Can You Really Use LinkedIn as a Sales Tool?

Greetings everyone. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 16th, 2014 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook and I'm with WSI Internet Consulting where we work with businesses and organizations on helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. Or just Google Eric Cook WSI, and with any luck, I pretty much come up on at least the first couple of pages with all sorts of social content and other online presence. So with that, unfortunately, my good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, he's over at Community Bank Consulting, is not going to be available to join us today. He's actually on-site at a client Working on an implementation of some software, and he is unavailable to join us. But we encourage you, especially the bankers and other folks in the financial services industry, to stop out to communitybankconsulting.com and learn more about Jeff and what he can do for your institution. Before we officially get started today and introduce Rob Thomas, I want to just provide a couple of housekeeping items. As a reminder, Free Webinar Wednesdays is recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So So if you would like to check out any of the past episodes, or if Rob piques your interest, or maybe talks too fast, or you want to share it with a colleague, you are more than welcome to come back. And we usually get those online within a day or so after the webinar has been completed. So check us out at freewebinarwednesdays.com. We also encourage, and hopefully we will get some questions and some interactivity from the audience today for those of you that are listening live. To do that, you will use the chat feature in your control panel which is most likely located over in the top right-hand corner of your computer screen. So just type your questions and comments in there as we go along, and I will monitor those, and we will get them over to Rob when there is an opportunity for questions. So with that, I'm going to work my little GoToWebinar magic, and I'm going to send the presentation controls over to Rob. And while I do that, I will officially welcome Rob Thomas. I'll say back to Free Webinar Wednesdays because I think at least least one other time you've been a guest of ours. Rob is also a colleague of mine in the wonderful world of WSI. He is one of our certified trainers in our social selling program. He's kind of a social selling guru and he is going to share some insights with us today on how to use tools like LinkedIn and some others to not just have fun and engage and read content but also use it as an actual business generation and hopefully revenue creation tool. So, and he is joining us from the sunny UK. It is 6 PM local time, and he is holding off on his beer and tea before he is over with today's webinar. So if you recognize an accent, there's a good reason for it. We've gone international today. So Rob, without further ado, welcome back to Free Webinar Wednesdays. Thanks for joining us today.

It's my pleasure. Just check that you can hear me okay, and then I'll crack on.

Absolutely. Yep, we can hear you, and we see the lovely little Windows alert message that comes up when sometimes— Don't you love that? Oh yeah, you gotta love that. So I'd say that's why I switched to a Mac, but you know, as soon as I say that, Mac's gonna do something and jinx me as well, so I'll just keep my mouth shut and we'll just blame it on technology in general. Yeah, okay, so let's, let's get into it. I can't remember if you've actually got anything in there that talks a little bit about you with your background, but if not, for those folks that aren't familiar with you, maybe how long you've been in the business and what you did before WSI. And if that's already in your presentation, then I've stolen your thunder.

There it is on the screen.

Perfect, there it is.

So shall I take over now?

Absolutely, go for it.

Okay, yeah, well, a little bit of the credentials there, but you can pick that up from the recording because there's one or two little quick links in there. One of the things that Eric may have mentioned in the past, he and I were lucky enough to be co-authors on the Digital Minds book, the 12 top tips or the 12 things that every business should know about digital marketing. And that's quite a useful little tool. I give it away to most of my clients, and a lot of people I meet say that it was a great starter for 10, as we say over here in University Challenge, just to get people going. So I've been around a little while, as you can see from the lack of hair. I've been in business for more years than I care to mention, and probably started to use LinkedIn for business back in 2006, 2007, and we've seen it grow exponentially. And the way that businesses use it, not only to seek out opportunities, to do their research and find the right decision-makers, but then connect with them, and more importantly, over time, share information— regular, relevant, quality information that allows those decision-makers to find out who you are, who your business is, what your reputation is, and start to over time attract inbound enquiries. And I think that's probably the El Dorado, it's what a lot of businesses seek to achieve, which is a world where rather than having to sell and do a lot of outbound activity, that they're getting enquiries, the phone is ringing, people are wanting to talk to them about how they might solve their problems. And that's really what today is about in outline. So if I skip back a couple of slides, because I jumped around a bit there, here's the structure for today's webinar. I'm going to briefly outline what WSI has been doing in this space, in this social selling, which is a phrase that has grown up over the last 3 to 6 months. I've seen it all over the place online. So I'm going to outline what the program contains and how we deliver it. so that if at the end of this 1-hour webinar you say, hey, I could really do with finding out more about this stuff, you'll know what to do and where to go. But what I want to do is to deliver through this webinar 3 implementable tips, 3 things that you can do if you didn't know already, things that you can put in place that will hopefully improve your bottom line very quickly. And we've had quite a lot of experience in this, and like all good consultancies, I hope We did it ourselves to prove that the thing worked before we started talking about it to our clients and our prospective clients. And towards the end of this, I will just take you through 2 or 3 quick case studies so you can see that we're not just talking about this stuff. We've got proven case studies where it has worked very effectively. WSI, you probably know all about already. As Eric said, it's an international company. It's probably the biggest international internet marketing company in terms of feet on the ground, with over 1,000 consultants in 80 countries. So Eric, from time to time, is able to pull on colleagues like myself in different parts of the world just to bring some further information to you. So without further ado, let's get into those social selling tips and tricks. And a bit of background first, I guess. The main challenge that most businesses are feeling today is, and your buyers and your customers will be feeling this, that they're just very busy. They're focused often on what's right in front of them, and throughout the day they're going to have a full email inbox, the phones are going to be ringing, and they're really not interested in being interrupted. And, you know, one of the ways that in the past organisations have tried to avoid picking up the phone and calling people is throwing out emails in the belief that that somehow will get the attention of that prospective customer. But here's the bad news, the average employee gets 147 emails each and every day, and they delete 48% of them immediately, and that's your average employee. If you're the decision maker, you're likely to be getting more, and you're likely to be deleting more. So conversely, you know, cold calling is dead. Your buyer just isn't listening, and many of you probably won't be engaging in this stuff anymore. Now, that's not to say as human beings we shouldn't be picking up the phone and talking to our prospective clients or our customers, but it shouldn't be in the form of a cold call. It should be in the form of either an inbound call, which is brilliant, or at least a warm lead as a result of socially surrounding your prospect. So the core challenge here is most buyers these days do their due diligence, do their research before they've even spoken to a sales rep. So whether that's me, somebody in business development, whether it's the sales director, they will do most of their research online, and a recent CEB study called The Challenger Sale, said that nearly 60% of all that research is done online before they even pick up the phone. So for many businesses, they've been ruled out of the equation before they've even had a chance to discuss the opportunity with a prospect. And here's another problem: even when you have spoken to a prospect, you may have, you know, delivered a a proposal, or you might have at least had an initial discussion with them, and they said they'll get back to you in a week or 2 weeks, and they don't. That's what we call the dead zone. And typically the behavior that you get in the dead zone is you'll want to pick up the phone and say, hey John, we spoke a couple of weeks ago, I'm leaving this message because I haven't heard from you, what should we be doing? Or you'll be throwing them an email going, I sent that proposal a couple of weeks ago, What's the answer? Should we be moving forward? And the trouble is, if you do that once, it's probably okay. If you do it twice, you're starting to feel uncomfortable. Do it 3 or 4 times and you know you're becoming a pest. And you hate that when people do that to you, so likewise we've got to try and avoid doing that ourselves. So you have to ask yourself the question, in these dead zones, are you a pest or are you an influencer? And when I come on and talk about what we can do on LinkedIn, it's very much about being an influencer rather than being seen as being a pest. And as you know, today people have access to the internet, to that research, 24/7 pretty much, whether it's on a tablet, whether it's on an iPhone, whether it's on the desktop, and more and more the executives are working longer hours, spreading their work out, doing research in the evenings and on the weekends, so we need to make sure that if they are using these tools, we're available to them, whether it's on LinkedIn, Google+, or elsewhere. So we have to get smarter about this, because our buyers will begin to look for answers to their questions with or without us. And what we do know is that— and this was Forrester Research fairly recently done— 65% of buyers choose the company that was first to add real value to their research, to their due diligence. Now, if we are the ones socially surrounding them with useful, relevant content, then we're going to be the company that wins more often than our competitors. So we have to think about that, we have to keep that at the forefront of our mind. Now then, when somebody goes to your LinkedIn profile. Do you know what, I see more of this even now, even though there's 300 million people on LinkedIn, I still see this quite frequently. I'll go to a prospective customer, or sometimes it might be somebody who's trying to put their wares, put their information in front of me, and I go to check out their LinkedIn profile, And the profile says, hey, I'm the top sales guy in this organization, I could sell ice to the Eskimos, I'm brilliant at sales. If I'm reading that and I'm a potential customer of theirs, what am I thinking? I'm thinking I don't want to meet this guy because he's not really interested in my problems and solving my issues, he's just interested in selling to me, and nobody likes to be sold to. On the right-hand side here, Here's the opposite of that. This is, you know, when you go on somebody's LinkedIn profile and they haven't even got a photograph of themselves on it. People do business with people, and therefore they're not going to do business with some sort of avatar or some sort of shadow. So it's very important that our LinkedIn profiles as the starting point don't make us invisible. So That's the background, that's a quick 10-minute introduction. Now we can get into the meat of the thing, and hopefully some of those issues will resonate with you, and as we start looking at some of these social selling tips, you'll be able to see how these can not only solve some of those problems, but actually take you to another level. And as Eric said, it's 6:15 over here now in the UK. I'm aware that in Toronto and the middle zone there, it's quarter past 1, and for some I know some people who've been joining us as far along as Los Angeles, it's 10:15 in the morning, so I'm going to take you right up to your coffee break with these next few tips. And when we talked about Social Selling Mastery, we have a 12-week program that helps focus on the behaviors, because what we found is if somebody just goes into a training session, whether it's a half a day or a whole day training session on LinkedIn or Google+ or some of these social selling techniques. They love it, people love it, they pick up some great hints and tips, and often they give good reviews on those particular training sessions. But actually, when they get back to the office, it's back to slide 1. They're so busy, their inbox is full, it just goes right out of their minds, and they probably implement less than 5% of what they've learned. So the reason we've developed a 12-week program, a 90-day program, Is that— sorry, 180-day program, I can't count— is that we found that for people to make a behavioral change, they need to be doing things on a regular basis so it becomes habit-forming. And once it becomes habit-forming, it becomes the way we do business around here, and that's what starts to deliver the significant uplift in sales results. Now, I'm not talking about 5 or 10% here, because You know, if you want to increase your sales results by 5 or 10%, you just work a little harder, you just run a little faster. But if you want to produce what we might call a high-growth increase in sales, and typically that's 25 to 30%, then you need to start to do things radically different. And in the world of B2B, business-to-business in particular, but also B2C, but my primary focus today is B2B, It's social selling that is that radically different thing, and less than 5% of businesses we find, not just in the UK but in North America too, less than 5% of businesses are doing this stuff well. So let's jump straight into tip number 1, and there are many, many tips that we could cover, but we've picked out the 2 or 3 juiciest ones that we know bring immediate results for people, and this first one is called Mastering job change alerts. Now, let me just take a step back a second, and aligned to this is often organizations or salespeople have a single point of contact. In this analogy here, it's being called single-threaded. You only have one person that you are directly connected with, either in a prospect or even potentially a client organization. And it's not just us, that's the average. And what we're seeing is that people throughout their careers will move companies maybe 11 times. So if you are only connected with one decision-maker or one potential prospect in an organization, that relationship is greatly at risk. So what we need to talk about here is getting deeper within that organization, socially surrounding that prospect or that customer, And then finding out how and when those opportunities occur. So for instance, we're going to talk about advanced searches as part of that process of having job change alerts. Now, within LinkedIn, even on the free version, you get 3 saved searches. For free. If you upgrade to one of the paid-for versions, then that becomes almost unlimited. But I would suggest if you're on a free account, just try saving 3 of these and playing around with them and seeing what they can get for you. So I'm going to talk about advocate marketing— that's one type of search— appointed leaders in your hot accounts, if you have named accounts that you're trying to work with, or being opportunistic. Let's start at the top, advocate marketing. So here's the first one, what does a salesperson typically tell you? They tell you it costs 6 times less to sell to an existing client than it does to sell to a new prospect, and I think I've heard that for the last 20, 30 years, so it must be true. So why don't we take our existing client base and figure out if anybody leaves one of our clients, who are currently using our solutions and goes to another organization, we want to know about it. Why? Because it's a fantastic opportunity when they move to that new company. The one thing we do know is most new appointees have maybe 90 days to prove themselves, so the first thing that they're likely to do is question the current suppliers, which in turn is an opportunity for you to get into that new organization. But if If they are your only contact in the organization they just left, as we just described 5 minutes ago, and you're single-threaded, that's a risk too. So not only should we make sure that we are aware when somebody moves from Company A, a client, to Company B to take advantage of that opportunity, but we should also make sure in Company A that they're leaving, we find out who's replacing them. Ideally, we should already be connected to them to avoid that single-threaded thing, but even if we're not connected to them because they're pointing from outside, if we have enough champions inside the organisation, then we're going to be protected from being challenged by the new person coming in. So what you have here on your screen, and I'm conscious today as time is limited, I'm not necessarily going to dive off into LinkedIn and do live demonstrations. If I have time at the end, I'll come back and do that just to prove to you how easy it is, but what we have here are a series of screen grabs, and you can go back and view the recording afterwards if you want to come back to these, that show you how you can start to muster these saved job searches. So for instance, here, the first thing you can do is, in this instance, if you can see it on the screen, we've set up a search for 3 existing customers: IBM, And we've used the word OR, Oracle OR Kronos. So here we're able to create one saved search that is actually tracking across all 3 companies. So if we do a search today that says current, we're not going to get the results we want. That will be people who are currently working for IBM, Oracle, or Kronos. So what we do on that dropdown arrow where it says current, We click on it and select past, not current. So when we do that search, it will show us everybody who used to work for IBM, Oracle, or Kronos but no longer does. Now, the first time you do that, it's probably a pointless activity. It will create a benchmark. But if you then say, I want you to repeat that search every day or every week, which are some of the options there, Each time it recreates that search, it will deliver to your inbox anyone who has just left IBM, Oracle, or Kronos. And you can be more specific than that, because Oracle employ thousands of people. You can delve right down to, okay, if it's the finance team you deal with, you can put title in the finance, or you can go further down and select the function that they're in. So these can be very, very advanced, very, very specific segmented searches. That once you've put them in, you simply save them— hang on a second— you simply save them and ask them to repeat them automatically, and they will deliver an email into your inbox. It's like a salesperson having a hot lead list right there in their inbox every day. So that's past, not current. The next one is the reverse of this. This is appointed leaders. So say for example—

Hey Rob.

Oh, hello.

Hey, can we take a question on that screen right there? Do you mind?

This one I'm on now? Yeah, go.

No, the one before that.

OK. Right.

Yeah. So one question is, does the name of the company or the title have to be an exact match? Or can it be kind of— so like if it's Oracle Corporation is the official name of the company, but you use Oracle, is that going to get you false positives? That, and then how many do you know— is there a limitation on the number of names that you can tie together with that OR command?

I'll answer that very quickly. The answer is there is no limit to the number you could put in there. So if you have found that actually, say for instance IBM, that there are some people who have linked themselves to IBM corporate and the others that have linked themselves to IBM Canada, for example, then you simply add all of those in. So it can become quite complex, but that's simply because you want to get the best quality results. So likewise, if you're looking for the title of the person, so it might be you have finance or VP finance or finance director or departmental finance head, whatever it is, the types of decision-makers that you want to keep track of, the great thing about the OR or the AND is that you can make quite complex searches. But the great thing is, once you've saved it, run it, and if it's not getting you the exact results you want, you can just go back in and edit it. And I have about 10 advanced searches, and I'm constantly refining them to make sure that I'm getting better and better results. And you'll find that out because when that email arrives, if you go, well, actually only 2 or 3 of those are spot on, the others are a little bit wayward, you can just go back and refine the search. And then you know the next time you get it in your inbox, it'll be more specific. Hopefully that answers that question. So yeah, one— oh, sorry, another one.

I was just going to say one of the ways to deal with that maybe would be to create like a separate text file and put that information in there and add it and then copy and paste. Because if you've got 10 or 15 companies, you're not going to see them all, and then you can just modify that. So cool, good, that answers those questions.

Excellent tip there, Eric. I mean, you're spot on because there is a danger that you inadvertently kill a search, and then you put a lot of work in and you've lost it all. So yes, I would recommend having a text file, a Word document, or something like that. Where you have the headings like title, company, location, etc., and you effectively create a templated search that you can go back and modify over time and just drop those straight in. So this, this next one, which is appointed leaders, is the reverse of that. So in this instance, we're looking at SAP or Walmart or Micro and saying we're interested in anybody who is newly appointed to the finance department. So you run that first time, and the next time it runs tomorrow or in a week's time, you will immediately have in your inbox anyone who is newly appointed. So if they're a named account that you're not into yet, you know this is a great opportunity to connect with that person and start to perhaps educate them a little bit into what you do. I'm conscious of the time, so I'm skipping through these quite quickly, but hopefully, even if it means you go back and review the the video afterwards, you'll be able to pull out of this the gems that you want. So this last one is about being opportunistic. So this, rather than being specific around a company, this is being specific around a location or a territory, because often salespeople or business development reps have a patch that they have to work on. So for instance, you can simply put the postcode or the zip code in there, You can say the distance within which you can operate, or if it's a country, or if it's a state. And then you can say, okay, I'm interested in anybody who is, in this case, a director or VP, and they're in the finance department. When they're appointed, these businesses— this is a great opportunity to say, I hadn't even heard of that company, but now I can see that they've got a new finance director. And I can see that it's a decent-sized organization, they're in the sweet spot that I would like to be doing business with, it's a great opportunity to develop a new relationship not only with that person but with that company. So that's, you know, being opportunistic. And the way that shows up, once you've saved the job alerts, they will appear directly in your inbox as an email, or you can go into your notifications within LinkedIn, whichever way you prefer to do this stuff. I just saw— I don't have an iPhone, I have an Android. I used to have an iPhone, I've moved over. iPhone or Apple just launched a LinkedIn app, or LinkedIn just launched an app which was called LinkedIn Connect, and what it is going to do, it's like a separate app from the main LinkedIn app, it's going to deliver these results straight into your iPhone wherever they are. I'm hoping they're going to bring out an Android app version in the next week or so, but in the meantime, for people like me, you'll just have to carry on using the desktop or the tablet. So that was tip 1. Where are we time-wise? Half an hour in. So tip 2, let's get on to it. Tip 2 is access your buyers for free. How can you do that? Because you're probably aware that on LinkedIn, unless you're connected to somebody, you can't message them directly. So typically what people do is they find somebody that's perhaps on profile as a prospective customer, and they might throw them a LinkedIn request. Now, it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's not the best thing, because to the recipient, It might feel like unsolicited spam, and even if you craft a very nice message— and I would recommend that you always craft a message, you never click the connect button and just let LinkedIn throw the generic default, that's not what I would suggest, always do a personal one. However, there is a way of engaging people before that for free. Now you might think this is a bit sneaky, But I think it's a very, very valid way of doing this stuff. So let's just talk it through. Let's pretend in this example here Brendan Cassidy was a guy that we were trying to make contact with. We were trying to over time build a relationship with. He's currently a second-degree connection, but I can see that, and on the right-hand side of his profile I will be able to see, you will be able to see what we have in common. So it might be skills and experience, or it might be that we're members of the same group. So we happen to be members of one of the groups, it's called On Startups. So what I would do if I wasn't a member of a group that he was, I might join that group specifically in order to start to have an online relationship with this guy. But also it's interesting to see that your prospective customers or clients, the groups that they swim in. What are the pools that they're swimming in? Because often you'll find a group and you'll go, crikey, I hadn't realized that group existed. This is a great one for me because when I go into that group, I can see that there are not just tens but maybe hundreds of the right type of on-profile prospect in that group. So once you're a member of the group, or if you're a member of the group already, all you simply do is click on the members tab, you then put their name into the search box, and guess what? You'll find them, and one of the things that you will see is one of the options, because you're members of the same group, is to send them a direct message. So you don't have to connect with them to message them personally. So you don't know their email address right now, you don't really want to know their email address. What you want to do is start to connect with that person, because what you want to do from day one is start to influence them. So here's a way of messaging people for free by being members of the same group. Just a word of caution, your first contact should never be salesy. It should never be, hi Brendan, really glad that we've got the opportunity to maybe connect in the future. I just wanted to let you know what we do, blah blah blah.

Blah, blah.

That is spam, and I get those all the time, and I usually press delete, and I usually make sure that that person doesn't connect to me. So what you should be doing often is offering a hand of friendship through this. It might be that Brendan has started a discussion within that group, so actually often joining in on that discussion, complimenting Brendan on what he said, agreeing with him, building on it. Or maybe providing a bit of interesting challenge, asking him why he was thinking about it in that way. I guarantee once you've started to engage with that person in that way, if you then follow it up at an appropriate time where they request a LinkedIn, they're going to accept that. And once they've accepted that, then you can start to build a relationship by sharing some regular, relevant, quality content with them, and I'll come back to that because that's probably tip 3 in terms of what we do. So that's how you can send a message for free, and as I mentioned previously, once you're a member of a group, you can start to do some deep dive research because you start to find out all those people in that group that you'd never known were there. And once you are a member of a group, when you click on the advanced search, you will see that one of the options, as described on this slide here, is you can select group members, or you can actually dive into a specific group. So if you see here, once you've checked group members on the right-hand side, all the members that you are— sorry, all the groups that you are a member of will pop up, and you will start to be able to do an advanced search within that. Now, just one little word of caution here. The early stuff I said is available to free members. When you start to get down to some of these really detailed segmented searches, which will save you a lot of time. Time equals money, and LinkedIn will be wanting you to pay some money, because the first level up— I don't know what it is in dollars in North America, but I have a feeling it's something like $50 a month, so the equivalent of a meal out, taking a prospect out for one lunchtime meal, etc. So if you put that into context, if you can find 10 or 15 good opportunities per month for the cost of $50, it's probably a worthwhile investment, but you'll have to make that decision yourself. But often what you will see when you come to this advanced search area, there will be some boxes that are tantalisingly interesting, and they'll be greyed out, and it will say you need to upgrade to see these. Here is a little tip. The way you upgrade is you go to your profile, and if you scroll right down to the very bottom, you'll see that you'll have an option that says upgrade your account. Click on that. You will then be able to work out which of the upgrades you might be interested in. If you don't immediately pay, you will often find that within a few minutes a chat box will pop up and somebody will say, hey, I see you're looking at the upgrades. Is there anything I can help you with? And if you say to them, yeah, I'm thinking about upgrading to, I don't know, executive, but I'm really not sure that I'm going to get the value out of it, often they will offer you a free month trial for maybe a month, maybe 2 months, and then that'll give you a chance to test out some of these and work out whether they're going to deliver the value for you. So that's a free tip on the side. Here's another extension to that tip. Once you have connected with somebody, or indeed even before you've connected with somebody, you can use LinkedIn as a mini CRM system, a mini customer relationship management system, and if you're not doing this already, I suggest you do, because often you'll have a bunch of prospects that you're talking to or you're starting to nurture, and at this stage they're not really a client, so you probably, if you're using Salesforce or something else, you're probably not wanting to put all the time and effort into pulling across all their details. In fact, why would you need to do that? Because on LinkedIn they're there for you to see. And what I love about LinkedIn, of course, the people that you're looking at, they are responsible for keeping their own profile up to date. So often, you know, LinkedIn is way more up to date than any CRM system you've got, because if they move company, they update it on LinkedIn. You've got to go back to your CRM system and make a manual change at some point in the future. But what I'm looking at here is 2 major tabs. The first one is called Relationship. If you can't see the information on there because they're a 2nd or 3rd degree and you've just got a little star there, click on the star and this box will now expand. So it allows you to put some notes in there. And, and to be clear, when you are putting notes in here, they can't see it. So in this case, Kelly can't see what I'm writing about the conversation we might have had or the research I've done. It is simply attaching when you are signed into LinkedIn to your record of Kelly what you're thinking. So you've got notes which might be what you're planning to do, a reminder, you click on that and it will as the name suggests remind you in a day, a week, a month, or recurring, however you want to do that. There's a little box, how you met, so if you met them at a networking event, you can type in there where you met them, what date, some useful information so that when you do start to have a conversation with them, you can be far more nurturing. When you get to my age, you forget stuff. My dad used to say, a short pencil is better than a long memory, so think of this as your pencil. And the last one on the right-hand side, tags. The great thing about tags, it's like segmentation, but it's your personal segmentation. You can tag that person in a number of different ways. So for instance, if I met Kelly at a Chamber of Commerce meeting and I thought that she might be interested in social selling, I might create a tag that is Chamber of Commerce. I would check that so I know that that's where I met her. I might have another tag that's saying social selling prospect. I'll put a check tag there. So later on, if I'm trying to invite to an event everybody who I know is interested in the Chamber of Commerce and also social selling, it will present me with a list of people that I can instantaneously invite. So tagging, there are many different ways of using it, but there's just a couple of examples. And again, nobody else can see those tags, only you, which is super. And likewise, the contact information tab there, when you click on that, often people haven't put their telephone numbers in there, or they might have put their their main business telephone number but not their cell phone. If and when you find out that information from elsewhere, you can just add it to the contact information, and again, it's for you to see, nobody else. So you can put all sorts of information in there. So I talk too fast, right? We have 20 minutes left, so make sure we've got into here. So accessing your tag folders. Once you've tagged people If you're thinking, oh God, how do I now find that? If you simply go back to the tab at the top that says Connections, click on that, then within there you will see Filter By. And if you click on the arrow next to Filter By, all your tags will drop down and you can select how you would like to filter them. So you can parse this information in many different ways, and indeed from that you can send messages to groups of people as well as individuals. Now, I'm not introducing this to you as a means of spamming lots of people quickly, because that's not what LinkedIn is about, but it is about personalizing messages. And for instance, I run 2 or 3 networking groups and I've tagged them all. I run the Rugby Business Network in Gloucester, so I know those people are passionate about rugby, they're serious business people, and they've been to one of our events. So if I'm sharing something that is sports and business related, I know I can happily share it with that whole group of people and they will thank me for it. But equally, if there was a story about football, I would not share it with those guys because no other twain should meet, let's put it that way. So next one, tip number 3, sphere of influence selling. Let's get to this very quickly. This example, Vision Critical, they are a client of ours, and if I were to tell you that Vision Critical have done this, this, and this in social selling, and here are the results, and if your name is Kevin, I say, look Kevin, these guys are brilliant, look at all the results they've done. If you've never heard of Vision Critical, you're probably not going to be that interested, because They're not in your sphere, they're not in your world, they're not in your sector even. So people that do care about Vision Critical and therefore fall into the category of sphere of influence selling are people like current employees. People who work for Vision Critical are interested in what they're doing and why they're doing it. People who used to work for them are. Their competitors definitely are, and sometimes potential marketplace persona are, and clearly vendors, partners, and existing clients are interested. So if we've done something, or if you've done something successful with a company like Vision Critical, it is easier to sell, to explore the opportunities in past employees, in competitors, in suppliers, partners, clients, than it is to somebody who's never heard of them. So using that case study, or if you like, a testimonial, but definitely a story around the success that Vision Critical has had, will allow you to extend your sphere of influence. So in this example here, Brain Juicer was a direct competitor of vision critical, and one of the ways you can often find that out is if you go to the business page of a client or a company you're interested in, and then you have a look at the section that says people who viewed this page also viewed that page, often you will pick up from that one of those groups in the sphere of influence, and that is competitors, because often people are comparing and So taking this example a bit further, this vision-critical success story that we had with social selling, well, 2 of the companies that were in their sphere of influence were USAMP and Hotspex. So we touted that vision-critical story to them, and here's a straight extract that Jamie wrote. He wrote to Gira, who was on the team at Hotspex, and he said, for your January sales kickoff, how many of your reps won't hit sales quota? 25%, 40%, 50%? What are your sales reps— sorry, why are your sales reps booking meetings with social selling, or are they? Social selling is about how the top sales reps in 2012 hitting their sales numbers. And then we put some direct links, these little Bitly links, off to a detailed case study that had the real numbers behind that. Are you free— here's the call to action— are you free Friday, 8th of November, 10:30 to discuss? So it was short, it was punchy, it took them off to more interesting information and gave a call to action. And you will see that the response says, Hi Jamie, You had me at vision critical. So what that is reinforcing is that sphere of influence between competitors. Of course, you will be really interested in what your competitors are doing, and I'm sure they're interested in what you're doing. Think about that in the context of your clients. So taking this example a little further, I guess going forward, we took that story and we turned it into a blog. We shopped that blog, that article, we sent it to decision makers via LinkedIn that would care about the story, which is Kevin here at USAN, for example, the VP of Inside Sales. He booked a meeting with us using TimeTrade. If you've never heard of TimeTrade, Google it afterwards, it's a great little tool, I use it all the time. I don't know how often people have said, oh yeah, I'd like to book a meeting, give me some availability in your calendar, and you know that's such a difficult question, because it changes all the time. So TimeTrade is just a simple way for people not to be able to see what's in your calendar, but see when you are free and book an appointment straight in there. So another bonus tip, try out TimeTrade. So we used that and we booked some clear appointments, and beyond that, that same compelling story— here's an example here where a decision maker of one of the competitors would be quite interested to know what the sales department is doing. So same goes for IT and operations or finance, it's not just a sales thing, it's a sales thing in the example we're giving here. But the XO story, which was a similar case study/testimonial, won us Tata, it won us one of the largest telecom companies in Canada, and it also got us into Level 3, into Comcast, and these other organizations. So it's just a brief example of how you can leverage that sphere of influence. And do you remember how we just a few minutes ago learned how the advanced search can help? Well, here, to reiterate the point, it's so powerful. One of the best places to search for new prospects are people that used to work for your existing clients. And this is LinkedIn's own secret. This is how they sold their TeamLink and their Sales Navigator, by tracking people who had already bought their product and then following them through to companies they were going. It's great prospecting. It's taking a list of your existing clients and having a look at where they're moving on to. And here's another quick bonus tip. You probably know this already because you probably do it, but actually often the best time to send out some useful content is actually on the weekend. On a Sunday night, for example, a lot of the decision makers will, you know, they'll be champing at the bit to get back to work. They will have had a fun weekend, and often they're catching up with the stuff to make sure that when they go back into the office in the morning, they've almost got a clear desk. The best time to capture the attention is on a Sunday. Give it a try. Bonus tip number 4— I said there was only going to be 3, but I see I've got 10 minutes left. So bonus tip number 4: sharing content throughout the buyer's journey. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, first of all, you have to think about your LinkedIn profile as your own personal brand. So your company will have a website, and that will be portraying the brand of the company, but your LinkedIn profile, it's not your CV, you're not trying to find a job, well most of us aren't, most of us are trying to be successful in our current role, and if that involves business development and sales, then definitely your LinkedIn profile has to be supporting your personal brand. And one of the ways you do that isn't just about the information on it, but it's how you then use that to share with your connections. So here's an example. I talked about regular, relevant, quality content. Well, how do you share that stuff? If you're not doing this already, it's pretty straightforward. LinkedIn is more and more focusing on delivering content to you, whether that's through when you first sign in, the thing that's called Pulse, which will be the most highly read, most highly shared content. And if you get into the social selling program with us afterwards, we'll show a whole bunch of tools, including things like Hootsuite and a number of other tools like Paper.li. There's a whole bunch that allow you to quickly identify who is distributing regular, relevant, quality content that you might want to share. And the way you share it is simple as this. If you go to a website or a blog, often there will be these share tools down the left-hand side, and you simply— if you're sharing it through LinkedIn, you click on the one that says LinkedIn. You're then taken to a box that looks something like this, and within this box you have multiple ways of sharing. You can share to your first-degree connections by just doing what is known as an update. That's a 140-character brief resume of why you think they should read this article, and you do need to do that. Don't just share the article, say why you're sharing it, add some value to it. Or second group down, you can post it to groups. You can join up to 50 groups. Now again, be careful, cautious around this. Don't share one article across all 50 groups. LinkedIn will have you tagged as a spammer. That's not what it's about. It's finding an article that's relevant to a group, and maybe sharing it with a couple of thousand people at one time. But if you're going to share it with a group, make sure you turn it into a discussion. So rather than being 140 characters here, you can write a load more stuff. You can comment on why you think this article is so good. You can perhaps put a proposition that there's something that happened to you recently that reinforces or challenges that, and then you ask for opinion. That's a discussion rather than a statement. And then the last one, send to individuals. This is where— do you remember we talked about the dead zone earlier on? If you've got a prospect who's had a proposal sat on their desk for 2 weeks, you could be a pest and say, hey, are you going to make a decision yet? Or you could share an article with them that says— you'd find one that says, you know, 10 top tips on how to move from strategy to implementation, what are the tricks, etc. So if you are sharing something with them that kind of subtly nudges them in the right direction, moves them through the end-to-end sales process without being a pest, that's brilliant, because that's you being an influencer. So that's what I'm talking about here. The old-school seller, they call, they email, they call, they email, they're a pest. The new social seller is all about sharing content post-conversation. To continue to help the buyer along their journey. Now, when you're sharing content more widely, you've probably seen this already on your own profile, LinkedIn is now starting to give you data so that you can see some of the stuff you're sharing, which is getting best results in terms of views, likes, comments. That's useful. Likewise, on your own profile, this flag top right This is perhaps your daily starting point. When you— if you come and talk to us about the social selling program, we try and hone all of these behaviors into maybe 30 or 60 minutes activity per day total, and this is substitutional for a lot of the other sales and business development work that you might be doing. But what's great here is the starting point will be having a look at those notifications, you know, who's commenting on your stuff, who's moved from company A to company B, what's useful that will provide triggers to potential opportunities for you. We've talked about some of the success stories, so I won't go into those in any great detail other than just to summarize. Oracle, we did a lot of work with Oracle. Collectively, 23,000 sales reps have now gone through the social selling program, and they've not done that for fun, they've done it because it's had a real impact. Impact on the results. At EXO, 50% of their team booked a net new meeting in 5 days. At USAM, their existing sales team booked 3.5 net new meetings per month per sales rep just using this stuff. And Vision Critical, who I've already mentioned, 31 meetings booked over 60 days. And these are some quite big brands, but it works as well for you know, the small company as it does for the large company, and often even more effectively because the business owner or the VP sales has a passionate interest in this. What I did like though was one case study, I think this is out of Utah, a company called InContact. They weren't sure whether this stuff would work, it sounded great, but they wanted to do a proper A/B test, so they split their sales force down the middle They put half of them through the social selling training, and the other half they just let carry on doing what they were doing, what you might call old school, and the social selling group outperformed the old school by 122%. So for me, I like proper A/B tests, because if you're just putting somebody through some training, you're putting them under a microscope, then you will get that placebo effect, you will get a natural uplift in sales anyway. So to really prove this, you do need to do these sort of A/B tests. So I've come towards the final conclusion, just a couple of things I want to share with you. Those were 3 implementable tips with a couple of bonuses thrown in that if you follow, I guarantee will have a temporary increase in sales performance, but the danger is you try them a bit and then you get distracted, there's another shiny object come along, and you forget about it and you don't do it anymore. It's not unusual, it's typical. I used to do that. I probably still do for other training that I go on, but what's different here is the Social Selling Mastery course we've developed is actually— it involves using a learning management system, so that's an online training tool where we've got recorded videos, how-to guides, all of that stuff. You get access to that for 12 months. But in addition to that, to really kickstart it and get those behaviors, there's a 12-week program where every single week there's a live webinar, a bit like the one you're in now, a live online seminar with a real trainer who takes you through step by step what the program is. In fact, here are the 12 steps. So it starts off in week 1, getting a buyer-centric social profile, looking at your existing LinkedIn and others, but LinkedIn is the primary one in this business-to-business world. Week 2, how do you map out your buyer personas? There may be just one, you may have several personas. How do you map that out specifically? I don't know about you, but satellite navigation, sat-nav, it only works when you've got a destination. It's pretty pointless without it. So Module 2 is about having some clear destinations, because then you can start to use those advanced tools and the saved searches in an intelligent way. And week 3 is about finding content that intrigues your buyer, week 4, etc., etc. Takes you right through to week 12, where you can really start to set up some quite interesting ways of mapping competitor and competitive intelligence. So at the end of that 12 weeks, not only will you be certified, but you will have changed your behaviours and start to take real advantage of this stuff. So in summary, If you're interested in taking this a little bit further, sales certification consists of these things: 1 module every week for 12 weeks, 60-minute video conference— we call them webinars— with a live instructor every single week, and at the end of 3 months you will then become certified. Or if it's not you, you might be, you know, the VP of Sales and you want to put your salespeople through this. The great thing about it is there's key performance indicators, KPIs, that you can track throughout the process, because the end result of this training shouldn't be a certificate. It should be doors are opened faster. It should be you are in control of the buying process. It should be almost making your competitors irrelevant, and more importantly, it'll be closing deals that you never thought possible. So if any of that rings a note with you, if any of that intrigues you, then What I would suggest is getting in touch with Eric, or if another WSI consultant has asked you to come along to one of these free weekly webinars that Eric runs, then by all means speak to that consultant. He will share with you some of these additional resources in addition to the recording of the webinar. So for instance, we've got a 9 Steps to Having a Winning Social Profile for a sales professional on LinkedIn. We've got the 12-step process, that's the 30-minute to 1-hour process that you will have achieved by the end of the 12 weeks. So that's it in a nutshell. Wow, I've done it, I finished more or less on time. So we probably have a few minutes for questions. Are you still there, Eric, or have I sent you to sleep?

2 minutes to spare, you're the man, nice job, nice job. So tons of great information, and, you know, I jotted down a few things as well. And that's one of the things I think Jeff and I have talked about that before. We love being the host, and we hope that our guests educate the audience, but Jeff and I usually get a lot out of it as well, and that certainly was the case. One question that I know has come up before, not only in the chat box but also in my course of business, businesses, is there a right time to know when you should be paying for the LinkedIn program as opposed to moving from the free version to the paid version? Is there a particular activity or a sign from the network or something that you want to be able to do that says, you know what, I need to start using one of their subscription services and not using it for free anymore?

That's a great question, and I can only answer it personally. For me, it was when I saw what was tantalizingly out of reach in the advanced search. When I wanted to identify some more on-profile prospects, having done that persona work, I wanted to be able to find quickly— I mean, you can find it slowly, but by having the advanced search options turned on and probably 50% of them are not turned on unless you're a paying member. That persuaded me that I should upgrade at least for a while and test it out. Now, if you pay for a year in advance, I think they give you something like 10% discount— typical, I'm sure most organizations do that.

Yeah.

I still choose to pay monthly. Okay, it's a little bit more expensive, but why do I do that? Well, because sometimes I upgrade and move sideways and downgrade. So for example, when I'm recruiting somebody, I have used the Recruiter Lite package, which is slightly more expensive but paid for itself many times over, because you know how much it costs to pay a headhunting agency. Typically they want 25% of the first year's salary. Well, with Recruiter Lite, I became my own headhunter and I got staff at a fraction of the cost and probably better quality. But then when I finished my recruitment, there was no point in being on that package. I swapped over to the Sales Exec package, which was slightly cheaper but gave me all I needed on the advanced. My tip would be try it out, but stick on the monthly paid because you can upgrade, downgrade, you can sideways, whatever you want to do immediately.

Very good, cool. We are right at the top of the hour, just a little bit over, and we've got a couple of other questions in the chat log, but I kind of know the answers to those, and I can go ahead and get those back to the individuals directly. So, Rob, thank you so much for joining us, and we really appreciate it. Again, this recording will be posted online at freewebinarwednesdays.com. I also want to encourage everybody to be a fan of the Facebook page. We send out updates obviously through our Constant Contact email notifications and post updates on Free Webinar Wednesdays, but we also do updates there. And so you can find Free Webinar Wednesdays and click the like button, and we'll put updates there as well. So with that, thanks again on behalf of Jeff, who is in absentia today, but I'm sure will want to check this out because he is also an avid LinkedIn user. Thanks to Rob Thomas and all the great LinkedIn info. So enjoy your evening, Rob, now that you actually get to start it officially. Thanks for delaying it a little bit and spending time with us, and we look forward to seeing everybody else next Wednesday and every Wednesday at 1 PM Eastern here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Have a great week, everyone. Bye-bye.

Cheers. Bye-bye.