How to Drive Leads and Make Sales with LinkedIn

Making sales and prospecting the old-fashioned way, cold-calling and endless appointments, is dreadfully tiring and time consuming. With today’s platforms and technology, it is so easy to connect to businesses, potential clients and key role players within your industry, even around the world – you just need to be smart about it. One way is to use social media platforms to their full potential. Savvy salesmen are now using LinkedIn as a means of prospecting new sales leads. LinkedIn can open many new windows for business opportunities, and makes the process of prospecting easier – if done correctly. It all starts with building quality relationships, just like you would face-to-face.

Visitors-to-Leads [Image Source: ethos3.com]

Kick-off your LinkedIn Strategy – How to sign up

If you’re new to LinkedIn, don’t worry – we’ve got you. LinkedIn is a very user-friendly platform, and you’ll be a pro before you know it. Start here:

• Sign up: Create your linked in profile here. Insert all your information and complete the steps.
• Once you have registered your account, try to complete your profile as much as possible. You can always get back to this part, just mouse over the Profile tab, and click on Edit Profile:

• Once you’ve got your profile updated, start connecting with people you know including colleagues, business partners etc. This can be done by searching for their name in the search bar at the top of the page:

Finding and building relationships on LinkedIn to generate sales leads

There are a few ways to gain people’s trust when connecting with the on LinkedIn. Make sure you follow these guidelines to build quality relationships that could potentially become sales leads:

• Why do you want to connect with them? When connecting with people on LinkedIn, tell them why you wish to do so – what’s in it for them? Did someone recommend them, did you see them at an event? Your reason should be convincing enough that they would accept your invitation.
• Ever notice how you can easily chat to someone about a common interest? The same applies to LinkedIn – find commonalities to support why they should connect with you on LinkedIn.
• Use favours to your advantage. Doing a valuable favour for someone on LinkedIn can have beneficial returns. This can be anything such as supplying them with information or recommending them to someone. They might feel obliged to return the favour, creating a quality relationship between you.
• Connect with people you meet online and offline on LinkedIn while you are still fresh in their minds. With every connection you make, you are broadening the opportunity for more connections. Grow your network daily!
• Use the LinkedIn search bar to find valuable connections. You can search for title’s company names, locations and more. This is a great way to find people that are worth connecting with.

How to Increase LinkedIn Engagement [Source: geekschicago.com]

LinkedIn is an extremely powerful social media platform, which is being under-utilised by many users and businessmen. Once you get into the habit of updating your profile, posting valuable information and connecting with other people in LinkedIn, you will soon start to notice the value thereof. So update (or create) your profile, and start connecting! Follow this 3 Stage LinkedIn strategy to get you on the right track.

How to Leverage LinkedIn to generate Sales [Source: outboundexcellence.com]