Today’s guest post is from my buddy Robert Koehler who is a Sales Product Consultant for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. I have known him for years and he was one of the smartest guys I know and he loves writing…My fingers are crossed we can keep him contributing! Enjoy his post below. (it’s awesome)
Last year our family went ‘Geocaching’ to find buried treasure. My seven- year-old defined treasure as buying him a smoothie. My ten-year-old interpreted this as a guarantee of finding him enough gold to fund the mansion he craves. In reality Geocaching is a ‘free real world outdoor treasure hunt’ app that helps you find hidden containers that someone else has left for you to discover.
In the driveway we turned on the app. To our joy we determined that the first treasure was miraculously buried right outside of our fence! After finding zero containers, one rattlesnake and the air pump that I had been searching for the last six months, we realized that the app was not showing us the treasure but rather our current location.
Finding prospects on LinkedIn Is like our Geocaching experience. Over 250 million members- real people, not a third party database- have left ‘hidden nuggets’ for you to discover. However you need to know your current location and have a map for finding the treasure.
Your current location: Where are you now?
1. Before you start searching, have a great LinkedIn sales oriented profile with a professional photo, headline and summary. This helps ensure that once you’ve found and reached out to prospects that they’ll want to respond. My definition of social selling is ‘leveraging your [LinkedIn] social profile to fill your pipeline through the right people, insights and relationships
Best practices:
- Focus your summary and profile on how you can help clients rather than just your recent resume accomplishments
- Use rich media such as video, Powerpoints and PDF’s to ‘not just say it but to display it’
2. Build a quality network. The more connections you have, the more your second and third degree connections will grow exponentially and the more prospects you will see in your search results. In general if you are in sales and have fewer than 350 LinkedIn connections you should focus on making one new connection a day. Reach out to past and present colleagues, customers, and friends and family that are business professionals.
Best practices:
- Only connect with people with who you have already had some two way interaction: think quality, not quantity.
- Always personalize your connection requests so that people know who you are and why you want to connect; it’s an opportunity to building a relationship and a conversation. A cold connection request is as uninspiring as a cold call or a cold email.
- Use the phone, email or LinkedIn introduction requests to initiate contact with a prospect; only use connection requests to build on a conversation, next step or relationship.
The map to finding the treasure
- Before you go hunting make sure that you know what you are trying to identify. What are the accounts, location, roles, titles and keywords that will lead you to your target prospects? Who are the people that you ideally want to be connecting with?
- Start searching.
- Conduct both keyword searches as well as specific field searches. When you do a keyword search on LinkedIn it searches a member’s entire profile. A specific field search narrows your search for those titles, keywords or other criteria solely in that specific field. For instance you can search with people who only have “HR Director” OR “Director of HR” in their current LinkedIn title .The top sellers on LinkedIn do very targeted searches combining multiple keywords, locations, titles and other variables.
- Use keyword modifiers such as OR and AND to expand or narrow your search. For instance since many LinkedIn members list their titles in different ways, you should consider doing a keyword search for “CFO” OR “Chief Financial Officer” to ensure that you are catching as many appropriate prospects as possible. By searching on “Mobile Communications” AND “Purchasing” (keywords in quotes, the modifier in CAPS), which requires that both keywords be present in a member’s profile, you can narrow your search to prospects more likely to be involved in purchasing mobile solutions.
- Filter your search results using the filters on the left hand side of the search results. Always prioritize second degree over third degree connections because there is at least one person that can potentially introduce you to a second degree connection. This increases warmer introductions and reduces the need for cold calling that research shows is increasingly ineffective. (note: premium subscribers and LinkedIn Sales Navigator users can gain access to additional premium filters such as ‘seniority’, ‘functional area’ and ‘company size’).
- Looking up the profiles of individual prospects in your search results, make sure you look at ‘People Also Viewed’. This feature shows you the other LinkedIn members that people who viewed this profile also viewed. Frequently this provides a quick roadmap of other executives and peers at a named account or shows a number of prospects in similar roles.
- Join and search LinkedIn Groups. On average top sellers belong to over thirty LinkedIn groups. Every seller should belong to at least five LinkedIn groups. Additionally you can send a private message to any mutual LinkedIn group member.
Like our geocaching trip where we ultimately ventured to ‘Turtle Cove’ (really, I’m not making this up) and stumbled upon one of the old local stops of the Pony Express shrouded in weeds and overgrown brush, you never know what treasure you’ll find until you start searching. By knowing where you’re starting and having a plan you’ll move far beyond the limited number of prospects in your immediate back yard.
Robert Koehler is a Sales Product Consultant for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. You can find him on LinkedIn (of course)
Geocaching photo provided by WiredRyo