How to Use LinkedIn for Sales: 12 Tips to Get Maximum Leads

According to FoundationInc, more than 550 million users are registered in the LinkedIn professional social network today, representing 150 business sectors from 200 countries. And every second, while you read it, 2 new participants join LinkedIn.

So, using LinkedIn for sales is a brilliant idea! 94% of marketers use LinkedIn to distribute their content, compared 89% for Twitter, 77% for both YouTube and Facebook, and 61% for Google+.

Weblium website builder team is going to share with you some important tips on how to use LinkedIn for sales. But do not forget that a good seller should have a portfolio, a site, showcasing his service or product, or at least a landing page!

 LinkedIn profile tips for sales

In a whole, there are three main segments of the LinkedIn profile, the modernization of which allows increasing the level of sales:

1. Title.
2. Description of the current position.
3. Media content and projects.

•         The default settings of LinkedIn set the current position as the profile header. It is a good idea to use this feature for your purposes: change the tagline to your offer and get a profit!

For example, if you are engaged in SEO, you can create a tagline like “double your website traffic in a month”. You have 120 characters to show your creativity in the title. Keep this in mind, as this is the first, and sometimes the only thing that users see in your profile.

•         Most of the job responsibilities at LinkedIn are a template list of tasks and a brief description of the company. To optimize your profile to increase sales, describe the current position using the company’s beneficial commercial offers.
•         The last section that can be optimized is your projects and media content. You can add text and video messages, and even slides to your LinkedIn profile. So if you have a cool presentation for clients, immediately add it to your profile.

And do not forget about the winning profile photo!

 Make contacts with niche groups

Narrowing the focus to a more concentrated market will lead to higher engagement and better conversion rates, even when it comes to LinkedIn.

Interaction with highly specialized niche groups can facilitate your work, as you can determine what benefits your company will bring to this particular market.

Using such a sales strategy on social networks is very effective; 75% of people holding leadership positions in B2B companies say that social media has a significant influence on their decisions, especially when it comes to researching the possibilities and purchasing of certain goods.

Then you can create custom filters for qualified leads, and Leadfeeder, integrated with your LinkedIn Sales Navigator will create a list of potential customers right in your Inbox.

Find customers already interested

Use the «People Also Viewed» option \ to double the number of the best previous customers and expand the sales funnel.

Think about those customers who needed your services, those who benefited the most, based on industry, position or specialty. Look through their profiles and see who else might be interested in your offer.

Sending a connection request to these users has a great chance of success.

Use LinkedIn Pulse to Publish Content

Use the “Interests – Pulse” menu. On the “Most Popular” tab, you can follow interesting publications, and on the “Discover New” tab, you can find communities and users whose news it will be useful for you to subscribe to.

This is a powerful sales tool for two reasons:

1. It allows you to share your knowledge with other professionals from their industry.
2. It allows you to instantly reach an audience.

When you publish content to LinkedIn Pulse, everyone on your contact network gets notified. This is just another reason to constantly connect with people from your industry on LinkedIn.

What kind of content should you post on LinkedIn? Here are some ideas:

• Interview one of your customers about how they use your product.
• Analyze new trends in your industry.
• Post news about product updates.
• Post unique information that you learned from customers.

Use Suggested Actions on LinkedIn as Interaction Points

One of LinkedIn’s latest features enables retailers to reconnect with their network of contacts. Engagement points can be events such as finding a new job, career advancement, work anniversary, or even just a new profile image.

With this feature, you can build relationships with customers in just a few seconds every day.

Suggested actions can be especially useful if you add each customer you make a deal with to your network. This will help strengthen relationships with customers and always be aware of when a client gets a job in a new company, which allows you to follow him.

Join the groups that your customers have joined

If you do an external search for potential customers, LinkedIn groups allow you to contact them before sending cold emails:

1. Open a list of potential customers and assign each contact to their LinkedIn profile.
2. Most profiles on LinkedIn show the groups that they have joined. Go through the entire list of profiles and copy all the groups each person is a member of.
3. In the table, note how many members each group has, whether it is open or closed, how involved the members of the group are, and how many potential customers are there in each group.
4. Based on this data, select 2-3 groups to join and become their active member.

Communicate in groups regularly

Participation in groups provides many opportunities:

• Commenting on publications of other participants.
• Helping the community to answer questions.
• Posting questions or asking for help.
• Sharing content that promotes your product.
• Posting other people’s content that you liked.

Try to find a consistent combination of each of these actions to become an active, useful and valuable member of the community and not to be classified as a spammer.

Adjust the frequency of participation in groups so that you can do this constantly. For example, commenting on posts every Tuesday, posting other people’s content every Thursday, and finding opportunities to be useful every Friday.

This, along with using the right keywords, joining groups, posting individual status updates frequently and getting more recommendations will allow you to quickly appear in LinkedIn’s top search results.

Know who is viewing your profile

To do this, use the “x people viewed your profile” menu. Some of these people may be your potential customers.

Use LinkedIn Showcase Pages

LinkedIn Showcase Pages are niche pages that help you to promote specific services or products. To create a Showcase Page, use the “Edit” menu on your company’s page.

Target your publications

To do this, click on the «Share with» menu, select the «Targeted audience» option and specify your audience.

Adjust your profile

As the «Sophisticated Marketers Guide to LinkedIn» shows, conversion from sales’ profiles is 2 times lower than from profiles of CEO or other C-Level guys.

Choose the right countries and cities

There are many other cities apart from New York and San Francisco. Go to cities with lesser competition. And if, for example, your conversion rate for New York was 0.8%, in other cities it can reach up to 15-20%, with a narrow sample and much less competition within the same city.

If the conversion is below 5%, this means that either the region is too competitive, or you have a poor contact base, or your messages are not effective enough.