The Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn Social Selling

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media platforms if you are looking to boost the ante on your sales performance by social selling.

Social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook are useful for getting to know your prospects better and making your brand relatable. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is pretty straightforward about the business.

What Is LinkedIn Social Selling?

 

Above all, social selling is interaction and building relationships with prospective customers using social media platforms. Consider social selling as a type of professional networking. It enables you to establish more personal connections with prospects at the outset of the sales process, building credibility and trust.

The goal of social selling on LinkedIn is to identify, get in touch with, and develop connections with leads and prospects while displaying your strong leadership in the industry to propel sales.

Benefits of Social Selling On LinkedIn

Indeed, there are numerous pros of social selling on LinkedIn. We will talk about them below. Let’s take a quick look at the statistics provided by LinkedIn about the importance of social selling in your strategy.

According to LinkedIn social selling leaders:

1. Create 45% more opportunities than peers with lower SSI (Social Selling Index).
2. Are 51% more likely to reach quota.
3. 78% outsell peers who don’t use social media.

Isn’t it impressive? Exactly!

If the numbers above didn’t convince you (what makes us very surprised), here are further benefits of including social selling into your sales strategy.

Strike a Business Pose

Certainly, LinkedIn is perfect for social selling. It is a professional networking platform full of high-quality prospects. That is to say, it is the biggest professional social media platform in the world and has a lot more purposes than just networking.

Accelerated Sales Cycles

A sales cycle is the period of time between when a prospect first hears about your products or services to the time they actually make a purchase.

The biggest issue with traditional selling is that, particularly when using tactics like cold calling, relationships with potential leads may get off to a bad start.

Compared to that, social selling is far more sophisticated and complex. As a result, you’re way more accurate in the evaluation of your potential client’s needs if you use social selling.

Needless to say that if you implement the social selling strategy properly, you’ll be at the top of your prospective clients’ minds. 

So, don’t forget that through the proper implementation of social selling strategies, your business can set itself apart from competitors and drastically shorten sales cycles.

Using social selling means staying competitive

Despite LinkedIn’s size and enormous user base, it is still feasible to differentiate yourself from the competition. There are still many chances for you to advance and produce engaging social selling content. A hint: the majority of professionals do not use Linkedin social selling properly.

How to Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Sales

Because you’re in sales, you’re targeting a completely different audience from most professionals. In other words, you want prospects, not hiring managers or recruiters. That means you should tailor your LinkedIn profile to reflect that. Don’t brag about your golf game or your favorite sports teams. Focus on helping people solve problems, and make sure your profile reflects that.

1. Add a personalized cover photo and a top-quality professional headshot to your profile

Think about working with a professional photographer/graphic designer if you don’t already have high-quality photos. Firstly, a profile photo ought to convey your personality and level of expertise. Secondly, for the cover image choose a picture that relates to what you do and appeals to your target market.

2. The headline should catch the attention of your target audience

The text that appears beneath your name is called the headline. This is the second thing people will see after your photo. Put there a powerful statement that highlights the value you can bring to your target audience.

3. Use the “About” section to share your story

Use this section to describe what you do and why, after that tell about your accomplishments, and share what makes you unique:

• Be precise and concise. Use search terms that your target audience is likely to use to find your profile. Most importantly, keep in mind that LinkedIn’s algorithm takes into account the content in your “About” section, headline, and title. You will appear higher in the search results on the platform if you use the power of proper keywords.
• Be both personal and official. Give readers a feel of your personality, your skills, and the reasons people would want to collaborate with you. In addition, demonstrate how you’ve used your abilities to accomplish goals.
• Be genuine. You should think of this as a networking opportunity where you are getting new experiences and making new relevant connections.
• Call-to-action is not a thing you can forget about. Many times people don’t know what to do if you don’t tell them. So, ask your profile viewers to DM you or to visit your business’ website. In addition, you can also leave the contact information at the bottom of the section, so it will be easy to find one for those scanning your profile.

4. Enhance your profile with various types of content

Share your video introductions, videos showcasing your products or services, blog posts from your company’s website, slides, LinkedIn articles, client reviews, etc. Content should be engaging, relatable, and easy to consume. 

5. Make sure to ask for recommendations

This will demonstrate to potential clients that you have a proven track record, which greatly increases credibility and confidence that your business is reliable to deal with.

6. Your profile should be public and have a customized URL

Imagine having every part of your page perfectly optimized, but closed to the public. Doesn’t make any sense, right? To clarify, keep your page open to the public, and don’t forget to customize the URL because it should be tied to you and easy to recognize.

7. Showcase your accomplishments, honours, your projects, and your voluntary activity

Show off everything you have to offer. This will provide the prospects with a more comprehensive understanding of how you can help them.

8. Finally, grow your LinkedIn network

Your connections should include your colleagues, customers, and of course prospects in your sales pipeline should be among them. Thus, a good rule of thumb is to make sure you have at least three things in common when choosing whom to invite.

How to Acquire Prospects on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is a bonanza for generating leads. Let’s take a look at how you can acquire prospects if you have a free version of the platform and with help of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Search (free)

The most effective and well-known way of finding prospects is through a search on LinkedIn because of its huge user base, ability to view mutual connections and your page viewers, as well as an extensive selection of filters.

You can search for prospects using filters such as:

• Connections’ degree (1st, 2nd, 3rd): you can choose the degree.
• Locations: you can easily find the prospects in the nearest targeted area. 
• Current company: with the help of this filter, you can locate prospects at desired businesses.
• Past company: this filter helps to find prospects with common interests
• School: you can find classmates from your college or university who could be good prospects.
• Industry: lets you discover prospects in your target industries
• Connections of: you can use this filter to find a potential client who is related to one of your existing contacts. 
• Followers of: search for people on LinkedIn who are followers of a certain page
• Profile Language: if your business intends to grow abroad, you can use this filter to identify prospects outside of your country.
• Service categories: this filter enables you to discover potential clients that are providing consulting services across various industries.
• Keywords: using this filter, you can simultaneously search by using different relevant keywords related to your search.

 

LinkedIn Sales Navigator (paid)

If you plan on conducting a significant amount of prospecting on LinkedIn, it is worthwhile to invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

You can choose the plan fitting your purposes:

• Core: top features include advanced lead and company search, alerts on your saved leads and accounts, and the possibility to create custom lists.
• Advanced: top features are that you can share content and track engagement, and warm introductions from teammates.
• Advanced Plus: top features are CRM updates with data validation, integrate CRM contacts, and advanced enterprise integrations.

Whichever way you choose to search for potential customers, any of them will bring you closer to your goals.

How to Sell Without Being Salesy on LinkedIn?

1. Personalized connection requests

Personalization can benefit you in establishing lasting first impressions and kicking off important discussions. Be creative and pick your words wisely. Firstly, give the prospects a reason to accept the connection request from you.

• Introduce yourself: a sentence or two on who you are and what you do should be enough.
• Let your prospects know how you found them: mentioning how you found their profile is important because it is a good way to get their attention and make them feel important.
• Break the ice: Look at their LinkedIn profile to see if there are any common interests, groups, or mutual connections, and put that in your connection request.
• Be specific about why you want to connect: setting expectations will be made easier by stating your intentions in the connection request.

2. Encourage productive conversation

Keep the discussion going after connecting with a prospect on LinkedIn. Moreover, even if it might not be ideal to make the sale right away, you should keep in touch to make sure you are still on their mind. Be an active supporter of the content they are posting. In other words, ikes and comments may help to keep you in front of their eyes.

3. Share content that is relevant to them

You not only have to stay engaged with their content, but you also have to post content that can catch their attention. 

When the content you publish is pertinent to your prospects’ situation, they may feel more eager to participate. This encourages them to get to know you and your business better and helps to prepare your contacts for the sale.

4. Take conversations out of LinkedIn

Don’t be hesitant to move the conversation outside of LinkedIn once you’ve established certain trust. For example, offer to schedule a Zoom, Skype, or live meeting. Do it when you feel the prospect is ready to start more serious sales talks so you can learn more about their concerns and showcase your business solutions.

How to Build Your Personal Brand on LinkedIn?

Above all, your name and reputation together make up your personal brand.

Fortunately, LinkedIn is an excellent place for purposefully developing and promoting a compelling personal brand.

Firstly, decide which adverbs you want potential clients and customers to associate with you. These ought to be aspirational and achievable. Secondly, build up a content strategy around it.

The top areas of your profile that will reflect your personal brand are the following:

• The “About” section
• Your content
• The recommendations that were given to you

Certainly, a prospect will be able to tell right away from looking at your profile that you’re experienced and trustworthy.

If you want to learn more about how to grow your brand on LinkedIn read our blog post about 8 brand-growing LinkedIn marketing tips.

LinkedIn Social Selling Best Practices

• Consistently share content that is relevant to your industry: by doing this, above all, you’ll demonstrate to potential customers that you are educated about and updated with industry trends.
• Share your opinion about industry trends: don’t be shy of speaking out if you have anything worth sharing. Potential clients will be able to see from your insights that you are an expert in the subject. Just make sure to provide evidence to support your assertions.
• Keep an eye on what your competitors are posting: you can modify your own social selling strategy in light of having this information handy to make sure you stay one step ahead of the competition.
• Interact with content that has been shared by others: don’t think that social selling is solely about you. Moreover, make sure you consistently share, like, and interact with content created by others. Feel free to share amazing discoveries with others or to get in touch with the author directly to start a conversation.

 

In closing,

Give prospects a compelling reason to connect with you on LinkedIn and as a result deal with your business. Turn LinkedIn into a powerful business tool implementing the best approaches and practices described in the guide you just finished reading.

We know that the hardest step is to start, and hopefully, we gave you enough reasons to no longer wait.

 

About the author:

Tali is a results-driven digital marketer with a track record of growing her clients’ businesses and driving revenue.

As the business owner at WSI Digital Path, Vaughan, she takes great pride in delivering powerful but cost-effective solutions for her clients.

Innovative and revolutionary digital marketing trends set the pace for the digital marketing industry. Don’t make the mistake of falling behind! Contact WSI Digital Path today and trust your digital marketing to the industry’s leading professionals.