Selling is hard especially when you don’t have a budget for big marketing campaigns. So, what to do in such a situation?
Well, try the golden rule of marketing- build deep relationships with your prospects. According to famous marketer Famous Jeffrey Gitomer, great salesmen are in reality, great relationship builders. They offer value to customers and make them win.
In 2024, doing so is even easier due to social media. And a professional network like LinkedIn is absolutely a golden opportunity for growth.
You can target a broader audience to promote your products or services.
Also, you can do a lot of marketing and promotion for free. And even the premium plans enable you to specifically target potential customers. Hence, you won’t waste your marketing budget and energies on a generic audience.
Importance of LinkedIn for Sales
On one side, it has a high development potential for individual professionals. On the other side, it also provides many unique ways to increase sales performance.
Small businesses can use it for marketing and lead generation. In turn, they will get more sales and could generate higher profits.
LinkedIn provides free and paid opportunities to improve sales. You can approach thousands of potential customers on this platform. So, you have a chance to target a large audience.
Plus, you can create valuable content to inspire your followers and make them buy from your brand.
How to Increase Your Sales Performance Using LinkedIn?
You can make sales through LinkedIn in many ways. Either use your personal profile, business page, or industry groups.
Whatever way you go, you will need well-planned marketing strategies to increase sales.
Here are some ways to increase sales using your LinkedIn profile:
- Develop a Professional LinkedIn Profile
As a business owner/representative, you can convert your profile into a lead magnet.
To do so, make your profile professional and buyer-centric.
Share valuable tips for your potential customers in your posts. When you discuss clients’ matters and their solutions, ultimately your authenticity increases.
And meanwhile talking about their problems, introduce your products and describe how they would solve those problems.
Showcase your expertise and achievements with your network to prove your brand authority. Use stories and high-quality visuals to describe what makes your company unique.
- Use LinkedIn Groups Effectively
Group selection is important when you are doing it for sales purposes. Because it’s futile to promote your products to a generic group.
Niche-focused groups are ideal where most members are your potential clients. There you can encourage your target audience to explore your products in many ways. For instance:
- Share useful information and tips about the topics your ideal customers care about. For example, if you sell a weight loss pill, you can attract ideal buyers by sharing tips for losing weight faster.
- Answer the burning questions asked in these groups. Social groups are made for mutual support. Many people ask for advice and tips on different matters in such groups. You can develop personal relations with potential customers by providing useful answers to those questions.
Bonus points if your product can solve those issues. Besides giving effective tips, you can also state the benefits of the products in your answer.
- Strategic LinkedIn Networking
LinkedIn is the largest professional networking platform. However, if you try to attract everyone, a lot of your efforts can go futile as the famous sales quote goes:
“If you are selling to everyone and you will sell to no one.”
The better method is to target the right audience. Don’t waste time with generic outreach. Even if your sales plan is open networking, you should do it strategically.
- A handy tip is to use LinkedIn’s advanced search filters. These filters allow you to short-list individuals who are most likely to buy the product when you approach them.
You get the most advanced options when you buy a Sales Navigator plan. Still, you can do targeted research to some extent using the free LinkedIn profile. - Custom tailor your messages when you outreach. Don’t just blast generic messages.
Personalized messages for each client can take you very far in the relation-building process.
Do some research about the person and tailor your message accordingly.
Find out what are their professional and personal goals. Look into their profile and group posts to figure it out.
Talk specifically about one of these things from their profile in your message. Or express a genuine interest in their challenges.
- Share Valuable Content
Your goal should be to offer value first. Don’t be pushy!
Start by providing helpful information or resources, like industry reports, insightful articles, or free consultations.
Share articles, tips, or news relevant to your field. Such content will position you as an expert in front of potential customers. Thus, it is an excellent way to attract leads because they already trust you and your brand.
Success stories from previous customers are a great content idea as it:
- Makes you look authentic
- And backs your product with social proof
Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator Helpful For Business Growth?
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a premium service from LinkedIn for business owners and sales teams. This multifunctional tool helps you:
- Find out the ideal leads
- Message these potential customers even if you are not connected to them
- Directly approach the decision-makers when cold messaging
- Get valuable insights about your target audience
More or less, it is an advanced version of LinkedIn search but specifically geared towards sales teams. Additional features include saving leads lists and accessing unconnected people via InMail.
Being a paid tool, it’s an investment. But its targeted prospecting features make this LinkedIn tool super handy tool for B2B sales.
Benefits of LinkedIn Sales Navigator
- It allows you to perform advanced company searches. You get over 25 advanced filter options for lead search.
Hence, you can target your ideal prospects with laser precision based on industry, company size, job title, keywords, and even shared connections.
- Because LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network. A vast amount of data is available in their database. Sales Navigator uses this database to provide you with hyper-targeted search results matching your criteria and interests.
This way it saves you a lot of time and effort in prospecting. - LinkedIn Sales Navigator also provides you with relationship management tools. Using these tools, you can:
- create custom lead lists
- track your interactions with prospects
- get notifications on recent industry developments and events
- A sales intelligence comes built-in Sales Navigator system. This system helps you stay ahead of the competition with real-time updates on leads and companies, industry trends, and competitor activity.
How to use Linked Sales Navigator?
- You can access LinkedIn Navigator by clicking on its icon
- Sometimes the icon is not visible there. In that case, click on the (For Business) icon
3. Once you are on the Navigator page, you will see 2 options for filters:
Leads Filters
These filters enable you to shortlist the potential clients based on their company, job titles, geography, industry, and experience, etc
Account Filters
With the account filter option, you can search for companies and organizations to whom you can sell your b2b products.
After setting the filters, check the profile/s you want to approach. Make a new list and add those profiles to that.
Setting Leads Filters
You can filter your lead search results in different ways. For example, the Sales Navigator panel has 6 sections containing more than 2 dozen options. These are
Company
Filters in this section help you find decision-makers in the companies.
For Instance, if you sell a product that can be useful for small businesses, set (10-50, 51-200, 201-500) for the company headcount filter. This way, your search results would not include people from bigger businesses.
Similarly, specify the company location and type to shortlist potential clients from relevant companies only.
Role
In this section, you can specify the department your prospects work in. This can be sales, customer service, or information technology, etc.
The job title is an even better filter. A useful tip for using this filter is to add different variations of the title. For example, if you want to outreach the CEO-level persons, add “CEO” “owner” “founder” and “co-founder,” because all these refer to nearly the same position.
Besides that, you can choose to filter by seniority level and experience.
Personal
Here you specify the personal traits of your potential clients like geography, industry, language, school, and years of experience, etc.
With the geography filter, you can target professionals from a specific region. While the language filter helps you to sort out the people you can effectively communicate with.
Besides that, you can even find the profile of a potential client by their First or Last name.
Buyer Intent
These filters will provide you with a list of potential buyers who are already interested in your company and services. By turning on these options, you will only see the people who follow your company’s page or who have visited your profile recently.
Best Path In
Using these filters, you can set if you want to approach the persons you already know or complete strangers.
Recent updates
You will find the newly added filters in this section. For instance, LinkedIn has added 3 new options in this panel in 2024:
- Changed Jobs
- Posted on LinkedIn
- Mentioned in news
The filter “posted on LinkedIn in last 30 days,” will help you focus your sales effort to individuals who actively use the platform. It’s important because you can only make a sale if the prospect actually reads and responds to your messaging.
Similarly, you can target people who have recently switched their jobs. As they are new in the role, they are usually more eager to try new products for the company’s functions.
Work Flow
In this section, you can specify your ideal buyer persona and use the prospect list you have already created.
Subscribe To LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you have not signed up for this service, you will be directed to the Navigator sales page showing that you can get up to 3.8 times more sales with this tool.
- Hit the Try Now button under your preferred package to start your 1-month free trial.
- The sign-in page will open. Here enter the email address and password of your LinkedIn account.
- After confirming your identity, LinkedIn will show the billing form.
- Select the monthly or yearly package and fill in the payment details. Click on Review Order and check out.
- After that, you can use the tool. One month for free and then paying according to your selected package.
References:
https://www.linkedin.com/help/sales-navigator/answer/a102021