3 Tips To Go From Hoping To Sell To Converting Leads - Using LinkedIn

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Let’s dive in….

We’ve encountered many professionals on LinkedIn who seem to put a lot of stock in this strategy:

Hoping and praying for leads and sales.

Who are we to criticise your faith? But, in terms of growing your business, hope is not a great foundation.

Especially when there are sales and marketing channels that you can be confident in to deliver real leads and real monetisation of your efforts.

It’s time to get a little more strategical about this:

On LinkedIn, if you take the necessary action, the leads will come; but not all leads are the same. Your conversion rates will go up if you implement a proper qualification process for identifying which of your leads are real opportunities.

This is the single most beneficial action that you, as a business owner, can take to convert more leads and waste less time.

Solving versus selling

If you’ve done the ‘groundwork’ with your connections, you will have uncovered many professionals with a problem that you can help solve.

If you are not qualified to solve their problem, it’s certainly not worth your time to engage with them at any length. You can walk away.

The others are a different matter – but not all of them will be serious or genuine. How do you weed out the serious prospects from the rest?

You do this by qualifying their interest.

Business owners sometimes confuse interested with committed.

On LinkedIn, you can bring your prospect to interested, but to get them to committed requires starting the sales process – usually off the LinkedIn platform.

Your job is to therefore to take your prospect on a journey by finding out more about their problem and their need - and delivering the solution and the promise.

Just to be clear, this is a process of qualification, not convincing.

If you try to convince people to buy, you are not selling a solution. Sales resistance will come up and prevent you moving any further: the ‘pushy salesman’ scenario.

Qualification is largely about letting the client talk. We must ask more questions rather than delivering statements about our products and services.

We need to go from the high opportunity cost we currently have, characterised by:

•  “I’ll think about it”
• Open loops
• Feeling frustrated by lack of progress
• Reactive rapport with prospects

…and move towards a higher conversion rate, characterised by:

• “Let’s do it”
• Plenty of closed business
• Feeling fulfilled
• Responsive relatedness with prospects

Three steps to better qualify clients

Your interactions with prospects at this stage should be based on collaboration rather than simply conversion-oriented.

Once someone pings you and shows interest on LinkedIn, pick up the phone and call them.

But remember - if you push too hard, the resistance comes up. Identify the problems and the solutions together with your prospect – that way, you already have their ‘buy in’.

The following three tips should help you improve your conversion rate:

1. Let them talk about their problem

Remember: there is absolutely no point providing a solution to a problem that people don’t have.

Use open questions to elicit information. One of the best questions you can ask is this, to get things rolling:

“What’s going on for you right now that you think I might be able to help?”

Try it next time – after the initial greetings and chit-chat has passed, move straight into the nature of their problem. And you can delve deeper and uncover the pain by first getting permission to ask questions:

“Do you mind if I just ask…” 

2. Control the frame to control the game

It’s very important at this early stage not to lose control or let time run away from you. Chit-chat can easily take over but brings no pertinent information to the table.

You’re busy and cannot afford to waste time, so every time the prospect moves away from the problems they are encountering and it descends into chit-chat, rein them back in again to discuss the problems.

By limiting the length of this call to 7-10 minutes, you will be able to talk to more prospects – and qualify those who are serious from those who aren’t.

3. Push for a committed YES or NO answer

Hard questions lead to easy sales.

You need to aim for committed YES or NO answers. Then you can start getting serious with your prospect or rapidly end the call and wish them luck.

Either way is OK for you, if you have a system that brings you leads every day. Don’t get hung up on converting every lead or you will be fearful of hearing the word NO. There should be nothing to fear from this word, as it enables you to quickly move on to the next opportunity, which is more likely to be a YES.

It can be tough for some people to push for a YES or NO, but getting permission and ’buy in’ before you progress makes it easier. 

Even out the peaks and troughs in your business

Small business owners often experience considerable peaks and troughs in their business: leads come in one week and none at all for the next few weeks. This can play havoc with cash flow and stress levels.

A system on LinkedIn to bring a steady flow of leads will help. But you also need to get smarter with qualifying those leads – and increasing the conversion rate of those prospects who are seriously interested.

If you qualify first by solving before you sell, you will get better results. Take prospects on the journey from where they are now to where they want to be.

Help them visualise how your solution bridges this gap and what their business will look like if they DON’T do anything about their problem. They will them come to the natural decision that you are the answer to their problem.

The key is in asking plenty of questions and being able to elicit information about their problem BEFORE you start selling the solution.

P.s. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways I can help you grow your business with LinkedIn

1. Join the Influencer Boardroom and connect with other advisors and consultants who are scaling too: It’s our new Facebook community where smart advisors and consultants learn to generate more purpose, profit and power. - Click Here

2. Join us inside our pitch-free private training. We’ll show you how we built our business (from scratch) using 2 LinkedIn profiles to hit $84,000 a month within 4 months using a simple 3 step strategy. Click Here: https://theinfluencerproject.com/linkedin-advantage/  

3. Work with me and my team privately: If you’d like to work directly with me and my team to take you from 6 to 7 figures and level things up… just send me a message and put “Private” in the first line… tell me a little about your business and what you’d like to work on together, and I’ll get you all the details.