LinkedIn the inbound way

LinkedIn is more than a great way to keep in touch with your work colleagues, it also should be a part of your inbound marketing strategy, particularly if you are a B2B organisation. But how do you approach LinkedIn?  To help explain how to use LinkedIn in a way that is engaging and trustworthy, I have collaborated with a group of experienced sales people and marketers to create a comprehensive guide to using LinkedIn: The Inbound Way.

We collectively struggled with what to call this guide. Should we put salespeople in the title? Should we put marketing in the title, or the current buzzword...”social selling”? One thing we did agree on was that we couldn’t use the word “sales”, as it’s a scary, four letter word and that our clients – business owners, entrepreneurs and marketing managers – wouldn’t identify themselves as ‘salespeople’ in the traditional sense.

Blurred Lines?

But the days of the traditional sales person are long gone. These days the buyer is in control. They are doing their research online, forming opinions and short lists before even thinking about speaking to a salesperson. So we are all in fact sales people, whether you have sales on your business card or not, we are all in sales. A bad customer support experience can hurt sales. Poor product development can hurt sales. Your prospects for promotion can be hurt if you don't ‘sell’ yourself. Whether it’s selling yourself as you climb the corporate ladder or running your own business, we are all selling something in some way. This means that now the line between sales and marketing is not so much blurred as it is completely disappeared.

Today, you need to know when to sell and when to market and using LinkedIn is a classic example of that. How do you use LinkedIn to be helpful and build trust? These are the two key elements for inbound sales success. We have all seen people posting ‘salesy’, self-serving blog posts into LinkedIn groups, or someone you don't know asking to connect. How you handle yourself on LinkedIn speaks a lot to your transparency, helpfulness and whether you'd be a good person to work with.

The individual contribution to the company brand

People buy from people, even if you work for a big company, there’s arguably never been a better time to add the person to the brand.

I have never really understood why an organisation would want to stop their sales people from blogging or participating on social media. Sure, there's the political question of who "owns" social media, but, with some training and guidance, your salespeople can and should be having conversations in social media. After all, you've entrusted them to meet with prospective customers face to face, so why not online?

Years ago, salespeople were hired based on the strength of their Rolodexes. Nowadays, LinkedIn is the Rolodex and the strength of their LinkedIn network is a key component of a strong, modern salesperson.

So how does that help marketing?

Imagine what could happen if your 5, 50 or 500 salespeople were sharing relevant articles, conversing and being helpful online? The increased level of activity will drive traffic to your blog, white papers and offers, create further engagement, trust and expand the company's reach.

When I’ve spoken with business owners, many of them say that they get the majority of their leads from referrals or networking. What many of them don't realise is that LinkedIn is the modern version of networking, just amplified 10x. Trying to have a face-to-face conversation with all of your “friends of friends” is impossible. Networking that way is just not scalable. But, on LinkedIn you can and all the information is right there, if you know where to look.

The strength of your network and the integrity of your social presence not only helps you, but also helps your company. That’s why this guide is designed to help individuals use LinkedIn to attract attention to themselves (and their company), create interest and foster engagement and develop a funnel and pipeline full of ideal prospective customers.

We purposefully have not covered LinkedIn company pages or more of the ways that companies use LinkedIn. There are many other excellent guides that cover just that. Our focus is how an individual, whether independent or employed can use LinkedIn.

So, go forth and remember…. always be helping.