Indeed, with millions of registered members (LinkedIn announced that it had exceeded 11 million members in France at the beginning of 2016 [i], thus surpassing Viadeo), it is possible to find your targets and engage with them. How do you conduct your prospecting on social networks? Do you have a strategy in place? If you are a sales manager, how do you guide your teams to help them use this platform? To succeed in digital prospecting, it is essential to have a structured approach.
Discover in this article (the first episode in our series on "social selling") some "keys" to transforming a simple contact into a future client.
1- To prospect with LinkedIn, start by targeting your contacts and stop chasing after connections
Unfortunately, this is a reality, and too many salespeople are adding people they don't know on LinkedIn left and right. What do you hope to achieve by doing this? The law of numbers! Out of 100 people added, one of them will eventually do business with us! Unfortunately, it doesn't really work that way. Worse, frantically adding contacts and competing to be "the one with the most connections" damages your image with your contacts. A salesperson from an unknown company who has 5,000 contacts? These are all signs of heavy-handed prospecting and the promise of unwanted advertising messages. Help!
Adding contacts on the fly, or conducting a basic search and adding people who seem relevant in a few seconds, or "look good," is not a strategy. What happens after this untargeted addition? Generally, nothing. Sending an advertising message right away doesn't work either. In reality, we are bordering on SPAM, the opposite of an engaging conversational approach. Indeed, approving a contact request does not signify an immediate need for a product/service. Some people are looking for help, others are observing, and some are in an advanced purchasing process.
To send the right message from the start, 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 have to support them whatever stage of their research they are at, without rushing them.
We understand it well here, the challenge is not to have one more contact, it is to have one more reader who considers you as an asset for his reflection, one more person to whom you can provide an answer.
In practice:
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- You shouldn't just randomly connect on social networks. Whenever possible, you should favor a mutual contact who can make the introduction.
- Always write a message explaining why you want to be connected with someone. There is nothing worse than an unmotivated request, which has no basis.
2- Get approval for a contact request on LinkedIn
As we have just seen, you can use networking through a mutual contact, who introduces you to a person, or choose to directly contact another user. In either case, use the InMail function, which are internal LinkedIn messages.
In practice:
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- " Pitch » your request so that your contact sees the benefit of accepting it for them ;
- Ask yourself the right questions before writing a message: what problems might this person encounter, what could help them produce more value for their own clients, help them in their daily life...
The contact request is accepted? The work is not finished. On the contrary! Once "connected" via your network or via an InMail, you must not contact the newly added person intrusively.
Build your relationship steadily by helping your new contact and providing them with value, focused on their objectives, not yours.
Offer them a white paper, a customer testimonial, or a relevant article. This is where marketing managers have a key role to play alongside sales representatives, by providing well-thought-out communication materials so that the contacts gleaned on LinkedIn enter the engagement funnel in the best possible way.
Build your credibility and legitimacy, and be seen as an expert. Be patient. You are often in it for the long haul here, not using a pushy approach like traditional outbound prospecting to secure a meeting in minutes. A well-selected LinkedIn contact can bring you business several weeks or months after the first interaction.
Remember, it's far more effective to have fewer contacts with a high conversion rate by building a quality online conversation, rather than sending out dozens of invitations that yield no results!
Discover soon on this blog the following episodes of our series on social selling, which will teach you:
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- What are LinkedIn groups (really) for and how to run yours
- How to develop a sales approach that is "interesting, not interested" and disseminate quality content adapted to your targets.
- How to develop and foster an engaged community around your brand values
To go further and learn more about the concept of social selling and the various communication tools, you can watch this webinar:
KESTIO regularly trains the sales teams of many companies in digital prospecting (social selling), particularly in mastering LinkedIn, which is the preferred social network for business leaders and therefore the most suitable for BtoB prospecting.
Rediscover our previous articles on this topic:
