Getting Serious About “Social” Selling: Part 2 – Leveraging LinkedIn

Getting Serious About “Social” Selling: Part 2 – Leveraging LinkedIn Jonathan Bentley, Managing Director, Head of Content The Social Network for Business Using social media has become an important element for business growth. It is essential to know strategies that work for each outlet in order to maximize your effectiveness.

LinkedIn is primarily focused on developing business relationships. Since the advent of LinkedIn, it has grown far beyond the convenient online business Rolodex with 277 million members worldwide to date. It is now the de facto source for professional history and connections. LinkedIn is also becoming a primary source of new leads rather than the place to update your resume or poach potential job candidates.

The 2nd Degree of Separation Twenty-five years ago, a social sciences theory, termed “six degrees of separation,” entered the business lexicon. “Six degrees of separation” suggests that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by a maximum of six steps or degrees. The primary power of social network platforms is that they have engineered a profoundly efficient way to leverage the second degree of separation. They build you a bridge to connect with everyone known by those that you know. Facebook drives these connections through friends and family; Twitter through opinion and wit; and LinkedIn through those with whom you work.

In LinkedIn’s ecosystem, this means the primary power is not in your own work relationship network, but in your network’s network, the second degree. Any target professional or business personnel in your market area that has number two next to their name means they know someone you know. By contacting the mutual connection to determine his or her willingness to make an introduction, you have just turned a cold call into a warm lead. To make this work you really need to be intentional about farming your relationship networks. It means that if your contacts are primarily friends and family you need to be planting seeds in some new fields. The key tip here is to make a habit of following up quickly with a request to connect with the people that you meet online or offline on LinkedIn, while it is still fresh in each other’s minds.

Prospect Relationship Radar For complex sales with multiple decision-makers, relationship mapping is made easy through LinkedIn. LinkedIn can be used for mapping out the rank of, and connections between, decision makers within your target prospects. Many people

add profiles items such as team, which office they work in, what projects they’re focusing on, and so on. With a little detective work, you can build up a picture of who you should be talking to, what they’re like through recommendations and what they’ve done before.

With the advanced search function, available with paid accounts, LinkedIn has an outstanding search capability. You can find people by title, company, location or keyword as well as company size and seniority. By efficiently mixing the different filters you can get fairly robust results in order to identify key individuals and their interests. Furthermore, you can save your search criteria and get a weekly report that lists anyone new who matches the prospective clients for whom you are looking. An example would be the ability to save a search for Employee Benefit Managers in midsized manufacturing companies within 50 miles of your city.

Then, each week you would get an email with anyone new who matches your search.

In our next post we will continue with more advanced ways to use LinkedIn. We will focus on how it has recently opened its publishing platform creating a blogging tool for developing your business. If you would like to learn more about InvestCloud’s compliant content services and how we can help your firm develop its social media presence, visit us at www.investcloud.comor click here to request a demo.

Jonathan Bentley leads InvestCloud’s content development and management division. From helping advisors better craft and deliver their stories to curating customized advisor RSS site feeds, Jonathan’s team is critical to InvestCloud’s bespoke design and site management services. Jonathan was previously founder and CEO of LightPort Inc. which merged with InvestCloud in 2013.

Previously a practicing RIA, while at LightPort Jonathan was involved in developing web portals for more than 500 advisors and money managers.