Indeed, with millions of registered members (LinkedIn announced it had passed the 11 million member mark in France in early 2016[i], overtaking Viadeo), it's possible to find your targets and engage with them. How do you go about prospecting on social networks? Do you have a strategy? If you're a sales manager, how do you guide your teams in using this platform? A structured approach is essential for successful digital prospecting.
In this article (the 1st episode in our series on social selling), discover some of the keys to turning a simple contact into a future customer .
1- To prospect with LinkedIn, start by targeting your contacts and stop the "network race".
It's an unfortunate fact of life that too many sales reps are still adding people they don't know to Linkedin. What do you hope to achieve by doing this? The law of numbers! Out of every 100 people added, one of them will one day do business with us! Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Worse still, frantically adding contacts and racing to see who can "network the most" weakens your image with your contacts. A sales rep from an unknown company with 5,000 contacts? These are all signs of heavy prospecting and the promise of unwanted advertising messages. We're here to help!
Adding contacts on the fly, or conducting a basic search and adding people who seem relevant to you in a few seconds, or "who have a good head", is not a strategy. What happens after this untargeted addition? Usually nothing. If you send an advertising message right away, nothing either. In reality, we're on the verge of a SPAM approach, the opposite of an interesting conversational approach. In fact,approving a contact request does not imply an immediate need for a product or service. Some people are looking for help, others are on the lookout, and some are in an advanced purchasing process.
To send the right message from the outset, you need to find a communication angle that initiates the relationship and helps contacts build their thinking, regardless of their level of knowledge of your company. You need to accompany them whatever stage of their research they're at, without rushing them.
It'snot about having one more contact, it's about having one more reader who sees you as an asset to their thinking, one more person to whom you can provide an answer.
In practice :
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- You don't connect to social networks at random. Whenever possible, it's best to use a common contact to make the connection;
- Always write a message explaining why you want to be put in touch with someone. Nothing is worse than an unmotivated request that has no basis in fact;
2- Get approval for a contact request on LinkedIn
As we've just seen, you can connect via a shared contact, who introduces you to someone, or choose to contact another user directly. In all cases, use the InMail function, i.e. LinkedIn's internal messages.
In practice :
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- "Pitch your request so that the person you're talking to sees the advantage of accepting it;
- Ask yourself the right questions before writing a message: what problems this person may be experiencing, what could help them produce more value for their own customers, help them in their day-to-day life...
Contact request accepted? The job's not over yet. On the contrary! Once you've "connected" via your network or InMail, the last thing you want to do is contact the newly added person in an intrusive way.
Quietly build your relationship by helping your new contact and providing value, focused on their objectives, not yours.
Suggest a white paper, a customer testimonial, something relevant to read. This is where marketing managers have a key role to play alongside sales, providing well thought-out communication elements to ensure that contacts gleaned from LinkedIn enter the engagement funnel in the best possible way.
Build your credibility, your legitimacy, and be perceived as an expert. Be patient. This is often a long-term approach, not the push approach used in traditional outbound prospecting, which aims to land an appointment in a matter of minutes. A well-selected LinkedIn contact can bring you business weeks or months after the first exchange.
And remember: it's much better to have a few contacts with a good conversion rate thanks to the construction of a quality online conversation, than to issue invitations by the dozen, which will not produce any results!
Discover the following episodes of our social selling series on this blog, which will teach you :
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- What LinkedIn groups are (really) for and how to run your own
- How to develop an "interesting, not interested" sales approach and distribute quality content tailored to your targets
- How to develop and animate an engaged community around your brand's values
To find out more and learn more about the concept of social selling, and the different tools available for communication, you can watch this webinar:
KESTIO regularly trains the sales teams of many companies in digital prospecting (social selling), and in particular in the use of LinkedIn, which is the social network preferred by company directors and therefore the most suitable for BtoB prospecting.
Read our previous articles on this topic:
