Nine ways LinkedIn connectivity boosts your B2B prospecting
Love to get more business from LinkedIn? Here are nine ways LinkedIn connectivity boosts your B2B prospecting.
Every experienced business development professional knows the sales process is often a series of small “yeses.”
When someone connects with you on LinkedIn, they’ve given a small, but important, “Yes” to start relationship-building with them (otherwise they’d have said no!).
Now, as you and I know, selling is often a marathon, rather than a sprint.
Because not every prospect will immediately buy from you, being connected on LinkedIn means you’re there for medium and long-term gains too. From sprint to marathon… connectivity on LinkedIn spans the sales track.
Nine ways LinkedIn connectivity boosts your B2B prospecting
In fact, there are so many reasons to have an effective connectivity strategy for LinkedIn, I’ve created a lovely list of them for you!
Your nearest and dearest on LinkedIn deliver bountiful benefits, including:
- Birds that fly together often buy together, so connecting to an ideal prospect means they bring THEIR network to you, meaning your reach grows exponentially in a highly relevant, targeted way.
- You can message your connections within LinkedIn, meaning you can continue to market to them even if they don’t opt in to receive emails from you, which gets round the impending GDPR-restrictions and means you can at least message connections electronically. Otherwise how else will you?
- Your connections are able to see your status updates on LinkedIn, so you’re able to keep front of mind with them in a non-pushy way.
- Your connections share your status updates with their network, and in effect, market for you!
- When your connections comment on or like your updates, it’s a great indication of their warmth towards you and openness to an approach.
- Growing your connections to 500+ means you’re rewarded by LinkedIn with a higher listing when those seeking what you offer search for you.
- You don’t need to fork out for LinkedIn’s paid for services, such as Inmails or Sponsored Updates, you can simply message your connections for free.
- Thanks to LinkedIn’s wonderful active status messaging feature, you can now see when the connections you’ve messaged are online and start a ‘live’ conversation.
- You can get a delivered and read receipt for messages delivered to your connections, so you know they’ve got them.
10 tips for connecting
So now you’re convinced, how can you get better at connecting on LinkedIn? Here are 10 tips for you:
- Always send a personalised invitation.
- Include in the invitation a reason why the member might wish to connect.
- Keep the tone light.
- NEVER sell in a connection invitation.
- Use LinkedIn’s search feature, especially its Sales Navigator account, to find the most relevant people to connect to.
- Invite your 2nd degree connections first as you’ll immediately have mutual connections.
- Resist the temptation to spend time on LinkedIn’s ‘people you may know’ suggestion – there are better ways to target searches (see tip 5)!
- Invite relevant members to connect that have viewed your profile.
- Check out LinkedIn groups your members of and invite relevant members to connect.
- Change your settings so that those who’ve viewed your profile will automatically follow you – here’s how: Go to ‘Me’ in the main toolbar > select Settings and Privacy > select Privacy and then cursor down to the bottom of the options – blocking and hiding > make follow primary – select yes.
Enough reasons?
If you’re in B2B marketing, the nine reasons above should have more than whet your appetite to spread your wings and grow your LinkedIn connectivity.
Sarah Hughes is an award-winning marketer and business growth expert. If you’d like your connectivity done for you, check out her Prospect Booster, a service that provides guaranteed results, starting week one.
Photo by Sigmund
