Buyer Profiles – Social Selling with LinkedIn Ver 2

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Hi there, it’s Chris Hamilton here with Sales Tip a Day, www.SalesTipADay.com. Today I’m going to talk about social selling with LinkedIn and specifically about buyer’s profiles. Here’s a bunch of stats I found online and actually, specifically, in a bunch of white papers that LinkedIn put out that I found were very intriguing. I’m going to highlight some of the … 4 or 5 of these and tell you some information behind them.

First of all, 49 percent of buyers research vendors through their LinkedIn profiles, which means that people that are part of a company that look for specific products or services are going to LinkedIn to find people that can help them with those products or services. What this means to you is that your LinkedIn profile should have your product or service and your geographical area that you look after any other relevant information so that when people are doing these searches online, they will be able to find you.

Secondly, 50 percent of buyers avoid sales professionals with incomplete profiles. What this means is if you have a profile without a picture, without relevant information on what you’ve done for companies or what you do and also information as it relates to the companies that you’ve worked for, the company that you are working for, if all that information is incomplete, people will just completely avoid reaching out or contacting you.

The next one that you should take a look at here is that B2B buyers are literally, they’re completing almost 60 percent of their buying decision before they’re willing to even engage with a sales representative. In fact, a few years ago Google came out with a piece of information called ZMOT, which is a zero moment of truth, which talks about online behaviors. What they found is that typically a buyer or purchaser is going online on average to 10 sites before they even start making a decision to talk to someone. The same sort of pattern is applying here, is that a lot of people are educating themselves prior to talking to a sales rep and one of the places they go is LinkedIn, so one of the things that you really want to take a look at is, are you creating content through your LinkedIn profile or sharing content so that people will find you because of those actions. That’s extremely important nowadays.

One of the other things we want to take a look at is … Now a lot of sales people and business owners typically think one of the best ways to do it is to pick up the phone and do cold calling to find individuals or get appointments with individuals. In fact, the information that I saw from LinkedIn said that the cold calling appointment rate is, literally, 2.5 percent, which I flip it around and take a look at it whole different ways. You know, 97.5 percent of your time is wasted, you’re being shut down, when you’re picking up the phone and cold calling. In fact, what you should be doing is looking at what’s going on next year which is a warm referral can increase your odds of sales success by 2 times to 4 times, which I always look at LinkedIn and leveraging people who are in the buying positions in companies or target audience. You should look for people that you’re connected to, or at least at a 2nd level connection to understand how you can get in front of that person. You’re going to increase your likelihood of sales success by 200 percent to 400 percent.

Then what you should look at is that 84 percent of B2B decision makers begin their buying process with a referral. First of all, try to get found online, secondly, let people know what it is that you’re doing so that when people are making those purchasing decisions, if they’re reaching out to people, which appears they do 84 percent of the time, that you’re top of mind for what people are looking for.

What I’d like you to do is join our next “Social Selling with LinkedIn” webinar which you can register for by going to bit.ly/LinkedInSocialSelling, all one word, that’s bit.ly/LinkedInSocialSelling, all one word, and you’ll be able to register for our next event. Or if you want, you can contact me, Chris@SalesTipADay.com or on my phone at 403-630-1243 to find out more information about that webinar and other webinars that we have coming up, or if you need help with any of this stuff, just give me a call.

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