This week I had the opportunity to write a couple of guest posts for the Sales 2.0 Conference blog that offer salespeople tips for ensuring that prospects can easily contact them. The first focused on LinkedIn and the other focused on the things that you can do to enhance your Twitter profile and you can read both of them here on my site also.

Let’s start with LinkedIn…

When was the last time you viewed your social profiles through the eyes of your prospects? Although many salespeople have LinkedIn accounts precisely to network and build referrals, a high percentage of them unwittingly make it difficult for prospects to connect with them.

Buyers are impatient. Make it difficult for them to reach you, and guess what? They move on to your competitor.

If you want to shrink the sales cycle and improve your chances of being contacted by a prospect, here are four things you can do immediately:

1)     Add your phone number to your LinkedIn profile.

Select “Edit Profile” (under the “Profile” tab) and scroll down to the Personal Information section (all the way at the bottom). Although the section is titled “Personal,” add your business phone number and address. Because LinkedIn only makes your phone number visible to first-level connections, I also suggest that you include your phone number in your profile summary and specialties areas.

2)     Include your business email so that your first-level connections have another communication option beyond emailing through the social site.

Remember, not everyone visits LinkedIn on a daily basis.

3)     Set your email settings so that LinkedIn invitations and messages come directly into your email inbox.

View your inbox as your communications hub. Use inbox rules to automatically organize and forward your message to folders you designate for your LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook messages. Be careful, though—don’t forget to check those folders regularly.

4)     Download the LinkedIn mobile app so your LinkedIn network is always with you.

This lets you respond quickly to connection requests and incoming messages; it also allows you to reach out to others when you have down time.

By the way, on November 15, I will present “Sales Meets Social: Identifying and Reaching High-Profile Prospects: at the Sales Strategies in a Social & Mobile World Conference. Perhaps I’ll see you there?

Today marks seven years since I first began using LinkedIn. As a raving fan, I use the networking tool daily for making connections, sharing referrals, prospecting, conducting pre-sales call research and more. It is an amazing sales tool with power far greater than what most people realize, which is why salespeople need to to invest the time to learn how to use LinkedIn effectively.

Making and accepting invitations is the first step in building your network, so I’d like to share 3 brief tips about how to do it the right way. Before I do, I need to tell you that I do not subscribe to the “open networker” philosophy, and I do not say yes to everyone who asks me to connect with them. Our networks are business assets and should be treated as such. If I’m going to allow someone access to my connections, I need to know that I can trust them to behave professionally. I’m about the quality of connections not the sheer number of them.

Ok, now that I’ve set the stage with my feelings about building my network, here are 3 tips for making and accepting LinkedIn invitations.

1. Invite people that you know. LinkedIn’s official policy is that you connect with people that you know. Daily, I receive invitations from people that I’ve never heard of, never met and never conversed with in a LinkedIn group. These invitations usually indicate that we are friends when we aren’t. Or, they suggest that we’ve done business together, which we haven’t. I keep an open mind about connecting with people that I do not know yet, but you have to give me a compelling reason to do so. What’s the benefit to me? That leads me to point number two.

2. Personalize your invitations. I’m pretty much over the standard “I’d like to add you to my LinkedIn network.” Really, why? Why am I a good connection for you and vice versa? The “you are a person that I trust” message also gets under my skin. These invitations are especially irritating when I have no idea who you are. How do you know that you can trust me? The way I see it, if the connection is important to you – stop and take a moment to customize your message. Guess what, I don’t have the time to look up your profile and figure out if we’d be good connections for each other. Other people don’t either. Your job is to make it clear why connecting makes sense for both parties.

3. When you accept a connection, send a personalized message saying “thank you”. It’s a small, but very important way to stand out. In fact, I conducted social media training for a group of salespeople on Wednesday, and one gal in the room said that it bugged her when people never responded to her after connecting. All it takes is a minute to click on “send a message” once you’ve accepted the invite. It lets the other person know that you actually care about being connected.

People buy from people that they know, like and trust. Sales referrals are shared with other professionals for the same reasons. Relationships matter. Remembering that you never get a second chance to make a first impression, make your first LinkedIn interaction count!

LinkedIn is one heck of a business networking, sales prospecting, sales research goldmine of information. The problem is that many salespeople still aren’t leveraging it to its fullest capacity.

Beyond the value of connecting with people and networking, LinkedIn provides an incredible opportunity to “build your branded presence”, which is pretty important if you expect to be found when buyers are searching for information about the products and services you sell. While there is still a fair amount of resistance in the sales community about the value of social media, the reality is that buyers are buying differently. If salespeople don’t embrace this change and adapt their sales approach to it, they can expect that the savvy social sales competitor is poised to kick their butt.

How do you build your brand?

Simply put – great content. Content can include blog posts, status updates, group discussion contributions and more. It also includes the ability to leverage LinkedIn applications to further build buzz for what you are about. The beauty of using applications is that if you keep the content fresh and changing, your name and face is more visible to your LinkedIn network. Aside from the great visibility inside the LinkedIn world, you’ll also be creating some great personal SEO (search engine optimization) for yourself out on the worldwide web.

We have an app for that!

You might be thinking, what’s the big deal if I do not have content and applications on my LinkedIn profile that’s compelling. Consider what your prospect thinks when they come across your profile.

Does your summary SCREAM expert in your field? Is there enough information there to give him or her some reason to want to contact you? Come on, be honest with yourself. If your summary is barely there and you’ve not completed the experience areas, you have no white papers or case studies to share and no presentation to showcase your product/service capabilities, why would your prospect bother?

There are a host of LinkedIn applications to fit your needs – everything from creating polls, sharing your travel schedule, posting your blog posts, suggesting a business book worth reading, sharing presentations or rating lawyers.

For the sales professional looking to build their brand, here are 6 applications that I use and recommend. They are all free by the way and just waiting for you to take advantage of what they offer.

• SlideShare – Use the SlideShare app to host up to 4 presentations on your LinkedIn profile You can upload far more presentations than that to your SlideShare account, but 4 is the most you can show on your profile at any one time. Post a corporate presentation about your product and service capabilities. Share a presentation you delivered at last week’s conference or post an informational presentation about your business topics. For me, that might be sales coaching. You can post PowerPoint or PDF files.

 

• Google Presentations – you can use this app to host presentations as well. I just happen to have started with SlideShare and really like it. What I do love about Google Presentations is that it allows me to host my video, which can be played right from my LinkedIn profile. Video is one of THE most engaging ways to capture someone’s interest. Since posting my video, I have closed 4 pieces of new business and in addition to telling me that my profile rocked the competitors, they all mentioned the video.

 

• WordPress – If you blog, making sure that your blog post shows up on your LinkedIn profile is a must. I happen to use WordPress, but the Blog Link app lets you connect other blog platforms to your profile as well. Every time you blog, you profile is updated and your network knows that you’ve added new content.

 

• Amazon Book List – A key part of my visibility strategy is speaking at meetings and conferences. As an avid reader, I typically reference statistics and information from books that I’ve read. Adds to my credibility (hopefully) in terms of staying on top of my industry. People used to ask me to provide a book list after the event. Now, I send them to my LinkedIn profile to check out my list. You can add your comments about books you like and recommend them to others. Oh, and you can follow the book’s lists of others and they can follow yours.

 

• Twitter – Even if you don’t want to get into using Twitter per se, you should still set up an account, set up your profile and then use the Twitter LinkedIn application to share your Linkedin status updates. If you believe what I tell you – that being as visible as possible on the web to potential prospects is important – then you want to leverage the Twitter platform as another vehicle for being seen. Mind you, some companies might allow it, so check your corporate policies to be sure that this is OK. If it is – go for it. Post once and get twice the visibility.

 

• Events – hosting a business event? Be sure to use the Events application to promote your event. It is easy to set up and you can then share with people in your network. Use your event URL to post as a status update so that more people see it. You’ll want to be sure that the event is included on your profile, so when you set up the app simply check the box to make this happen.

Today’s buyer often starts the sales process without you! When they have business problems, they turn to the web for answers. Smart salespeople will leverage multiple platforms to stand out from the competition. If you are in B2B sales and are not utilizing LinkedIn applications to create a more compelling profile that sets you apart from your competition, I hope I just motivated you to get moving!

If you read posts 1 and 2 on the topic of busting your brand, you know that I didn’t take kindly to the dimwit who decided it was okay to send me spam, because we were members of the same LinkedIn group. You also know that he didn’t care for me making the suggestion that spamming people wasn’t the way to go about driving successful sales. His response said it all.

But, that wasn’t the end of it, because as you know I felt compelled to let him know for the second time that he’d now taken rude to another level. I figured that would be the end of it. Ah, but not for this guy. Here is his final response. There are soooo many things that I wanted to say in return, but what would be the point? He considers me “sanctimonious”, perhaps because I was the first one to tell him his approach might be losing him sales. As for the rest of his logic…one can only wonder.

“You were never going to buy from me to begin with. Just because you wrote just another book on sales doesn’t mean your way is the only way to get new business. (Hey I have a book published too. 5 stars on Amazon.com – which is really great, but I don’t consider my book to be the definitive answer to anything). There is still plenty of room for cold calling in the market today – and you are wrong if you think otherwise. There is rude, and there is sanctimonious. Besides, those in your network, who like you, believe that there is no room for Cold Calling were never going to buy from me anyway, so be sure to let them know. Actually, I am sure that some sales professionals will be interested to speak with me just because you tell them not too.”

By the way, some of my colleagues suggested that I was only wasting my precious time responding to this guy and then blogging about the situation. My feeling is that every now and then you’ve got to take a stand. I’m getting far to many of these cheezy sales pitches thrown at me via LinkedIn, as are many others, and I felt that I needed to speak up. Whether he hears the message or not is really not the point. Oh, and if you are one of the sales professionals who want to talk to this guy just because I suggest you look elsewhere, please let me know. I’ll happily pass along his contact information:)