Personalised Sales on LinkedIn

This week I chat with Luis Báez , a sales enablement leader, trainer and coach about taking a different approach to business development on LinkedIn.

Luis has worked in sales for LinkedIn and other big names in Silicon valley. He is now dedicated to helping online business owners and B2B professionals.

I truly believe that the way to succeed long term on LinkedIn is to establish a strong personal brand and become influential by building relationships, maintaining a high level of visibility and innovating in your field. The aim is to become seen as a scarce resource that is in high demand meaning that traditional 'business development' effectively becomes a thing of the past.

This all sounds great but it doesn't happen overnight...and we all have bills to pay! So what do we do to generate business before we establish that sort of brand and reputation?

Many people resort to the numbers game hitting a high volume of 'prospects' with the same sales messages. This inevitably has a low success rate but if we hit enough people then we will start to gain customers and establish out business.

Here's the big problem with that...

By going down the volume route we establish a pattern that is very difficult to reverse.

• You are always seen as the hunter
• Prospects respond by seeing you as the needy supplier
• You find it increasingly difficult to establish productive customer relationships - the respect just isn't there and the balance is wrong.

So what is the answer?

Luis has established a reputation as a sales coach who takes a different approach, focussing on quality relationships and niche target customer pools.

This bridges the gap between my favoured 'inbound' strategy and the high volume, low hit rate strategy described above.

If you want to fully appreciate this topic, you should listen to the full podcast episode below

In our chat we covered many areas including;

• The mindset required for success with sales. Rejection is inevitable and prospects do not wish to be sold to.
• The importance of focussing on a small, tight niche market. This goes against our instincts when we get rejected but it's crucial to hold onto this focus.
• Recent algorithm changes are designed to discourage posts that are designed to sell in favour of topics that are helpful.
• Always attempt to engage with a prospect through activities such as commenting, replying and reacting to content rather than approaching with a cold DM
• If a prospect is not active on LinkedIn then find the platforms where they are, and if they are not active anywhere, don't waste your time and focus on people that are.
• Always emphasise uplifting other people in your communication and content rather than self promotion.
• Is it helpful to identify yourself as a salesperson in your profile? The key here is to make your profile and job title focused on how you can help.
• It is better to focus your content on your area of expertise and skills at least initially until you have established an engaged audience.
• Linkedin are anti-virality they want content to resonate with a niche audience and not to be wildly popular. This is important to remember when posting content.
• Good content should show empathy with your target audience's challenges 1 in 5-7 posts can be promotional but no more than that.
• Luis believes that we shouldn't have too much fun on LinkedIn and let it become the water cooler interation rather than the boardroom. (I'm not sure I agree with this point).
• A prospect should only become a LinkedIn connection after you've have engaged with them and built some level of rapport. Invitations should be personalised with a very succinct note.
• We also discussed the benefits and disadvantages of audio and video messages versus text messages on LinkedIn. He believes that audio and video messages are mainly suitable for short, succinct messages and not appropriate as a first point of contact.
• We should never lose sight of the importance of being 'human' when using Linkedin. If you wouldn't do something in person, don't do it on LinkedIn!

That really is just a basic summary, I strongly encourage you to listen to the full episode to fully understand this topic.

Thanks to Luis for spending the time talking to me. You can find out more about him at;

LinkedIn profile

Website

This episode is the first of a series of interviews I am publishing while I am away on an extended leave. I will be back to the usual show format at the end of November.

Next time I will be chatting with Karen Tisdell about her approach to LinkedIn profiles.