In our previous post on general LinkedIn sales strategies for sales professionals, we provide a list of tactics that many salespeople should employ if they’re in the B2B sales space. But there are a few strategies that are advanced but should be the bedrock of any sales professional’s arsenal. Based on our experience, the strategies below are paramount to being more effective in sales and outreach.
Deep Advanced Searches Within LinkedIn
LinkedIn allows you to search for people based on many different forms of criteria. The challenge with other online platforms including Google, there are not as many ways to target the same way you can with LinkedIn. Within LinkedIn, you can target CEOs, CFOs, VPs of Marketing, companies larger than a specific employee headcount, in a particular city, in a specific industry, and at any degree of relationship to your circle of prospects. This alone is worth its weight and gold because with this level of targeting you can stay in front of the people who matter the most to your business and saves you a load of time in research and discovery.
Save Your Searches
After you conduct your targeted searches for prospects, you can save your searches into various buckets so you don’t have to perform the search over and over again. For example, if you are targeting CEO’s of companies between 10 – 50 employees in the New York region and within the real estate industry, you can save that specific search under a particular name. Suppose you’re aiming to connect with CEOs of companies with 10 to 50 employees in the New York region, specifically within the real estate industry. In that case, you can save this particular search under the name ‘headshots for realtors‘. If you do business with multiple industries, this can be valuable because you’re saving time but also because you can create multiple searches and save each one so you can remember which buckets to tackle as you perform outreach and discovery.
Lead Builder
Lead builder in our opinion is not as robust as performing the advanced searches that you can save within LinkedIn. However, a lead builder can be effective in sending you a stream of prospects and leads based on that specific criteria. For example, the lead builder has many of the same functions as advanced searches, but there are cases where if you wanted to filter based on school, you can’t. You can still save this search, but anytime someone enters this search criteria, LinkedIn will inform you based on your account settings.
Hootsuite & LinkedIn
Looking for ways to automate your processes and stay in front of prospects, connections, and leads you’re connected to? Leverage a platform like Hootsuite (many other social media management tools similar to this) to schedule posts and information every week that can be uploaded directly to your company page and/or your own personal LinkedIn profile page. Based on our busy schedules, anytime we can automate processes like this one, we should. However, we do not recommend sending updates on a daily basis. That can be a little overkill. But maybe something twice a week which then makes it manageable for both you and even the people in your circle who follow you.
Thought Leadership Posts
Thought leadership posts are powerful because as they are built and created directly within LinkedIn’s platform, it is also shared with everyone within your circle. You can then look at the metrics of each post and based on the ones that received good engagement, you can sponsor ones to be seen by those saved searches you created in the beginning. Sponsored posts can cost a little bit of money and the average cost per click can range from $1 – $5. However, if you are targeting your leads effectively, that can be money well spent.
Leverage Your Company Page
Many companies tend to neglect their company page, but as prospects follow up and want to learn more about you, they will likely view your company page. Try to make it a lead magnet that is compelling and engaging. Ensure that all of your employees are connected to the page. Ensure the page is well built out with pictures, updates, and presentations conducted by the executive leadership. By keeping the company page engaging, you are giving yourself a great chance of a prospect being further intrigued by both you and the solution your company provides.
Not any one single action will turn a prospect into a customer. However, enforcing many of these actions can move the needle forward and give you a greater probability of landing more qualified prospects who are open to listening to what you have to say.
