The value of LinkedIn

As I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn to build my personal brand, look for new prospects and also put a name for Crane out there, I figured it might be nice to write a piece on what I think the value of LinkedIn is and how you can best apply it to become successful in e.g. Sales.

If you're looking at this article, it means you have LinkedIn which sort of means that you do understand that there is value in this network at all. Although most professionals nowadays use LinkedIn, not that many are actually fully convinced of its potential. Yet try and imagine what it was like to find the right decisionmakers or even certain companies before we had LinkedIn. Let's look into the (for me) most important values:

Source of information

LinkedIn is a wonderful source of information, with all users constantly posting thoughts, insights or opinions you can get an idea of sentiment, developments in specific markets but also the opportunity to learn. In my industry, good information is key! By searching for people who work at specific companies in specific regions and analyzing their post behavior, you can easily get a clear image of their sentiment and maybe even things which have happened abroad that have not made the news yet.

Addition to cold calls

Crane Worldwide Logistics invests a lot in Technology, which is also why everyone in the Sales organization has been granted a Sales Navigator account, which will enable you to explore LinkedIn in a more advanced way, send messages to people and create lists within LinkedIn of people you'd like to meet or speak with. I get an average response rate on my messages of around 40-60%, which is a little higher than I would get out of cold calls. However the positive response rate is lower, which means that 'picking up the phone and start dialing' is still crucial for results. Lots of people out there don't believe that sending inmails will get you anywhere, which is nonsense - you just should not solely send inmails, but top it off with some phonecalls. I try to maintain a 30/70 ratio between inmails vs phonecalls and this easily gets me 5-10 new client meetings per week.

Easy exposure

We all have business cards and we all try to give out as many as we can each year before ordering new ones. However, how many will you actually give out? And don't these people usually already have your details? A couple of months ago, I posted a picture of my Business card and got almost 14.000 views on it. 14.000! As my network on LinkedIn consists of 7000 connections, that means that over 7000 people outside of my network looked at my Business card. Of course, nothing beats handing out cards personally and shaking hands, but 14.000 people looking at your company name and contact details counts as a big win for me, besides it only took me 5 minutes to create this post.

Sharing knowledge

As I have mentioned in a previous post, knowledge is what will truly set you apart from any of your competitors, no matter what branche you're in - knowledge is key. Of course, just posessing knowledge is not good enough, you also have to share your knowledge and apply it as in basing your actions on it. LinkedIn gives you the opportunity to not only gather knowledge, but sharing it with your network as well. People will read your posts and see someone who clearly knows what he/she is talking about. This will create an association between you and certain areas of knowledge, which is a good thing.

Conclusion

LinkedIn is not something which should be the center of your focus if you're in Sales as personal contact (face-to-face) will always remain crucial to doing business, at least for the foreseeable future. To utilise LinkedIn to its maximum potential, look at it as an additional way to get your face out there, an extension of your Sales Activities which will expand your network and exposure.

Results will come, I challenge anyone sceptical about LinkedIn's commercial power to go ahead and try doing three posts a week, 1 article every two weeks, daily shares and 20 inmails a week for a month and tell me they did not gain anything from that.

Happy selling!