curiosity of your audience is one of the best ways to ensure success when it comes to LinkedIn selling.
Using words and phrases like “your”, “you” or “meeting this Tuesday” can intrigue your audience and make driving a sale that much easier.
Step #8 Never Close Without a CTA
Repeat after me: your potential customers are NOT mind readers!
When it comes to LinkedIn selling, too many customers expect their target audience, prospects and customers to read their minds through the process, but that isn’t the way social selling or any sales process is supposed to work.
You need to be direct in your communication when approaching potential customers with your products. Let them know what you want from them and what they should do following your call.
Be direct and be willing to listen and understand, because your prospects will be significantly more open to talking if they know you’re listening to them.
Step #9 How to Start Good Conversations with Your Prospects
Starting a good conversation is, as we mentioned before, one of the most crucial aspects of your social selling process.
Research has proven that B2B decision makers in large and small companies alike choose who they want to go with almost entirely off of interaction.
This means that great conversations trump pricing, brand reputation and even product or service quality when it comes time to choose a provider. A.k.a, you or your competitor.
A sales rep who can give a potential customer vision in what they want to help a prospect achieve is the real “make or break” of the LinkedIn selling process, and one that shouldn’t be neglected.
“What are Some of the Basic Elements of a Good Conversation?”
This is mainly up to the sales rep and how well they can articulate and communicate the value behind their products and services, but by following a few simple rules, you can become a great conversation starter in no time.
Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #1:
Create value: create a powerful message that targets the potential customers. “Why you?” and “Why Now?” are powerful things that your customer can consider through the process.
You want to create disruption and force prospects to question their goals. Don’t they WANT to be successful? How are they action-ably taking steps to get there?
Differentiate between you and your competitor by being the one to ask and answer difficult questions. Prove that you mean business and you won’t wait around forever. They either want it or they don’t and you’re here to demand success or nothing.
Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #2:
Elevate your value!
Connecting your solution and problem-solving to an executive buyer and then building a case for your products and services should always be the next step.
Show your potential customers that you’re worth their time and that you’re there to provide for them the tools THEY need to succeed in the business world.
The ultimate goal is to build a case for your product or service that will ultimately pass the test of scrutiny with executive buyers, decision makers and business owners.
Starting a Great Conversation, Rule #3:
Capturing the value is the next most important step, and the goal is to protect your margins and ALWAYS avoid the unnecessary discounting of your work and your services during a negotiation.
Helpful tip: Close deals over a video call. You’ll be far more likely to close the deal, and it allows *almost* face-to-face interaction that builds trust with your prospects in a way that calls and emails will not.
LinkedIn Selling: Building a Great Reputation as a Thought Leader
Building trust: a complicated, messy process, (especially when all of your interaction is online) and sometimes so complicated even social selling experts can’t figure it out.
Establishing yourself as a thought leader within your industry is by far one of the most critical components to building relationships on LinkedIn and across other social media platforms.
But like anything of great worth, building that reputation on any social network, and most especially on LinkedIn takes a lot of work.
The key is to frequently share relevant pieces of content, engage in social listening, utilize social selling tools, look to a long-term social selling strategy that will help you reach and engage with potential buyers and embrace a thought process of helping your customers with problem areas.
If you can prove that you’re on the same side as your potential buyers, helping them find solutions and helping them learn to utilize tools available to them, you’ll have a much better chance of closing deals outside of cold calling from your sales team.
LinkedIn Selling: Utilize Tools for Prospecting on Social Media with Your LinkedIn Strategy
Ready to make more LinkedIn sales?
Of course you are. There’s no reason for it to be a question. But for whatever reason, sometimes marketing and sales professionals want you to believe that it should be. They want you to believe that they have the answers.
And maybe they do. But when push comes to shove, you don’t need some complicated response. You just...need the answers.
Well, consider this. There are no magic tools that you need to create an ideal LinkedIn selling strategy. Nope. In fact, the most important tool that you can use is already a part of LinkedIn Premium.
No installations, no additional fees apart from the Premium subscription and no special certifications are necessary. All you need is a little help navigating the Sales Navigator.
LinkedIn Selling: Utilizing the LinkedIn Sales Navigator
As long as you aren’t planning on adding more team members immediately, you can use Sales Navigator free for thirty days HERE.
Before you can begin utilizing Sales Navigator, you’ll need to configure it for your preferences. You’ll have to enter things like target region, languages, positions and verticals.
You’ll also have the option about whether or not you want to save your current connections as leads, or link your Sales Navigator with Salesforce to import accounts and contacts.
LinkedIn sales navigator will suggest several companies and leads. Whether or not you decide to save these is entirely up to you.
To finish, LinkedIn Sales Navigator will allow you to fill out information about the specific types of leads you’re looking to target.
LinkedIn Selling: Finding Prospects Through LinkedIn Sales Navigator
For starters, you’ll want to explore the Lead Builder HERE and get familiar with how it works before you start putting your lead lists together.
Click the lead builder button on the right of your search box in Sales Navigator to reach Lead Builder.
Using this tool, you’ll be able to search for job titles, company names, positions and more. You’ll also have the ability to use filters to refine your search criteria for better, faster results.
To the right of every result, you’ll have the option of saving specific possibilities as “leads”.
After retrieving the results from your search, you’ll have the option of saving the search itself, which will send you email alerts when there are new prospects who match your criteria.
Linked Selling Frequently Asked Questions
“Is LinkedIn Selling Actually Effective as a Social Selling Method?”
In short: yes! Our own clients have seen wild success after we implemented our social selling assistant services for their businesses. One of the things we put quite a bit of emphasis on is improving their SSI score; which in turn means they’re getting better results overall.
“How Much is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?”
Sales Navigator Professional: $79.99*/month/license or $779.88*/annual/license.
It’s important to note that The Enterprise version is more as it allows you to add multiple social sellers to one account.
“Can I Still Social Sell Effectively Without LinkedIn Sales Navigator?”
While you can definitely social sell using the tricks we’ve outlined in this blog post, I would encourage you to utilize tools like the LinkedIn Sales Navigator as it will make the time you spend social selling much more fruitful.
Why spend hours doing something that can be done in a matter of minutes using the tools available in LinkedIn Sales Navigator?
Start Making More Sales. Level Up Your LinkedIn TODAY
It’s not enough to just make sales. You need to be surpassing your competitors and showing your prospects that what you offer is what they need NOW.
We can help you get there. Our Social Selling Assistant services were created with you in mind. It’s time to surpass your sales goals, reach beyond your sales quota and get serious about your business goals.
What are you waiting for? Get in touch with one of our social selling experts TODAY and let’s talk business.
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