Sales Managers are frustrated with how quickly their sales reps give up nurturing a prospect. Time-after-time, sales reps get comfortable with making 1 or 2 touch points, and then giving up. Sales Managers would ask “where do we stand with this prospect” and the sales rep would reply “they aren’t interested, dead opportunity”.
The reality is sales reps that constantly say this just haven’t tried hard enough. If there are dozens of articles available talking about 6,8,12 touches for maximum ROI, why aren’t sales reps doing this?
It’s easy to categorize this as lazy and/or cherry picking. It’s easy to say there is far too much market to concentrate heavily on one account. The reality is that most sales reps just don’t know any better. That’s right – most sales reps are poorly trained. Most sales reps will NOT take the initiative to self-learn, it’s the 80/20 rule. As Sales leaders it’s up to us to put these tools in their hands.
3 Tips to Help Your Team Drive More Sales Leads (with a multi-touch approach)
1. LinkedIn InMail-to-Email Combo
This technique has been very effective for our clients. A LinkedIn InMail has a 5 day window of Accept or Decline. We have found not to panic if your InMail hasn’t been responded to within 24 hours. Be patient as it might take 48-72 hours. If you haven’t heard anything by the 5th day, LinkedIn will rebate your InMail credit (and your message will still say in the prospects Inbox). Go into your sent folder, find the InMail and click Forward. As you see from the example, it will date stamp the time of your message.
Now place this original message into an email, with a quick RE: Subject Line & a message that drives them to review your original message. This technique has booked 10+ meetings for our business in the last 3 months alone.
2. Twitter-to-LinkedIn Driver
This technique is a great call-to-action. First find your prospect on Twitter and Follow. Within a few days, you’ll most likely get a Follow back. If you don’t, send them an article they would find very valuable – this will help you make a friend. Once your prospect is following you, craft a great LinkedIn InMail and Twitter message at the same time. Make sure the Twitter message is driving the prospect to find your LinkedIn InMail. An example is “John, great article on Big Data on Tuesday, I’ve sent you a LinkedIn message. Chat soon. Jamie Shanks”. Send the Twitter message first, then LinkedIn message 15 seconds later. If they are socially saavy, this will 2x Ping their Iphone with a Twitter then LinkedIn message. We’ve found this powerful to ensure your LinkedIn message is acted on.
3. LinkedIn x2
This is exactly as the title implies – sending a 2nd LinkedIn message 4-5 days after your original message. This we know from teaching LinkedIn to 100’s of sales reps that it’s not currently being done. We had a prospect that wrote this last week “Sorry for not getting back to you, lately I seem to get a lot of sales pitches, so I ignore the first email unless I know you.” – which turned into a meeting booked for our team. Most sales reps aren’t willing to go that much further to open a door.
So – here are 3 new tips, what are you going to do with them?
What Could You Do?
If you don’t want to be left behind the 8 ball – you need to start to take action. The following dozen blog posts on utilizing social selling strategies and LinkedIn can help you start but if you are looking for some hidden gems on how you can attract a very specific prospect, I recommend you check out – How-to-Guide: Making $$$ with Social Selling.
