Part III: Can LinkedIn Increase Your Sales?

What can I do to be more effective? It's a question that's always on my mind. That's why I began this exploration of LinkedIn. I wanted to find out if and how sellers were leveraging this technology to improve their sales results.

In the final article of this 3-part series, you'll discover even more ways you can use this tool to create more opportunities, connect with decision makers and win more business. Again, real sellers and real results.

Strategic Visibility & Connecting
Tim Hayden, President of Game Plan Marketing & Events shares what he's trained his team to do with LinkedIn:

1. Focus on connecting. Anytime you receive a business card from its owner, you then "know" this person. While not everyone is a valuable link, search for that person on LinkedIn right away. Because you have their email, you can send them an invitation to connect.

2. Increase your visibility. Don't simply add people to your network. Ask or answer questions on LinkedIn. Make sure your public profile is complete. But most of all, recommend people in your network and ask them to recommend YOU!

Anytime you do any of the above, LinkedIn posts updates online or in weekly updates to everyone in your network.

3. Make LinkedIn your homepage. Whenever I open my browser, I can immediately review my "LinkedIn Home Page" which shows what others in my network are doing and who they're connecting with. I also check every 2-3 days to see "Who's Viewed My Profile." Just as you can use web statistics to see what companies are looking at your website, you can also see with about 80% accuracy who's been checking out your profile.

In the past two months, I've used these strategies to identify more than 20 new business leads –and converted two to clients!

Keep-in-Touch Strategy
Stu Garrow, Managing Director of Software Traction Pty, Ltd says: As we know in sales, it's much easier to keep an existing contact happy than it is to create a new one. The real value in Linked-In is to remind you who you know and provide a way of keeping in touch with them.

Every week, you take 5 people from your list of contacts and you send them a short email. It is amazing how many times a few emails will turn into some live opportunities and the simple act of keeping in touch will place you way in front of a competitor.

Visible Network Reminder
Barak Kassar of the creative marketing firm Rassak Experience shares: Selling is networking – and sometimes networks are hard to visualize. LinkedIn can be like putting a die-trace on your network, making it visible to you. This makes it easier to figure out who to contact in a given situation, even if I don't always make the contact through LinkedIn. Also, I've been introduced to some incredible people directly through the LinkedIn tools.

Starting a Networking Group
Rob Kingma, Ernst & Young Revenue Growth Services adds: I started to focus on LinkedIn as a selling opportunity after hosting the first physical gathering of LinkedIn users in Australia. This event was an outcome of an in-person meeting I had with my country's most connected user. The result was a turnout of 120 LinkedIn users and three business opportunities for our practice.

Leveraging Long-Lost Relationships
Mark Hunter of The Sales Hunter says: LinkedIn can reconnect you with former colleagues you've lost contact with. I've used it to get in touch with people I worked with nearly 20 years ago. The process I used was simple. By entering previous employers into the search bar, LinkedIn gave me a list of people who'd also worked for these firms.

Though I didn’t know everyone, I discovered several whom I knew quite well at one point in time. Reaching out to these people not only enabled me to catch up on time gone by, but also to cultivate some significant opportunities that are on track to close this year. Plus these conversations led to other past associates and, again, potential prospects emerged.

Currently, my profile on LinkedIn enables me to be found by others who are doing the same thing. This proves the need to make sure your profile includes all of your previous employers and locations to allow you to be as visible as possible.

Creating a Business Relationship
Nick Wright, head of Nick Wright Consulting contributes: I use my Google Reader to leverage LinkedIn. I go to the homepage, click on the "Answers" tab, then I pick the categories I want to follow (ie: Marketing and Sales > Sales > Sales Techniques). Then I simply click the RSS button to subscribe to their feeds.

When I pop open my Google Reader each morning I quickly browse the headlines - which are the questions asked. If I find one that's aligned with my interests or business goals, I click on it and go directly to that question's page on LinkedIn. At that point I use the Q&A's as a reference tool to learn from ... and if I find an answer I really like, I'll click on the person's name to go to their profile.

Then I look for a blog or website listed on their profile and go from there. I subscribe to his/her blog and become a regular, ultimately planting the seed for a possible business relationship to grow.

Accidental Success
Kent Speakman of Suitcase Interactive shares: When I was adding contacts to LinkedIn, I mistakenly included the President of a very large company in my network. We'd been trying to get in to see him for about 7 months, but none of our account entry strategies had worked.

When he got my invitation to connect, he proceeded to check me out on LinkedIn. Then he sent me an email saying thanks for sending the link, but stating that he didn't know how he knew me. (I'd found his email address on Jigsaw.)

I responded with an email that contained our value proposition and a humorous apology. From there, we exchanged several emails and a series of voicemails. Because he liked what I was sharing, he connected me with his Vice President – who was indeed in need of our help. We got the bid for the work and hereby my first accidental LinkedIn success story.

So What Have I Learned?
LinkedIn isn't a panacea or a miracle cure for your sales woes. Instead, it's a valuable tool that we, as sellers need to learn how to leverage to our advantage. It's a way to augment our prospecting and business growth efforts, not replace them.

While I've focused on the numerous ways that people have used LinkedIn to get business, I've also heard from others that it may not be appropriate for what they sell or that the decision makers they're trying to reach don't have profiles posted. I'm sure they're right.

Since I started this exploration, I've discovered a multitude of ways to use LinkedIn that I could never have conceived of on my own. I've learned that it's not just about making connections with someone who knows someone who knows someone. Rather, it's about a new way of thinking about your network, your personal visibility and your relationships.

Personally, I am choosing to participate in this new Sales 2.0 world. I believe that it's the way of the future. I don't know where it's all going, but I am sure going to find out. Join me!

Missed the previous LinkedIn articles?

Part I: Click here to read it now.

Part II: Click here to read it now.

Check Jill Konrath's LinkedIn profile.