Get Set For Social Selling – 7 Tips To Maximise Your LinkedIn Social Selling Efforts

Its official  . . .  social selling is not going away and as the number one social selling platform is it time you got to grips with LinkedIn? Step up your social selling skills with these 7 LinkedIn tips:

• Revamp Your LinkedIn Profile: Is your LinkedIn profile looking a little faded, outdated or sparse? As your professional brand online, your LinkedIn profile says a lot about you to your potential prospects. Make first impressions count by focusing your profile on your ideal clients (rather than potential recruiters) to help you cultivate a reputation as a trusted advisor, who understands your target audience’s challenges and can offer solutions.
  
• Hang Out With Your Prospects: LinkedIn has at least 2 million groups in a host of areas. However, most people tend to join peer groups where mostly their competitors hang out. Instead review your clients and prospects profiles and see what groups they are in and then join them. I go on the 80/20 rule. 80% of the groups should be groups that your clients & prospects are in, with the other 20% being industry or networking groups.

 Apply the 80/20 rule to your LinkedIn groups – 80% of your groups should be where your audience hangs out

• Add Value: LinkedIn is a great platform for raising your visibility as an expert in your niche. As well as status updates, you can post your blogs to LinkedIn Pulse, start and share conversations in group. However don’t ruin it with sales messages. Instead share content that adds value.
  
  This means you have to know and understand your audience’s challenges so that the content you share is helpful or solves a problem. It doesn’t always have to be your own content. Demonstrate your expertise by sharing other content sources such industry blogs; have your finger on what’s happening in your sector and how that will impact your prospects and clients.
  Be the first to add value – 74% of buyers choose the sales person that was 1st to add value & insights
  
• Get active & engage: conversations should be a 2 way street hence social selling is about engagement. Review your home page newsfeed and your key groups regularly; comment, like or share your clients and prospects content, but make sure your interaction is relevant and meaningful and again not just an opportunity for a sales pitch.
    
• Build relationships: Start your relationships on LinkedIn by giving people a reason to connect with you. Connecting and who you should connect with can be quite contentious but the thing is you need to be connected – it extends your network and helps you to get in front of your prospects. A great way to start relationships with people you don’t know is to be in the groups where they hang out, to comment and like their conversations or their comments and then open the relationship from there by referencing their conversation or blog to personalise your connection request.

LinkedIn is one big database that you can use for free to show you who you know that knows someone you want to know . . . 

• Look for referrals: who do you know that could introduce you to people you want to know? LinkedIn is one big database that you can use for free to show you who you know that knows someone you want to know.

• Manage your prospecting efforts: organise your best prospects using LinkedIn Contacts. LinkedIn gives you a number of tools that you can use to drill down and find your target audience (for example advanced searches, company pages). As you start to find potential contacts use LinkedIn Contacts to save them to your connections as an internal LinkedIn contact. I prefer to do my searching before I start building the relationship because more research may be needed as to how best approach the relationship. So I save the contact from their profile with notes as to where found and then I tag them so that I can easily find them again when I am ready to reach out and connect.

To learn more about how to use LinkedIn Contacts please watch this short video.

Need more support with LinkedIn?

💙 If LinkedIn isn’t working hard for you or you’re not sure where to start with using LinkedIn, email judy@judithparsons.com or connect with me on LinkedIn to chat about how I can help.

Or book a virtual brew here and let’s make LinkedIn work for you . . . ⭐

I run regular LinkedIn LoveIns which are short 30-minute learnings over lunch, often with guest experts to help improve LinkedIn results. If you’d like to be notified of new events why not join my LinkedIn LoveIn group. You can also find the recordings of previous LoveIns as well as tips and updates here.