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sales strategy

How To Increase Your Customer Renewals

New business is always great. In most situations, the more customers, the better. That’s why almost all revenue teams devote most of their time and resources to acquiring new customers. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually on advertising and marketing each year—in fact, the United States saw over $240 billion in ad spend in 2019 alone.

But while a new customer is always a worthwhile pursuit, you shouldn’t forget that customer renewals are just as important. It’s imperative that companies allocate time, effort, and resources to put together a comprehensive customer retention or customer success strategy. Here’s what you stand to gain from a high customer retention rate.

The Benefits of Customer Renewals

1. Retention is cheaper than acquisition.

It’s more cost-effective to keep an existing client than to bring in a new one. According to this Harvard Business Review article, acquiring a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. While retaining customers may not always be easy, it definitely pays off.

2. Existing customers are more likely to purchase from you again.

If a customer is satisfied by the value of your product or service, they’re more likely to purchase again. So it makes sense that retained customers have been proven to buy more often and spend more than new ones, and it’s estimated that almost 65% of a company’s business comes from repeat customers.

3. You’ll have a higher chance of getting customer referrals.

Happy customers are the best form of advertising. Despite the massive strides undertaken by the marketing and advertising industries in recent years, word of mouth still reigns supreme, delivering higher conversion rates while expending minimal resources.

4. You’ll have a ready market for new products and services.

When you’ve proven your value to a customer, they’ll be six times more likely to try a new product or service from your brand when it becomes available. This also gives your company wiggle room to develop new products, different messaging efforts, and other branding initiatives.

5. Loyal, engaged customers are more willing to provide feedback.

Satisfied customers will be more willing to share their thoughts about your products and services and thus, will be more likely to tell you how you can improve. And if they have a bad experience with your company, they’d be more willing to let the issue slide—as long as it doesn’t happen again.

These are just some ways a great customer retention program can benefit your company. So how can you increase your customers’ likelihood of renewing their contracts with you?

How To Increase Your Customer Renewals

Here’s something all sales professionals should know: The more contacts you have within an account, the more chances you’ll have of entering sales conversations—which can lead to customer renewals.

“Let’s assume that you’ve met an extra five, six, seven people [within an account], gone out, and introduced yourself proactively to them. You’ve told them about what you’re doing in that account, you’ve told them that you’re working with their peers and colleagues, and you’re starting to actively strike up more sales conversations,” says Sales for Life CEO Jamie Shanks.

“You can call this cross-selling, upselling—it really doesn’t matter. But having more contacts or stakeholders in an account will absolutely increase the likelihood of renewal and expansion of business in any account that you’re dealing with.”

To expand your network and enter new sales conversations, you need to go where your customers are.

“You’ve got to be on platforms like LinkedIn,” says Shanks. “You’ve got to deliberately, and with intentionality, go out there, find people in all the key accounts, start connecting with them, and start striking up conversations with them.”

Do this every single day, and set targets for the number of people you’ll reach out to per session. This way, you can increase your network size gradually and strike up more conversations with people in your target accounts. Your customer renewal rate will thank you for it.

Key Customer Renewal Metrics

To see if your customer renewal efforts are working, you need to know how to measure customer retention. This allows you to make more informed decisions concerning your sales strategy. Here are the most important customer retention metrics that all sellers should know:

Calculating The Customer Retention Rate

  1. Count your total number of customers at the end of a specific time period.
  2. Subtract the number of new customers you’ve acquired during the same time period.
  3. Divide the difference by the number of customers you had at the start of the time period.

Customer Retention Rate vs. Churn Rate

Some sellers confuse retention rate and churn rate. These two metrics, though related, are vastly different.

The retention rate refers to the percentage of customers that have returned to your company to avail of your product or service within a certain time period. The churn rate, meanwhile, refers to the percentage of customers that you’ve lost over a period of time. 

A high retention rate corresponds to a low churn rate, and vice versa. Customer churn is normal—but if it’s higher than five to seven percent, you should take a step back and evaluate your sales strategy.

Calculating The Repeat Purchase Ratio

The repeat purchase ratio refers to the percentage of customers that have returned to buy from your company again. It’s especially helpful for assessing the performance and impact of your company’s customer retention strategy.

  1. Get the number of returning customers.
  2. Divide it by the number of your total customers.

Calculating The Customer Lifetime Value

The customer lifetime value refers to the revenue generated by a single customer. Your customer lifetime value should ideally rise or, at least, stay constant—a shrinking number could indicate that you’re losing customers at a faster rate than before, and that’s not a good thing.

  1. Divide your gross annual sales by the total number of unique customers in a year. This is your average revenue per customer.
  2. See how many years each one of your customers has stayed with your company, and get the average. This is your average customer lifespan.
  3. Multiply the average revenue per customer by the average customer lifespan.

There are more metrics that you should track to get a clearer picture of your customer retention efforts, but you can start with these. The data you can collect from these metrics allow you to improve your customer experience and increase your renewals.

Conclusion

If your company doesn’t have a customer retention strategy in place, you’re missing out on several benefits. Not only is it one of the best investments that your company can make, but it’s also one of the most effective marketing strategies for your business.

There are many things that you can do to increase your customer renewals, but the easiest way to go about it is by increasing your connections within an account. This paves the way for more conversations, converts more champions for your brand, and, in time, increases your opportunities to upsell and cross-sell your products and services.

Categories
Social Selling

How To Make Your LinkedIn Profile More Attractive To Buyers

If you want to succeed in today’s modern selling environment, you have to accept that the power lies in the customer’s hands.

Our access to information has drastically increased in the last couple of decades, and customers are taking full advantage of the availability of objective data to form their own opinions and beliefs about the options at their fingertips. Buyers have never been more in control of their purchasing decisions, with the product being the only variable that sellers can adjust.

The impact of this change is especially felt by B2B sellers. In the past, buyers would, upon discovering a need for a particular product or solution, reach out to different companies to get information about their offerings, their features, and their prices. Conversely, sellers can easily cold call decision-makers and help them uncover a need they did not know existed.

But this isn’t the case anymore. In fact, most of the B2B buying process is performed out of the seller’s sight, with buyers doing their own research digitally via online content and social media, specifically on LinkedIn.

Social selling on LinkedIn: the key to B2B sales success

LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social networking site, with over 800M members across 200 countries. This makes it the perfect platform for social selling, with nearly endless opportunities to generate leads and referrals, prospect efficiently, and build relationships with your customers.

Social selling success on LinkedIn hinges on the sellers’ application of both outbound and inbound strategies. This is the only way to achieve undisputable results that could be felt across the entire organization.

Outbound social selling strategies

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “sales”?

Chances are you’re probably imagining a sales rep reaching out to a customer to promote their product or service, maybe through a phone call or via a meeting. This is exactly what outbound sales is: The process in which the seller initiates communication with a prospective buyer via sales activities such as emailing, cold calling, or social selling.

While outbound selling methods are clearly effective—that’s how sales reps have been meeting their quota for years—it’s not enough if you want to surpass your sales goals. You can make the most of your outbound sales efforts by strategically targeting only the accounts with the highest likelihood of conversion.

Still, this isn’t enough to be successful in sales. The best sellers complement their outbound sales techniques with inbound sales methods. This turns them into lead magnets, attracting customers in their sleep.

Inbound social selling strategies

Turning your LinkedIn profile into a lead magnet requires a strong, carefully crafted personal brand. Your personal brand should show that you are an active participant in your industry, thus establishing your authority and knowledge. Do it right, and expect to reap its benefits—the most notable of which is an increase in the inquiries you’ll get from prospects.

To achieve this, the first thing you need to do is to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

How to optimize your LinkedIn profile

An updated, optimized LinkedIn profile can boost the reputation of any professional, but it’s especially helpful for people in sales and marketing. It adds credibility to both you and your company and helps you reach a broader audience.

Ready to revamp your LinkedIn presence? Start with the following areas of your profile

1. Your Profile Photo and Background Photo

Your photo is the first thing that people notice when they visit your profile. Upload a high-resolution, well-lit headshot, preferably one where you’re smiling to give a friendly, approachable impression. While you’re at it, update your background photo to indicate your professional brand. Remember, first impressions last—so you better make sure your photo creates a positive impact.

2. Your Headline

Your headline is where you can highlight what you do and how you can help your customers. Use action-based keywords to project confidence and authority, and use terms that clearly define your role and contributions.

3. Your About/Summary Section

Your summary should complement your headline, adding more details about how you can help your customers win. Use this section to position yourself as a thought leader in your field. Try not to exceed 150 words—any longer, and it’ll be tedious to read.

4. Your Recommendations

Recommendations serve as social proof of what you have written in your Headline and About sections. For customer-facing roles, a minimum of five recommendations would be ideal.

5. Your Activity

This is where your profile’s visitors can see your perspectives about your industry. Share relevant content, comment on your connections’ news, and engage with posts that resonate with you—these simple actions go a long way in showing that you’re an active, contributing member of your online community.

Conclusion

A strong LinkedIn presence is necessary to survive and thrive in today’s modern, cutthroat B2B sales environment. The sooner you accept this, the faster your revenue team can meet quotas, grow pipeline, and maximize profitability. 

The easiest way to strengthen your LinkedIn presence is by optimizing your profile. 

Upload clear profile photos that reflect your personality, write a headline that shows your professional capabilities and include a personal summary that sheds more light on your accomplishments. Don’t forget to post and share content regularly, and ask for recommendations from people whom you have worked with.

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LinkedIn

How Can You Fully Utilize Your LinkedIn Sales Navigator Investment?

With nearly 800 million members worldwide, LinkedIn’s status as the world’s largest professional social network is indisputable. Though LinkedIn gained popularity as a way for job seekers to connect with hiring scouts and get potential recommendations, it has also become an international hub where global professionals can expand their networks and form industry-shaping connections. As time went on, sales professionals learned to leverage the platform to improve their bottom line.

With an ever-climbing percentage of companies using LinkedIn for sales and networking, can your organization keep up in today’s increasingly competitive social selling environment? To own your place in the digital sales ecosystem, you need to be serious about your LinkedIn strategy–starting with your usage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

All About LinkedIn Sales Navigator

The free version of LinkedIn can be used by any member of any company to find leads, reach out to prospects, and close deals. However, its capabilities are severely limited. If you want to take full advantage of what LinkedIn can do for your revenue, you should invest in Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s roster of features is specially developed with sales professionals in mind. It allows users to search and reach out to more leads and companies, keep track of changes within your prospect accounts, and engage with your network in bold and different ways. 

The most popular function of LinkedIn Sales Navigator is probably Advanced Search, which makes prospecting on the platform a breeze. There are over 20 filters you can apply to narrow down your search to get the most promising leads. You can also perform boolean searches in keywords, title, and company fields, allowing you to find the people who fit your ideal customer profile to a T.

Let’s take a look at some other features of LinkedIn Sales Navigator:

  • LinkedIn InMail: InMail is an incredibly useful tool for any sales professional, but it’s not available on the free version of the service. However, the basic version of LinkedIn Sales Navigator comes with 20 InMails per month. The Team and Enterprise tiers of Sales Navigator add even more opportunities to reach out, giving you up to 50 InMails per month. The more InMails you can send, the more potential first connections you can make with prospects of interest. 

  • Extended Network Access: The free version of LinkedIn imposes a monthly commercial use limit on the amount and extent of the searches you can run. Only being able to search a limited number of profiles every 30 days can seriously impede your ability to generate leads and follow up with potential prospects. LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives sales professionals access to an unlimited number of profiles, increasing your potential to generate new leads. You can also save your searches and create alerts to keep track of any changes within your target accounts.

  • Integration with your sales tools: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is designed to integrate seamlessly with your revenue team’s daily sales and relationship workflow. That’s why it has certified integrations with the most popular CRMs in the market, including Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Hubspot, Oracle CX Sales, Pega, SAP, and SugarCRM. You can access Sales Navigator as a viewable embedded profile within your CRM, or you can actively sync it with your existing software to efficiently move important data like leads and accounts from one platform to another.

Given all these benefits, you might think that the next logical step is to get Sales Navigator accounts for your entire revenue team. Let’s get one thing clear: Sales Navigator is absolutely worth it—but only if your team knows how to properly use it.

What You Should Consider Before Investing In LinkedIn Sales Navigator

 Is LinkedIn Sales Navigator worth investing in? All signs point to “yes.”

According to data that LinkedIn has gathered from usage reporting, Sales Navigator users have reported experiencing the following benefits:

In an industry where connections are so powerful, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a worthwhile investment that can maximize your potential for lead generation. If used correctly, there is no doubt that this purchase can make your company’s sales strategy skyrocket in terms of efficiency. 

But just because you can afford it, doesn’t mean you should buy it for your whole team.

Process Before Platform

A lot of sellers would ask us if they should invest in LinkedIn Sales Navigator accounts for their entire revenue teams. Would it be a worthwhile investment, or would a mix of free and premium accounts make more sense?

The answer will depend on your organization’s unique situation. The key, says our CEO Jamie Shanks, is to remember that your process should dictate your platform.

“If your team does not have a process for using the tool, it doesn’t really matter. You’re going to have terrible seller utilization,” says Shanks.

He compares it to giving a sports car to every member of his team because they all need to get to work early, only to find out that not everyone can maximize it. Some people use different forms of transportation, so they can’t take full advantage of the car. On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who can’t even drive in the first place, rendering the car useless.

“If your own team is not socially surrounding your customers, not developing robust social networks, and not altering their own social platform profiles, then what is Sales Navigator going to offer them from an account-based sales development standpoint?” asks Shanks.

“Yes, you can organize accounts and create lists and save these lists in more structured ways, but if they can’t do the fundamentals…why do you need to give them a Porsche?”

That said, Shanks’ advice is to give Sales Navigator access to only the sellers who can really maximize the platform: your business development representatives and your key account executives with robust total addressable markets (TAM). Sales Navigator will allow them to efficiently analyze, segment, and contact the most qualified leads to speed up their sales process.

Conclusion

Always remember that an effective sales process is the key to maximizing LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Getting the most out of this investment is a whole process that requires dedication, attentiveness, and a perceptive eye for sales opportunities.

Sales Navigator offers tremendous opportunities for prospecting, so don’t be afraid to integrate it as tightly as possible with your existing sales strategy. When your sales goals are properly defined and aligned with your strategy and tools, your sellers can propel your company onto the top of the market.

Categories
b2b sales

How To Start Building Your Personal Brand

If you want to stand out from the rest of the sellers in the market, you need a strong personal brand that reflects what you stand for.

Your brand tells potential buyers what they can expect from you. It tells them about your personality, your processes, and your working style. And, depending on how well you build your brand, it tells them how reliable you are as an authority in your industry.

The Importance Of Having A Personal Brand

At Sales for Life, we believe that a strong personal brand isn’t just nice to have as a seller, but a must-have.

In fact, one of the first things we teach in our flagship course, The ScalePipeline System, is the importance of building a strong personal brand. We have a whole module about it: Modern Branding Fundamentals, where we teach sales professionals how to build their professional reputations and increase conversations by strategically creating and sharing content on LinkedIn. This gradually builds you up as an authority in your industry, making prospects see you as someone they can trust.

Build your personal brand well, and you’ll have customers reaching out to you instead of the other way around. You’ll have the power to draw in leads in your sleep. And that’s why having a strong personal brand is the best inbound sales strategy.

So how can you get started building your personal brand?

3 things you need to know when building your personal brand

The first thing you need to know when building your personal brand is that there are three things that will ultimately determine the results of your efforts. Think of these three factors as levers that determine the effectiveness of your engagement efforts: Many times, when your sellers’ messages aren’t resonating, they’re probably not manipulating some of these levers.

  1. The stories you tell people: the stories have to offer value for your prospects: You should be able to make them money, save them money, or mitigate their risk.

  2. The mediums through which you tell stories: The medium by which you engage with your prospects informs your message. Whether it’s email, video, text, snail mail, or LinkedIn—creative sellers will consider a variety of different mediums, recognizing that they can’t predict which medium is going to land with the customer. It helps to use an omni-channel approach, testing different engagement strategies to socially surround that customer.

  3. The cadence and sequence: This pertains to the order and operation by which you tell your stories. Key account selling is not for two-week closes. It takes several weeks and months to close deals—and that’s why you need to engage with your audience regularly and repeatedly in order for your brand to stick in their minds.

If you isolate each one of these levers, you’ll be able to develop an engagement action plan. But first, you need to recognize that a one-time approach doesn’t work. Sending one message and hoping you get a response is not a strategy.

Always think about how you can manipulate these three levers to alter the results and outcomes that you’re trying to achieve. As a seller, you should always think five chess moves ahead. That’s why the best key account sellers have at least five sales plays in their pocket, being delivered over weeks and months. This way, they’re constantly engaging with and nurturing their customers.

LinkedIn: The Best Place To Start Building Your Personal Brand

One of the most optimal mediums to build your personal brand is LinkedIn. It’s the most conducive platform for building a professional presence that properly showcases your work to your network.

 Below are the five basic things you can do to improve your LinkedIn profile—and, correspondingly, your personal brand.

  1. Add a professional profile photo: Pick an appropriate profile photo that corresponds with your role. It doesn’t have to be taken by a professional photographer, but it has to be clear with a non-distracting background and should showcase you in your best light. 

  2. Write a distinctive headline: Your default headline is your current employment position, but you can write your own to demonstrate your expertise or your role. Think of your headline as your personal tagline—include the words and phrases that you’d like to be used to describe you.

  3. Change your LinkedIn background photo: You can upload a LinkedIn background photo to tell your network more about who you are and what you do. You can use it to echo your company’s brand, or to share your own hobbies and achievements.

  4. Optimize your summary and experience sections: Your LinkedIn profile and your resume should not show the same things. Your experience should list your major accomplishments and the key positions you’ve held, along with brief explanations of each role. Meanwhile, your summary is where you can dive deeper into your vision for your role or company. Back up your achievements with statistics, and use keywords to make your profile easier to find.

  5. Ask for recommendations: The most effective kinds of advertising are those done for you by other people—and that’s exactly what LinkedIn recommendations do. Recommendations from trusted contacts whom you work or have worked with will be visible to your network, giving your reputation an instant boost.

Conclusion

Building your personal brand is necessary to boost your professional reputation. It’s doubly important when you work in sales. A strong personal brand can turn you into a lead magnet, thus functioning as your inbound sales strategy.

Being active on LinkedIn is one of the easiest ways to build your personal brand. Optimize your profile, network strategically, and publish content regularly. Keep in mind the three levers that will affect your engagement strategy: Your stories, mediums, and cadences. Adjust your sales plays constantly to get the results you want, and constantly engage your audience so your brand will leave a strong impression on their minds.

Categories
Social Selling

5 Things You Can Do To Fill Your Social Media Calendar

Social media is one of the most powerful tools in a sales professional’s arsenal. You can use social media platforms to build pipeline, gather information, communicate with prospects, and conduct research. But one of the most powerful ways to use social media is for establishing your and your company’s brand and authority—and the easiest way to do this is via content.

Posting content on a regular basis builds credibility and expands your reach, making it a reliable way to strengthen your brand. It makes your presence and authority known, allowing you to more effectively influence your network.

The best part is that your connections won’t even know that they are being influenced, because you’re doing so in a way that won’t register in their consciousness. Instead of blatantly appealing to their emotions to buy your product, you’re presenting yourself in the best possible light and establishing connections with those who are most likely to become your clients, leading their minds to realize that you’re a trustworthy seller.

3 Reasons To Post On Social Media Daily

Posting content regularly isn’t just nice to do—it’s a must-do. And it should be done on a daily basis, if possible.

You see, when you regularly post or share content, you’re telling your market that you have something substantial that they should consider. And the more people that you can educate, the greater the chances that they’ll do business with you. 

  1. You can anchor your brand to the messages you want to convey.

    First impressions may not always be correct, but they certainly last. This is explained by the concept of anchoring: Why our brains easily recall the first piece of information that we obtain when we have to make a decision or when presented with an unfamiliar scenario.

    By posting regularly, you can anchor your personal brand to a particular message, such as competence or creativity, that you want your audience to associate with you.

  2. You can make your brand easier to remember.

    Humans are naturally biased towards things that they can recall easily. That’s why the goal in advertising is to occupy the customer’s “top of mind”. You want your brand to be the first thing that pops up in their mind when they think about their industry.

    Every time you post on social media, the people who see your content are reminded of who you are and what you do, thus increasing the space you occupy in their minds. Even if they don’t engage with your post, you’ll still make an impact on them—and this increases the chances that you’ll be the first one they’ll think about when it comes to your product or service.

  3. You can benefit from the Halo Effect.

    The Halo Effect is the tendency for a positive impression that you may have about a person or a product to extend to other, unrelated attributes. For example, if you perceive someone to be successful professionally, you might think that they’re similarly happy in other aspects of their lives. Or if a friend frequently posts gorgeous photos on Instagram, it’s easy to conclude that their day-to-day activities are always picture-perfect (even if that’s not really the case).

    So by establishing yourself as an authority in your industry through your social media posts, your network would unconsciously extend your expertise beyond the topics of your content. You’ll be perceived as a competent, trustworthy person that can help them succeed.

However, posting content on a daily basis is much easier said than done. Can you really keep posting about the same topic every single day?

Our answer is a resounding yes.

The good news is that you don’t have to write thought-provoking essays or create engaging images every time. Here’s how you can keep a full social media calendar without thinking too much about it.

4 Things You Can Do To Fill Your Content Calendar

  1. Share stories and news that you find interesting. As we’ve mentioned earlier, you don’t have to write profound analyses of your industry every day. Simply sharing news and stories from reputable sources is also an effective way of demonstrating your expertise—it shows you’re up-to-date on the latest news and trends, and thus, can be relied on for legitimate industry knowledge.

  2. Share stories of client wins. The most effective forms of promotion are those made by other people. Showing how you played a part in creating positive experiences for your clients can sharply boost your personal brand and reinforce your expertise.

  3. Post about the people in your network. As the saying goes, your network is your net worth. Don’t hesitate to incorporate your connections when planning your social media calendar. Repost their content and add your own insights to establish your knowledge on the topic.

    You can also post happy photos from in-person events that you’ve attended, such as conferences and networking events. This shows your online connections that you have great offline relationships, and that you’re a person they should get to know. 

  4. Automate your posts. Most social media platforms allow post scheduling, which is a godsend for busy sellers and marketers. You can produce several posts in one go, schedule them on your intended days, and they’ll be automatically published.

  5. Ask questions and create polls. These types of posts demand engagmement from their audience. When they like, comment on, or share your content, the algorithm will be trained to show them more of your posts in the future, increasing the space that your brand occupies in their minds.
Categories
Account Based Sales Development account basedsales Social Selling

Social Surrounding: A Critical Aspect of Account-Based Selling

As a B2B seller, one of the most important things you should remember is that you don’t win companies. You win people.

Winning people involves building relationships with them. Relationship-building requires showing the other person that you genuinely care about them and the things that are important to them.

The good thing is that there are several tools at your disposal that make it easier to build long-lasting business relationships. You can use social selling techniques not only to improve your online presence and reputation, but also to find more information about your customers that can help you position yourself accordingly. And when you know how their world looks like and what their pain points are, you’ll have a better idea of how you can add value to their lives.

Now, the average sales professional has relationships with 3 contacts from an account. That doesn’t seem like a bad number. But buying decisions are made by committees, and in a typical organization, there are around 8 people who influence and contribute to the decision-making process. Even in smaller companies, most salespeople just have 1 relationship, when there are at least 3 people involved in a sales decision. 

This isn’t ideal.

Why You Should Nurture Several Relationships Within An Account

The average employee changes their job every 2.5 years. This may seem like a long time, but in B2B, that’s just a couple of sales cycles—which means that your contact only has a few chances to persuade the buying committee. And if your contact leaves, who will be left to champion your cause?

“The amount of flux that’s happening—the talent going in and out of businesses—means that a company’s priorities are shifting, ebbing and flowing all the time,” says Sales for Life CEO Jamie Shanks.

Think about it: If you have a relationship with a company’s chief information security officer, that person probably has a good understanding of what you’re talking about and what you can bring to the table. However, the other people in the IT department might not know who you are, or might not have any experience with your solution. And you’ll probably be more of a stranger to people from cross-functional departments such as legal, procurement, finance, or human resources.

So how can you build relationships with them?

This is where social surrounding comes in.

Using Social Surrounding for Your Target Accounts

The entire purpose of social surrounding is to get information fast, while automating much of its collection. The easiest and fastest way to go about this is to make this a part of your account planning process.

You can include your social surrounding research when selecting which accounts to prioritize—this process is tied to your customer accounts after all, and it will be easier to have all your account information centralized in one place.

Advanced search strategies for social surrounding

1. Browse a stakeholder’s LinkedIn profile and start collecting insights about them. Any useful information you can find should be captured.

2. In LinkedIn Sales Navigator, press the save button on someone’s profile to:

  • Follow the person. This way, any like, comment, or share will appear neatly in the Leads section of your Sales Navigator homepage.
  • Follow their company. This lets you easily access any content shared by their company page. You can view this in the Account section of your Sales Navigator homepage.

3. Use Boolean Search on the Bing browser to do research. Do these two searches:

  • person and company search
  • company and topic search

After using Advanced Search strategies to find out who the stakeholders are in your target accounts, it’s now time to do your research on them. Believe it or not, 92% of salespeople and CSMs don’t do any research because they think it takes too much time—and this is a mistake you shouldn’t commit.

Remember that the purpose of social surrounding is to speed up research so it takes less than 2 minutes per contact, instead of trawling the internet for the crucial data you need. These advanced search steps will allow you to automatically capture insights on the people that you want to have a relationship with, using both LinkedIn and Bing.

Conclusion

It’s difficult for sales professionals to build relationships within their customer accounts. You can’t exactly do site visits with every department, especially cross-functionally, because these departments might be located in different cities, states, or even countries—more so now, when there’s a global pandemic going on.

But it’s necessary.

You see, in all your accounts, there are two things that could happen. One, the buying committee will come together and reach a consensus, requiring you to have more advocates inside the organization. Two, if somebody in the buying committee leaves or is replaced, you’ll need to find out who the person is, what happened to them, and who will replace them.

Using LinkedIn and other social platforms to connect with the stakeholders within your customer accounts will allow you to monitor their activities and engage them, keeping you in a stronger position to influence and ensuring you’re ready to act should something happen.

Categories
Blog LinkedIn Social Selling

12 Hacks To Increase Your LinkedIn SSI Score

While there are opinions around the validity of LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) Score, I can definitively say my SSI accurately reflects my progression as a social seller. I am now at the point where I’m growing my network rapidly, connecting with the right people, and creating new opportunities from social on a weekly basis. In fact, since I began my social selling journey at Sales for Life, my LinkedIn SSI Score has gone from 63 all the way to 96!

But why is your LinkedIn SSI score so important in the first place?

What is the LinkedIn Social Selling Index Score?