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Things your sales team needs to know about LinkedIn

660 million LinkedIn users are senior level influencers and 63 million are in decision-making positions. So why isn’t your sales team using LinkedIn to secure your next sale?

The modern sales team need more than just a car, the yellow pages and a company phone. They need 21st century tech which is going to go the distance so that they don’t have to.

It’s exactly where LinkedIn comes in.

LinkedIn was launched back in 2003 with its main purpose being for professional networking. Need a new job and have nowhere to look? LinkedIn took the job hunt out of your local area and the newspapers and right into your living room. It was and still is the working professionals dream, so how has it changed to allow modern sales teams to use it successfully for building new leads?

Well, 15 years later and the platform has expanded quite extensively.  As of October 2019, there were 660 million users registered world-wide in over 200 countries, out of which there is a colossal active user community of 250 million people.

Now if that isn’t an opportunity not to be missed we don’t know what is.

So, what does the modern sales team need to know about LinkedIn? After all, LinkedIn is pretty much a social network for individuals looking for their next job move right? So, quite literally where is the connection?

Insights for free

Let’s start on the free platform. LinkedIn may focus primarily on getting you and your prospects that next jump up the career ladder but in doing that you’ve also unlocked another insight we bet you haven’t even thought about.

LinkedIn provides us a degree of information which we wouldn’t otherwise have on our prospects. No, we don’t know where they grew up or what their favourite breakfast food is (vegetarian cooked breakfast, thanks for asking) but we do know their career history, their skill sets, and we get to learn their goals. Whether those goals are attributed to their current company, the one they are building or the industry they love we can gather a huge amount of information on our prospects and quickly. And that is exactly where LinkedIn finds its sweet spot.

So, if you are starting anywhere, start with free and consider more than just connection requests and updates but instead start looking at the tool as helping you make better, more informed decisions as to who your prospects are, who to reach out to and what they want to be sold and if you already know that aren’t you already half way there?

Paid but powerful

Now for the hard-core sales team member who wants to get into the nitty gritty of it, we have Sales Navigator (Sales Nav). If I had to explain where Sales Nav fails sales teams, I would liken it to Salesforce: there is far more available to you once you scratch the surface. But I understand, the surface can be confusing.

The main benefits to starting with a professional Sales Nav package (starting at roughly £50.00pcm) is your ability to utilise advanced search and better still the previously unlocked contacts thanks to the sales navigator interface and its own unique newsfeed. A newsfeed where you can even pull in ‘leads’ and see your prospects posts without a connection.

Paid LinkedIn at any level also gives you access to InMails, so you can start the conversation with prospects that are outside of your network.

For the well-connected sales team as well, all paid packages come with CRM and email integration capabilities, so LinkedIn needn’t be a single entity but can feed directly into your sales funnel and do all that pesky admin work for you.

The next step

All of this is barely scratching the surface of what LinkedIn can really do for your sales team and that’s why in 2018 we started working with clients and their sales team in a new way, offering our comprehensive, ‘Social Selling in a Box’ package which offers your teams on-site and away training, all the content, all the design and even posting schedules and best practice tips to get teams on the right track to making the most of LinkedIn’s selling potential in 2020.

Want to know more about LinkedIn and how Fieldworks can superpower your sales team in 2020? Why not get in touch?

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