“Keep your sales pipeline full by prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.”
– Brian Tracy
Inside Hubspot’s State of Inbound 2018, Salespeople cite prospecting as their #1 challenge when ranking the most difficult parts of the sales process.
Salespeople, it’s no secret, you must make prospecting for NET NEW business a priority. This is the fuel that keeps your funnel consistently full of opportunities.
Think about this quote for a moment and let it sink in…
“Opportunities are usually disguised as hard work, so most people don’t recognize them.”
– Ann Landers
A consistent, systematic approach around prospecting for new business is a priority in order to maintain a healthy sales pipeline. Lack of prospecting will impact your wallet as some compensation plans now have net new business growth gates. Time to set aside your big fat ego and the mentality of ‘I am beyond prospecting’ or ‘this is beneath me.’ For goodness sake you’re salespeople. Part of your job is to prospect and grow your business. This is your responsibility!
Successful sales professionals have made prospecting gratifying by making one simple tweak…
They’ve realized integrating the use of LinkedIn and the power within their network has become mission critical to how they grow their business. Recognizing their network is their net worth, these sales professionals turn on the hot water faucet to warm up their approach to prospecting.
“Sales professionals take to heart that they’re one degree of separation from their best sales opportunity.”
3 Ways Sales Professionals Nail New Sales Opportunities Using Linkedin
Leverage Current Clients
Sales professionals capitalize on existing relationships. This means they socially connect 3, 4, 5 and sometimes 6 deep within their client base. This is a fantastic way to grow your business by connecting the social dots with your clients as you now can be exposed to their networks
Sales professionals farm and assemble a first-rate list of potential clients. Switching the faucet from cold to hot these now become warm calls as opposed to cold calls as they ask their clients for an introduction into their network of friends. There’s no one better qualified than a happy client to introduce you to potential clients. These introductions are golden and a fantastic bridge to building new relationships.
“How well do you know your clients? How well do they know you?”
In this hyper-connected digital world, your network is crucial to your sales success. We’re in an era where shifting business and cultural values along with advancements in technology enable sales reps to network in vastly improved, more focused; more enjoyable ways which are more aligned with our personalities and passions. Strategically integrating LinkedIn accelerates networking, reduces the degree of separation between connections, amplifies the playing field, and redefines the prospecting process.
Construct Target Lists
Sales professionals integrate simple people search fields within LinkedIn to help them uncover relationship opportunities. They balance their relationship funnel as well as their sales funnel.
Sales professionals throw on their digital detective hats and create in-depth strategies to identify key prospects through effective targeting. They find out who within their network is connected to someone within their targeted accounts. Furthermore, they leverage their 11st-degree connections to bridge introductions into their targeted accounts. The more 1st level connections you have the more success you will have searching.
This is why you connect with multiple people inside your current accounts.
Let’s do some simple math…
For example, a sales rep handles 100 current accounts. They then connect to 6 people inside each and every account. 100 x 6 equates to 600 people inside their current accounts who know like and trust them (hopefully). This now opens up Pandora’s Box of networking with my friends.
Sales professionals who are nailing their net new quotas understand how to leverage their network and mine their connections. They set aside their egos and ask for help in growing their business. Start getting familiar with this term… Digital Referral Selling. Is Your Digital Self, Digitally Referrable?
Drive Conversations
Sales professionals add value to their relationships by sharing relevant industry information. They stay in front of their clients, prospects and audience by making daily educational deposits on LinkedIn.
They increase their exposure by cultivating, teaching and tailoring to their audience by engaging on LinkedIn. On a daily basis, they educate, engage and excite their network into conversations. They proactively take over the social steering wheel.
Communication on LinkedIn directly impacts all aspects of the sales funnel. Conversation and collaboration leads to conversion!
“If your content isn’t driving conversation, you’re doing it wrong”
– Daniel Roth
Let’s do some simple math…
For example, a sales rep engages in 5 new conversations per week via LinkedIn (one per day). There are 4 weeks in a month equating to 20 new conversations. Taking this over a year and this is 240 new conversations! Using a 10% conversion ratio to appointments and this means 24 new opportunities added to the sales funnel.
What would it mean to your quota if you added 2 new opportunities every month to your sales pipeline?
Sales professionals who are nailing net new quotas understand how important their gardening skills are to new business growth. Please meet cultivate, teach and tailor.
The Choice Is Yours
I’ve outlined three simple ways to enhance your new business development efforts. Integrating the power behind LinkedIn will invigorate your sales funnel. This approach is intended to start conversations, build relationships and increase sales opportunities.
“Sales reps must be consistent with their prospecting efforts or accept inconsistent sales results as a way of life.”
This will work as part of a well-rounded prospecting strategy. It will work much better if you have a valuable LinkedIn presence (see mine for an example) and you’re actively driving relevant content on LinkedIn that will be of interest to the people you are reaching out to.
In today’s business environment, people want to know who you are and what you’re all about before they invest any time speaking with you. If you’re socially active on LinkedIn, curating content, engaging in conversation and creating excitement; you make it pretty easy for your prospects and clients to recognize you as a professional.
“Why should I have a conversation with you?”
This is a great time to be in sales! Be social, build relationships and remember your gardening skills. Think of prospecting as social business development and watch what happens.
To your future success!
Please feel free to send me a message at llevine@socialsalesacademy.net. Your comments are greatly appreciated.
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