Using LinkedIn for business to business sales is an interesting prospect – LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network, and most sales teams already use it for prospecting and researching prospects. But can you use it as an effective part of your sales process? How does it compare to more traditional channels like cold calls or cold emails?

The answer is that LinkedIn CAN be used to generate new pipeline. But you need to be strategic and invest time before you’ll see results. 

In my experience using LinkedIn to break into high value enterprise accounts (think Fortune 500 executives who never pick up the phone), I’ve found 6 tactics that help cut through the noise:

1. Have a Compelling Reason to Connect
2. Share Insights
3. Sell The Next Step, Not The Whole Solution
4. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for Prospects, Not Recruiters
5. Measure Your Social Selling Process
6. Be Human

Let’s dig into each of them in more detail.

Have a Compelling Reason to Connect

It’s really easy to connect with your prospects on LinkedIn. It’s almost laughably easy. You can probably get away with spamming connect requests without any personalization at all and still see a 20% connect rate. 

Here’s the thing – those connections also mean very little. You don’t want low value connections. You want to connect with your prospects and you want to come across as a trusted thought leader from the very first message. 

Start your LinkedIn social selling process with a super compelling reason to connect. Highlight how YOU add value to the prospect by being in their network. 

It doesn’t need to be difficult or complicated – you can say something as simple as:

“Hey prospect, LOVED your profile and we share some professional interests like A, B & C. I share a lot of insights around those. Let’s connect?”

Keep your message enthusiastic, friendly, and offer them a reason to connect. Even better, if it’s a really valuable prospect then spend a little time seeing if you can mention something on their profile that you do genuinely have an interest in. 

Share Insights

Regularly share articles, but don’t just post them – add your own context or summarize the key takeaways and add your opinion. Ask your network for their opinions.

We’ve all seen those sales reps who just spam articles on their personal LinkedIn profile. Or even worse – people who only share content from their own company’s blog. 

This is shallow, doesn’t add any value for anyone and is the antithesis of Social Selling.

Here’s a better approach to sharing insights, broken into easy steps:

1. Set up a Google Alert for keywords related to your industry.
   • Google Alerts will notify you anytime there’s news around your keyword, sent directly to your email.
   • I would start by brainstorming a list of topics that a) matter to your prospects and b) can be linked back to your value proposition without too many steps.
   • For example, if you sell accounting software to small businesses, you might want to set up alerts like “small business + tax regulations” or “small business + payroll best practices”.
   • This is going to provide you with a steady stream of content to pull from.
   • It might take a little trial and error before your regular email from Google pulls in relevant content, so don’t be afraid to turn off any Google Alerts that only send spammy content. 
2. Every week, set aside 30 minutes on your calendar to go through your Google Alerts and pick out 5-10 of the best ones. Drop these links into Word or Google Docs. 
3. For each link, scan the article and summarize the main takeaway in a few short sentences. Add this into your document underneath the link to stay organized. 
4. Here’s the secret sauce: You have qualifying questions, right? Add at least one of them after the summary you’ve written as your Call-To-Action (CTA). 
5. Repeat for each article, and you’ll have content that you can copy and paste for the rest of the week. It shouldn’t take more than an hour and you’ll find you’ll become more efficient as you continue this process. 
6. Throughout the week, you can set reminders on your calendar on when to post each piece of content. Or you can even use a tool like Buffer to automate the posting for you. 

If you follow this process, people will stop thinking of you as just a spammy sales rep and will start to see you as a thought leader – after all, you’re now posting relevant content, summarizing it concisely, and asking thoughtful questions. 

Sell the Next Step, Not the Whole Solution. 

Your goal isn’t to close someone on a deal once they engage with one of your posts. Far from it. Instead, you need to close your prospects on the next step in the sales process – a phone call.

Don’t think of LinkedIn (or any social platform) in the same way you think about the phone or email. Think of it as a way to build up your credibility.

You have an opportunity to position yourself as a thought leader. Thought leaders don’t try to sell you something the second you like or comment on their post. They offer value and insights that help you solve a problem. 

The phone call is where you share that insight with your prospects. Teach them about their problem, and position your product as the logical solution. Like they say in The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson & Matthew Dixon, you want to “teach towards the sale”.

Optimize your LinkedIn Profile for the Prospect, Not the Recruiter

If you’re using LinkedIn for Social Selling, then your profile needs to be targeted at prospects. This is a subtle but extremely important change to make. 

Most people list out all their achievements or responsibilities under their job history. That’s great if you’re looking for a new job, but it’s not going to help you attract any new prospects. 

Instead, you should rewrite your LinkedIn profile to highlight:

1. The specific problem you solve + who you solve it for, ideally in your headline. So if you sell insurance to small businesses, you would say something like “Helping small business owners mitigate risk” in your headline. 
2. Bring up your customer’s burning pain points in the first paragraph of your profile summary. It’s even more powerful if you can do this by telling a story about a customer you’ve helped. Continuing from the previous example: “When I met Joe, he was worried about what would happen if disaster struck and his business didn’t have the cash flow to survive…”
3. You’re not here to sell. You’re here to solve problems and offer insights. So tie up that profile summary by ending the story with your customer’s problem actually being solved: “Today Joe can sleep easily, knowing he has nothing to worry about. Even if something happens to his business, he’ll have the cash flow to survive and bounce back.”
4. Instead of listing your President’s Club streak or quota attainment under your current role use that valuable digital real estate to build some credibility – highlight your most recognizable clients and state your company’s value proposition. What makes your company different and why should prospects choose you?
5. Ask your customers for references. If your prospects see that you’ve actually helped other people like them, that’s extremely powerful social proof. 
6. Pick endorsements that showcase you’re a subject matter expert in your prospect’s field. Resist the urge to include “Sales” as one of your skills, talented as you may be. 
7. Make sure your contact info is in your profile, and make it easy to find. It should be above the fold so that prospects can easily see how to reach you without having to scroll down your entire profile.

Measure Your Social Selling Process

Success in any sales process can often be boiled down to how well you track and measure your results. Don’t try to message a bunch of prospects on LinkedIn without a plan. And when you do execute that plan, make sure you measure the results. 

Otherwise you’re not following a Social Selling Process. You’re just doing random things. Random things do not lead to predictable results. And they are not going to be effective if you want to use LinkedIn for business to business sales.

Stay organized. 

I recommend tracking your LinkedIn outreach with a spreadsheet or even a piece of paper. 

You should treat LinkedIn like any other funnel, and be able to measure your results based on what you’re saying to prospects. This is the only way you will improve your social selling process.

Don’t Be ‘Salesy’. Be Human.

Be conversational and human. Even in business to business sales, you’re still selling to other people. 

What’s specific to LinkedIn is that you aren’t competing against the business of the workday. You’re not writing formal emails that are getting a quick glance in the inbox. You’re not making cold calls to prospects in the middle of their work day. 

Prospects check LinkedIn when they’re bored! 

That’s not an excuse to be verbose and write long boring paragraphs. But it’s a great excuse to ease up and be a little more human in your sales approach.

You’re talking to people in a more casual setting. Keep things relaxed and don’t start with your company’s value prop, start with YOUR value prop – Why should this complete stranger connect with you? 

Keep it casual:

“I’m Dave and we share an interest in X. Here’s something cool about X that I liked checking out, what do you think?”

Is much better than:

“I’m Dave and I work with a company called ABC Corp. We sell widgets for software companies to enable them to switch to a cloud infrastructure. If you have 30 minutes, why don’t we talk about how our solution can help your business?”

Even though the second option might work in other channels, it’s not going to be effective on LinkedIn. You’re selling too hard and too early. With LinkedIn, you want to take the slow burn approach to creating value so that prospects start to trust and value your opinion. 

Let’s Wrap it Up

When it comes to Social Selling and using LinkedIn for business to business sales, these principles will guide you not just on LinkedIn but any other social network. Truthfully, they’ll work on most digital platforms where you can engage with prospects.

If you want to succeed at Social Selling, then remember that you need to 1) have a compelling reason to connect, 2) share insights, 3) sell the next step but not the whole solution, 4) optimize your LinkedIn profile for prospects, 5) measure your social selling process, and most importantly – 6) be human. 

Have questions about how these principles apply to your own Social Selling process? Leave a comment below!