If you’ve ever heard me speak, you know that I have some strong opinions on things related to social media and what I would call “right sales behavior”. It isn’t that my way is the only way, because of course, it is not. Having sold professionally for close to 30-years, I do have just a bit of experience in this area. There are just some things that salespeople continue to do that drive me a little nuts. Add social media into the mix and well…more stuff to rant about.

My mission (and that of our company) is to help sales leaders and their sales team members bring their “A” game to the evolving world of sales. Though aspects of the sales process remain important…things like identifying and assessing needs, crafting solutions that help your customers improve their business or gaining commitment haven’t changed, other things about the process today have changed.

What’s different?

What has changed is that your buyers buy differently! That means that YOU as sales professionals need your sales A-game to include the smart use of social media as part of your overall sales process. Does it?

On to my rant about the little things…

• Take 30-seconds and personalize your LinkedIn connection invitation. I ignore the “friend” requests…save those for Facebook folks. I also pretty much ignore the generic “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. Really, why? Why are we good connections for each other? Why should I have to figure it out? LinkedIn’s policy is that you know the people you connect to, but honestly, I’m open to connect with people I don’t know just yet, but ONLY if you take a minute and let me know who we can help each other. If it isn’t reciprocal, I’m not interested.
• If you want to send me sales spam, could you at least do your homework? Yesterday, I received an email from a Salesforce.com rep asking for 15 minutes of my time to talk to me about the service. Guess what. I’m already a client and have been for several years. Hello?
• Show some respect. If I have explicitly stated on my LinkedIn profile that I don’t want sales pitches, then don’t send them! You only serve to annoy me, and I just tell my net to avoid you like the plague. I don’t care what LinkedIn says about the positive ratio of people willing to respond to your InMail. That only works if you are darn good at personalizing, which most are not, and the person on the other end really needs what you sell. Recruiters this works for but for salespeople, not so much. Respect what people put on their profiles about the type of mails they are open to. Be creative, find another way!
• Stop asking for favors and never offer to do one in return. You have no idea how many people want to “pick my brain” to get FREE information. I’m all for sharing, but too many people cross that line. I’ve learned to be very discerning and say no as needed. But hey, if you buy me an awesome lunch or dinner with a nice bottle of wine, sure I’m open to sharing my valuable expertise. All I ask if that people respect that I do this to earn my living…I can’t give you everything for free! I know people who reach out to me for help with introductions and they NEVER offer to do anything to help me. Don’t even get me started on the people who show up every couple of years looking for help securing a job. Really? You haven’t talked to me in 3 years and the first email since is to send me your resume and ask that I ask my network to help you? Uh…not going to happen.
• Be relevant. Might mean you need to do some homework. I am soooo tired of receiving spam emails that have zip to do with me or my business. It’s lazy and a time waster to shoot out hundreds of email to people that you don’t know and that you haven’t bothered to learn about. Oh, and don’t school me if I have not responded to the sales crap you sent me last month. I didn’t respond because what you offer has nothing to do with me.
• Follow the rules of email marketing. The CANN-SPAM act is very clear…don’t send spam email to people who’ve not opted in to a list. And, you MUST give them an easy way to “opt out”. When you send me email without that option, it really makes me mad. The act says you are “forgiven” if you spam someone once, as long as they can easily opt out. Follow the protocol. In another blog post, maybe I’ll rant about the people selling Opt-In Database services who spam me – I didn’t opt-in to their list – and then give me no way to get off their email. Do you get the concept of opt-in?
• Say, thank you. Is it really that hard to acknowledge people and thank them for mentioning you, sharing your content, tweeting about you, helped you get that introduction, speaking gig or whatever? No, it isn’t. Do it. It is the right thing to do!

Folks, sales is a people business and people buy from people that they know, like and trust. In today’s social world, your prospects also buy from people that their colleagues and friends know, like and trust. Isn’t it time you figured out how to put social selling to work for you in a way that’s focused on what you can give versus what you can get? Relationships matter.

I’d like to suggest that it is time to play a bigger game! Bring it!

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!