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LinkedIn

12 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your LinkedIn Profile

LinkedIn is the finest social media network for B2B marketing out of the many social media platforms today. According to one survey, LinkedIn creates more than 80% of B2B leads generated through social media. Businesses are clearly discovering leads on this large social network, but are you sure you’re optimizing its features?

Whether you’re just getting started on LinkedIn or want to step up your LinkedIn lead-generating game, there are a few important steps you should make to get the most out of your LinkedIn B2B marketing.

The best ways for optimizing your LinkedIn profile

B2B decision-makers, like everyone else, conduct research online. And they frequently find up on LinkedIn while looking for information about possible clients, sellers, and a service or product they may acquire for their business. It’s also a reliable referral source. As a result, these changes to your LinkedIn profile might have a tremendous impact.

Fine-tune your settings. 

If you want your account to help you produce leads, you need to make sure that those leads can discover you. Begin by making your LinkedIn profile public and creating a unique URL for yourself.  Go to your account and click “View profile as”, then “Manage public profile settings” to make sure your profile is public.

You may also create a custom URL on this page. It’s preferable to include your entire name here so that others can discover your profile quickly. 

Showcase your profile

Target leads with your language. 

If you want to optimize the lead production potential of your LinkedIn profile, you should make each modification with a specific demographic in mind. Consider the buyer personas of the most valuable leads for your company and ensure you’re speaking their language.

Summarize what you do. 

You must provide a precise and straightforward summary of your profile right away. The easiest place to do this is in your profile’s title and summary. Use terms that are immediately related to the prospects you wish to attract. 

Optimize your photo. 

While you may not believe that your LinkedIn photo has an impact on lead creation, it most certainly does. According to one eye-tracking research, LinkedIn profile visitors spend over 20% of their time on a profile looking at the photo, so make sure you look your best.

There are several tips and Do’s and Don’ts for LinkedIn profile images available, but suffice it to say that it should be as crisp and presentable as possible. You are considerably more likely to be desirable as a seller or partner if you present a professional image.

content is key

If you don’t publish, you’ll perish.

One of the greatest methods to attract high-quality leads to your account is to create excellent unique content. The same holds for your LinkedIn profile. The site’s publishing tool, LinkedIn Pulse, was just recently made available to the entire public. Your LinkedIn friends will be alerted when you post on LinkedIn Pulse, and it will appear on your profile.

Achieve a higher participation grade. 

You will not produce as many leads as you might if you do not properly participate in the LinkedIn network, no matter how good your profile seems. Every possible business and specialization has a plethora of organizations and groups to choose from. The organizations and groups you join will be visible on your profile, allowing prospective leads to learning more about your experience and interests.

participate, lead, showcase

Ask for recommendations. 

This is a fantastic approach to display your skills and reputation to your coworkers, clients, and other connections. A recommendation should be as detailed as possible.

Some people opt to make recommendations for others in the hopes that others would reciprocate. Simply asking nicely for a recommendation is the best way to obtain them.

Take the lead.

Being a regular participant in famous LinkedIn groups can help you generate leads faster, but launching your group can be much more successful. That’s because, as the administrator of a group, you may utilize LinkedIn announcements to send emails to your members. Use this feature to start conversations about important industry subjects, develop thought leadership, and cultivate leads.

Make your slides available. 

SlideShare was bought by LinkedIn in 2012, making it simpler than ever to distribute your B2B presentations as LinkedIn content. You can quickly urge visitors of your presentations to provide you with their contact details and opt into your marketing activities, thanks to its built-in lead-generating function.

Put together a portfolio. 

The LinkedIn portfolio feature is perfect for exhibiting your efforts, such as presentations and larger-scale projects on which you have worked. This establishes your authority and might entice potential clients to visit your website and eventually become leads.

Build your company profile.

A company LinkedIn page is a must-have for B2B lead creation. Your company page serves as a storehouse for relevant content about your business and may serve as an extension of your homepage, demonstrating to potential clients your brand and what you care about.

A business page may also be used to provide inbound marketing content, such as whitepapers and ebooks, as well as webinar invitations. The LinkedIn Showcase page functionality allows you to establish several LinkedIn pages for different brands and companies under your umbrella brand, making it easy to split your lead generation strategies even further.

Don’t brag about your rivals.

You’ll see a section labeled “People Also Viewed” on the right side of your LinkedIn profile page if you go to it. The pages or accounts mentioned there are visitors of your page who have also looked at their profiles. You’ll note that the majority of them work in the same business or industry as you or have the same job title. Instead of clicking away to one of those persons, you want those who are looking at your account to learn more about your expertise. So turning off this feature is advised. 

Conclusion

If you know how to utilize LinkedIn for B2B lead creation, it may be a very powerful tool. You may get a lot more out of your LinkedIn profile by investing a bit more time in it. Start with these suggestions and see how they influence your lead generation game.

Categories
LinkedIn

How to Use LinkedIn to Attract the Best Sales Talent

The era of the Great Resignation has arrived. In April of 2021, 2.7 million people resigned from their employment, a record-breaking number for more than twenty years. By July, it was reported that there were 10.9 million job openings, with employers scurrying to fill them.

Recently, however, the job floodgates have opened as a result of more people being inoculated against COVID-19 and the relaxation of pandemic restrictions. Now, employees are feeling more in control than they have in years.

To attract these talents employers have been offering flexible work hours, competitive compensation, and other perks and benefits regardless. However, job seekers are increasingly searching for more. They want to work in environments that share their values and provide them meaning.

In a talent-driven employment market, top candidates will accept offers from companies that share their goals, purpose, and vision. This makes the ongoing talent exodus an issue that affects not just recruiters and human resource specialists, but sales leaders as well.

Things to consider when attracting the best B2B sellers

As a sales leader in a company competing for top talent, there are several factors that you have to consider: your corporate brand, the quality of the work you provide, and the purpose or meaning the position will deliver.

Measuring success begins with determining where a candidate’s journey starts and which touchpoints drive them to you as a potential employer. When it comes to developing relationships with potential prospects, every touchpoint is crucial.

Using LinkedIn to find and recruit the finest people

Your sellers play a crucial role in your B2B company’s expansion and development. They work to build and keep your company’s client base and improve revenue by recognizing and chasing new leads, spotting upsell possibilities, and offering a great customer experience. Sellers must have outstanding communication skills and a thorough understanding of a company’s offers to successfully steer prospects toward the solutions they seek.

This means that when hiring the best talents out there, you will need all the help you can get to be successful. Here are some LinkedIn tools and resources to assist you in hiring the best people available:

Career Pages

Career Pages is a branding tool for employers that highlights your company’s culture and vacant positions.

Recruiter

The Recruiter platform assists you in locating, connecting with, and managing the individuals you want on your team.

Talent Insights

Employment Insights is a workforce planning tool that uses real-time data to help you make intelligent talent decisions.

Using LinkedIn as a hiring platform may assist your company whether you invest in recruitment tools or simply comply with best practices. It is also a good way to nurture your corporate image, make the most of your network of connections, and locate the top active and passive applicants than any other job board.

As a B2B business, attracting talent isn’t always simple, but leveraging LinkedIn’s capabilities may help you battle for top talent on an equal footing with your competition. 

Keeping your sellers on board

Keeping your sellers on board

More than hiring them, keeping sellers continues to be a major difficulty for businesses across all industries. The COVID-19 epidemic has created several obstacles, but it has undoubtedly reached a tipping point for many sellers, prompting employers to reconsider their whole employment model and the importance of keeping their best staff. 

To overcome this, your company should devise ways to aid the Great Retention, allowing it to recruit and retain your sellers.

While the top sellers and other business professionals these days desire better compensation to remain in a company, they also want more flexible work schedules and conditions, a better corporate culture, and more incentives to be interested in their job and inspired to come to work every day. If you don’t want to comply with these expectations, you may soon find yourself in the same situation as many other businesses: a slew of resignations.

Top sellers now seek more from their companies because they want to be fulfilled. It’s critical to build retention programs like these to guarantee that you’re satisfying your talent’s present (and likely future) demands.

Here are some ideas for keeping your greatest sellers:

  • Recognize that recruitment methods are the foundation for long-term retention.
  • Offer a pay and benefits package that is competitive (naturally).
  • Create flexible job possibilities.
  • Provide opportunities for professional growth.
  • Create clear routes to success.
  • Insist on — and cultivate – a pleasant work environment.
  • Keep your employees motivated by engaging them.
  • Ascertain that they have the resources and tools they need to thrive in their jobs.
  • Be a mentor, not a watchdog!

Today’s sellers are involved in their lives as much as their jobs. They don’t want to work for organizations that they see as ‘dead ends’ on several levels. As we have seen again and again throughout the pandemic, time is important and life is all too fleeting. Your company may contribute to Great Retention by devising ways to recruit talents who share your purpose and encourage them to commit their time and skill to your company for the long haul.

Conclusion

Businesses and companies will have to compete for the top talent as the large talent movement is expected to continue over the next year or more. Good thing LinkedIn offers several solutions that can assist your company at every stage of the process of attracting and retaining top talent, from prospect to applicant to a new hire.

Categories
LinkedIn

The 10 Most Popular LinkedIn Features for Sales Professionals

The sales environment has been changed by social selling, which has made it simpler than ever to engage with prospects and uncover leads organically. LinkedIn has long been a popular and successful platform to identify and nurture sales prospects since it is the common social media site for networking opportunities and partnerships.

Many LinkedIn features are aimed at helping you save time, build your network, and achieve your business objectives. Here are several LinkedIn features you may not be aware of that might help you increase your business revenue.

What are the hottest LinkedIn features I should use as a sales professional?

Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales teams, even more, control over how they find prospects and manage their pipelines. It’s a sales management tool that aims to make it easier for sellers to connect to LinkedIn’s vast network and, as a result, secure more (and better) transactions.

Members can get access to monthly InMail messages, stored leads, sophisticated lead and company searches, and custom lists. Alerts for leads and accounts, as well as notes and tags, may also be utilized.

These make it simpler to manage sales pipelines and guarantee nothing goes through the cracks.

Shared Experiences and Commonalities

Users can already store leads in Sales Navigator, but the “Share experiences with you” feature makes it simpler to find possibilities inside that database. By bringing together all the potential clients who have at least one thing in common with you, the feature gives you a great base for building trust and rapport.

When you contact out, highlighting this point of commonality will increase your odds of getting a reply.

Account and lead suggestions

With automated lead and account suggestions, LinkedIn can help sales teams maintain their pipeline filled.  Sellers should use the LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s Sales Preferences feature to ensure that their suggestions are as near to their buyer profiles as possible. Location, industry, role, and seniority level may be among these factors.

Showcase pages

Showcase pages on LinkedIn are an excellent approach to categorizing your incoming LinkedIn visitors. Developing a Showcase page can greatly assist you in creating a business unit that is closely connected to a specific audience

As a company, you can use this feature to target distinct buyer personas by creating single pages dedicated to certain items, product offerings, and services.

Users may also follow individual Showcase pages without needing to follow the company’s primary page or any of its other Showcase pages on LinkedIn. You may also alter the page based on the actions and interests of that specific audience.

These were created specifically for B2B businesses to help them generate more leads.

Save the results of your searches

Do you spend much time on LinkedIn looking for prospects, articles, or courses? You should save your results in case you want to come back to them later.

You may keep their searches, articles, and learning programs on LinkedIn. The stored things are listed under “My items” on your profile.

You can also use this LinkedIn function to get weekly or monthly email alerts whenever a new user of the network or a job meets your stored search criteria.

Advanced Search Option

LinkedIn Advanced Search Option

The Advanced Search Option gives you a more efficient search experience. It’s the most effective technique to locate and contact someone as part of a focused search.

You could wish to discover if you’re related to someone who works at a certain business, for example. You may also refine your search by region, industry, prior employer, school, profile language, and interest in nonprofits.

LinkedIn Education

LinkedIn provides several excellent courses that may assist anyone in developing important skills. Individually, you may utilize LinkedIn Learning to develop your business or selling abilities, or you can purchase courses for your revenue team.

Live on LinkedIn

Livestreaming has exploded in popularity across a variety of social media platforms. Even though LinkedIn has this feature, few businesses use it as part of their content promotional campaign.

LinkedIn Polls

LinkedIn now has a tool that allows you to build polls that your audience may participate in. This is a fantastic approach to increase immediate interaction while also learning more about your contacts. You may utilize LinkedIn polls to pose lighthearted, hypothetical questions to engage your audience.

Before this new option, if you wanted to share a sequence of photos in a post organically, you had to publish them as a gallery, which was difficult to manage. You may now share a multi-page PDF document and have it displayed as a scrollable carousel on the platform. This approach makes telling a clear, compelling tale or collection of suggestions a lot simpler.

Conclusion

LinkedIn, like any other network, is always experimenting and developing new features. While these LinkedIn features aren’t as well-known, they may be game-changers if used correctly.

These LinkedIn features are the ultimate hack to LinkedIn success, whether it’s driving more traffic, increasing exposure, or even generating viral branding. LinkedIn analytics tools may also be used to boost social media metrics such as engagement, impressions, and followers.

Categories
Sales Inspiration Sales Management

How Focusing on Clients’ Success Can Pave the Path to Your Own Success

Customer success is critical to every company’s progress in modern selling. This strategy is intended to ensure that the client successfully uses the company’s products and services. As a result, customer loyalty and retention improve, churn decreases, renewal sales remain consistent, and the business owner can upsell these accounts.

The distinction between customer service and customer success has recently aroused much debate. Although the two require similar skill sets and objectives, they take distinct methods.

What’s the difference between customer success and customer service?

difference between customer success and customer service

Reactive vs. Proactive Management

Customer service is often “reactive,” meaning that it responds to a customer’s request for assistance or when they contact them with an issue or query. Customer success, meanwhile, is “proactive,” concentrating on assisting clients in identifying and achieving their objectives.

Relationship-Oriented vs. Transactional

The majority of customer service and support contacts are transactional. It starts when a client contacts you and terminates to respond to their request. Customer success, on the other hand, does not have an endpoint. It’s a continuous, dynamic, and persistent focus on enhancing current connections to strengthen the tie between the client and your business.

Key Performance Indicators and Metrics

Customer service metrics are focused on monitoring and improving both the speed and quality of assistance interactions. This level of assessment usually ignores events that occur before or after the support engagement.

On the other hand, customer success is concerned with the beneficial effects that those interactions may have on a happy client, such as improved retention rates, rising repeat purchases, higher lifetime value, and higher upsell or cross-sell rates.

The path to customer success

The path to customer success

Make the client, not your product, the focus.

There’s a reason it’s called customer success. Make it such that you assist clients in achieving their objectives and your product benefits as a result, rather than the other way around. 

You must also be aware of your clients’ journeys. To do so, lead them through their journey from awareness to retention. You must be familiar with your product, including what it can and cannot accomplish. Always make sure that your reaction is in line with their cultural beliefs. Never make a promise you can’t keep. Make sure they know how much you respect their time.

Clients’ perspectives must be taken into account when speaking with them. Avoid sounding excessively professional or bombarding them with jargon. Use their degree of comprehension to communicate. You could think that using templates and prepared replies is a good idea, but clients will notice. As a result, you must leave such replies to automated communications. Also, pay attention to what they’re trying to say. Make your replies and background on your inquiries as precise as possible. You must make every effort to please them.

Keep expectations in check.

The requirement to manage client expectations is inextricably linked to creating an Ideal Customer Profile. Success should not be defined by closing a sale; instead, it should be determined by resolving your clients’ problems. Accounts don’t buy your product; they buy a solution. When they get the result they want, their problem is solved. The question is, what problems are you tackling specifically?

Clients with different issues will demand varying levels of solutions from your product if you don’t narrow down the value proposition. You’ll wind up with many unhappy and furious clients whose issues your product isn’t addressing, and they’ll tell your genuine clients about their bad experiences.

So, how do you keep track of your accounts’ expectations? Of course, by being precise about your value offerings. Don’t be an all-in-one bargain for your clients. Instead, choose your product’s finest qualities and advantages and promote them in your communications.

Ask regularly.

Requesting feedback is standard corporate practice. What’s to stop you? It aids in the development of a clear image of how real people use your product. This is the foundation for making product changes and enhancements before they become serious problems. It also aids in the development of client loyalty.

Customer success, as previously said, takes a proactive approach. You may also apply this to your clients. Inquire about their work and feelings towards your product or service. Maintain an open line of communication and various communication channels so that people may contact you at any time and via their chosen mode.

Assign the right people to the job.

Assign the right people to the job

To increase your bottom line, success management is essential. As a result, it should go without saying that the individuals in charge should be outstanding. They must be able to deal with various situations and communicate effectively with consumers.

At the absolute least, your customer success team members should possess the following characteristics. 

  • Experienced

They must have extensive knowledge and experience in the industry they work in. They’ll provide guidance, answers, and directions, among other things.

  • Great listener

When clients take the time to come to you with a concern, the least you can do is listen. Good customer success people, on the other hand, go beyond that. They pay attention to the issue at hand and recognize the issue they’re experiencing, no matter how minor. This is the most effective technique to deal with their technical and emotional problems.

  • Patient

Early consumers demand a lot of hand-holding and assistance. In addition, they have great expectations. As a result, successful sales teams must be competent in dealing with this. They must be able to lead their clients through the entire process, including the ups and downs, and answer any questions they may have, all the while retaining a calm and polite approach. 

Conclusion

Producing a high-quality product and marketing it to your target market is no longer enough. Clients are more demanding than they have ever been. They won’t settle for anything unless they’re confident the solution they’re investing their money in will work for them. To keep your clients loyal to your business and generate sales, you must be the best match for them. Ensure this by implementing customer success in your business.