Even with training on LinkedIn, social selling remains a complex, time-consuming, and somewhat technical approach. However, this social network with 467 million members ( The Moderator’s Blog – Q3 2016) is a powerful tool for meeting your customers of tomorrow. Also, strengthening your presence on LinkedIn has become essential to any business strategy.
The essence of the approach lies in the work of targeting and approach, like what we do through our Insides Sales. Indeed, LinkedIn represents an incredible opportunity for those who know how to establish a relationship of trust with the right contacts. So it is good to aim for a quadruple objective:
- Generate the first contact with your prospects,
- Enter into the conversation,
- Trigger an appointment and
- Identify in your prospects a problem (or problematic) and an interest in your offers.
Founded based on our daily practice and our expertise, discover the best social selling techniques to the better prospect on LinkedIn.
Invite the right people
It is important to start by building the network that will allow you to convert the best. The key then is to correctly select the companies and employees to integrate into your network.
How to do it? We can first list between 150 and 300 target accounts that meet your marketing objectives. Then, within these companies, it is necessary to identify the decision-maker and the circle of influencers. Depending on your offers, this represents between 3 and 5 contacts that you invite to be part of your network.
Illustration: You sell infrastructure solutions in the cloud. You will invite the CIO into your network, but not only. It is also important to identify those responsible for systems, infrastructure, CISO, purchasing, etc. There may be only one person who signs the order form in the end, but they are not alone and isolated to arbitrate. . Also, it is necessary to reach all of its employees who are involved in the decision-making chain: prescribers, influencers, etc.
To organize your invitations on LinkedIn as well as possible, it is good to simultaneously build up your database in your CRM by including the following information: Company / Staff group / Sector / Last name / First name. In addition, some solutions on the market, such as Datananas or Email Hunter, allowing you to identify the professional email address of the targets you want to contact.
Send a welcome mail
When a prospect accepts your invitation, you should always thank them with a personalized welcome message. At this point, initiating a discussion with your contact is your only goal. You can tell him that you will come back to him later because you think that there are synergies to develop between your two companies.
Conversely, it is not advisable to send a 20-line copy and paste that presents your activity. It feels it shows and your new relationship is not fooled.
Schedule messages to your connections
After accepting your new relationships, it is a question of establishing a strategy of regular reminders. Its objective is to advance the engagement of your prospects with your company. Depending on the profile of each of your new contacts, it is good to anticipate the scheduling of the broadcast of your future messages.
To be effective, we recommend that you implement 2 to 3 different dissemination tactics. By measuring the return rates, you will be able to adjust your procedures. Each of your posts should be concise and include a call to action, such as a physical date request or an event invitation.
Bring your profile to life
You must appear in the news feed and notifications of your LinkedIn connections. How to proceed? We can share and publish content regularly. Like what you may already be doing on your blog, it is good to try to be useful to your targets by using the springs of inbound marketing. We believe that to be effective, presenting qualitative, relevant, and essential information is the best option.
To feed your content strategy, we suggest that you take up the two axes that we use:
The curation of content related to your field of activity
The ScoopIt solution is ideal for monitoring. Thanks to it, you can identify the most appropriate content for your industry and distribute it regularly on your network.
Publishing your company’s content
To assert your expert value, it is useful to create content with different formats: feature articles, news, infographics, studies, etc. To do this, the publications issued by your marketing department will help.
Interact with your network
Thanks to the animation of your account, you generate interactions with your relations which give credibility to your profile. It is recommended that you respond as a priority to the reactions of your readers, those who have liked, commented, or shared your publications. Either way, being responsive and spontaneous is a great thing.
It is useful to take advantage of all the opportunities available to you by reacting to job changes, birthdays, publications, additions of skills,… of your relationships.
Tease
You have to perform teasings and preview broadcasts of your premium content. Soliciting their advice from your contacts is also important. This tip promotes engagement and thus the impact of your posts.
Participate in focus groups
You can subscribe to the main industry discussion groups. They allow you to stay on top of what’s going on in your field and learn more about your targets as they interact.
Then reacting to the different publications that are made in these groups is necessary. It is good to initiate discussion topics and highlight your blog content yourself. This good practice allows you to gradually position yourself as an opinion leader.
Leverage your competition’s publications
It is also important that you watch what your competition is doing. The information in their content can inspire you. Personalized contact with the likers and commentators of these publications is also appropriate.
Keep your profile up to date
Of course, having a complete, up-to-date, and optimized LinkedIn profile is essential. It should be written in such a way as to showcase your expertise and your insurance business by using keywords related to your field of activity. In addition, it must display your commercial offer concerning the pieces of bread of your prospects.
Like your company page, your account represents your commercial showcase. It is also good to feed it with customer recommendations, publications on the network, awards and distinctions obtained,… Your profile constitutes the cornerstone of your brand image.
Act in multi-channel
Beyond the possibilities offered on the LinkedIn site, various channels allow you to interest your prospects. Thus, your contacts can be solicited directly from their professional mailboxes, by extracting their emails via LinkedIn. We can offer them, for example, a white paper corresponding to their areas of interest.
Directly prospecting a relationship by phone is possible wisely and by taking up the whole contextual environment. We see that this type of call gives excellent results because you are already identified with the person. However, your approach must incorporate very personalized elements of context.
As you will have understood, this type of strategy requires method and time to be able to fully bear fruit. This is why social selling cannot be decreed. To succeed in your process, you need to put enough skills and requirements into it. Also being able to invest daily in the long term in a systematic way is crucial. And if you are not personally in a position to achieve this, outsourcing these assignments is one avenue to explore. Professionals offer their customers to take charge of this process.
