Buyer Profiles – Social Selling with LinkedIn

Social Selling with LinkedIn: Chris Hamilton to talk about today is social selling with LinkedIn and specifically as it relates to buyers profiles. Here’s a bunch of stats that I found doing some research and leveraging a lot of white papers that LinkedIn has. Some of the highlights with these different statistics are that 49% of buyers research vendors through their LinkedIn profiles. People that are looking to buy are going online and going through your profile. One of the points here that you need to look at is to make sure that your profile has specific keywords in it so that you’re getting found for what it is that you sell and specifically in a specific geographical area. That’s one of the things you should take a look at. The next thing is that 50% of buyers avoid sales professionals with incomplete profiles. If you don’t have a picture, you don’t have a lot of information sitting on your profile, guess what? People are not going to call you. They’re not going to reach out to you and you’re missing an opportunity for people to reach out to you and connect with you to engage you for your products or services. This one is extremely important when you think about it; it that most B2B buyers have completed 57%, almost 60%, of their buyer decision before they’re willing to talk to a sales rep. They’re going online and they’re educating themselves to find out more about products. In fact, Google put out a report a few years ago called the Zero Moment of Truth or ZMOT, and in that what they say is that a buyer will hit at least 10 different websites before they engage with a salesperson. Once again, it goes back to making sure you have a complete profile, so that people can find you online. Because the people who are making these buying decisions are already educating themselves in advance. Another side to this too, is being proactive and reaching out to people in organizations that you should be talking to and starting to educate them as well, which will put you top of mind or help you actually drive a sale within these companies. The other thing too to take a look at and I do numerous webinars on this, is the average cold call rate is 2.5%. In fact, actually I’ve got a couple of studies that show that this rate is far lower than that. It’s actually less than 1%, but even if you take a look at it, your success rate is upwards of 2.5%. I flip it around and say you’re wasting 97.5% of your efforts if you’re making cold calls because it’s going to relate to any kind of success whatsoever. The other way to take a look at it is leveraging LinkedIn and using referrals or warm referral to get your foot in the door to an organization. They say the success rate on this is 2 times to 4 times greater than if you don’t do this at all. I’m a testament to this. I leverage a lot of my connections to get my foot in the door and increase a lot of opportunities for me and that absolutely works. Last but not least is 84% of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with referrals. Think of it this way. I just said the average cold call rate is only successful up to 2.5% of the time. If you want better odds of getting in the door, you should start with a warm referral, and the best way to do that is through LinkedIn to find the people that you want to connect with and someone who’s in your second network, so that you can actually leverage them to get you in front of them and then take a look at this. 84% of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with a referral. The other side of this too is making sure that everyone knows exactly what you do. Thanks a lot and thanks for watching.

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