LinkedIn is the professional social networking site that every professional should be on and that every salesperson should be utilizing. With each connection, you will increase your future reach with your posts and will gain more insights as to where your connections work, their role, their professional interests and a lot more.
With things like that at a sales person’s disposal, it would be a waste not to use it for sales purposes. First, you need to build your personal brand and credibility, then grow your network, and engage with valuable information as much as possible. It takes a lot of effort and time to maintain all these tasks. If you find difficulties to do all these, you may find out the robust LinkedIn automation tools to maintain and automate your duties on LinkedIn.
Build a strong personal brand
Before you can start getting sales on LinkedIn, you need to build up your credibility, AKA your personal brand. We aren’t saying you need to be the next Gary Vee (that wouldn’t hurt) but, you do need to put in the work to create a strong profile.
Start off with the basics. You need to do have a professional profile picture and good summary. A picture is worth a 1000 words, and words are worthless if no thought was put into them. Be able to tell a story through your profile. Want to see what strangers think of your profile picture and how they rate it? Try out photofeeler.
The next thing to do is post regularly. We are not talking about reposts, but valuable posts that have the potential to spark interest. By posting often, you set yourself up to be seen by more people more often, and it makes it look as if you have some knowledge (value) to share. Consistency is key in creating your own brand. Remember; saying you are at an event is not of big value for your connections.
Lastly, post personal things. Even a short 30-second video of you talking about a problem in your industry can significantly increase your credibility. Never be afraid to show vulnerability when creating your brand.
Want to know how you score on Linkedin? Linkedin offers a Social Selling Dashboard for everyone to see where you can improve or how you score compared to your network. It gives you some fun insights, view your Social Selling Index here.
Grow your Network
Growing your network is a must if you want to find people to sell to. Anyone you have had an interaction with at a tradeshow, meeting, or just ran into getting coffee needs to be followed by you. Growing your network and connections is a great way to earn credibility. No one wants to do business with the person who has only two contacts.
The rule of thumb has been a long time that 10% of your connections will see your Linkedin posts in the first hour, if they engage with them the post will be shown to others. Increasing the first 10% will help you to get more traction and views on your posts for sure.
Joining Linkedin Groups can easily give you access to new prospects in your industry. Being present in these specific groups is paramount for finding opportunities to chime in and leave valuable feedback, and even ask from others.
Growing your network can also benefit you passively. Some of your connections might know other that could use your product or service, and if you have been posting good content, regularly you have the credibility built to where they will feel confident telling others about you.
Automation tip: Start using Dux Soup
Engage on posts where ever you can
If you see a post from someone which can be a potential prospect, it easy to start engaging with that person if he posted something online. Make sure the comment is valuable and unique to that person and the post. You will find out that spending that time will give you a lot better results than any other ‘cold outreach’.
Read and leave replies on blog posts people have written, build up some reputation, and watch out for opportunities to give and ask. It should not be the first interaction you have with someone but the 4th or 5th.
Once you start interacting with other posts you will see people start looking at your profile, if step done is right you will start getting connection requests + questions about whatever you have to offer.
In Summary
Work on your profile, make sure you give off the same energy you would want a salesperson who was reaching out to you to give. Take a professional headshot, and curate your summary to be informational.
Earn credibility and use it to your advantage. Without credibility, you are just another random person on LinkedIn. The ways you build credibility are the actions that allow you to ask.
Want to start automating your Linkedin work. Check out why Growth Hackers love Dux-Soup. Want a more all-in-one tool? See our own growth Hacking suite!
Pro tip: See our own Growth Hacking Suite here.