Make the most of buyers’ extra attention spans this summer

What happens when there are fewer people in the office at your target accounts? It means that those in the office have a lot fewer meetings, receive a lot fewer messages and emails – and have a lot more opportunity to catch up on the tasks that tend to get pushed to one side. It means that at some point this summer, you will have more of your buyers’ attention than at any other time of the year. It’s a crucial opportunity that it’s important to make the most of.

Here are some of the ways that you can use LinkedIn to make the most of the quality time that both you and your buyers have available:

Target buyers’ moments of attention with personalised InMail
Fewer messages means less competition for attention in people’s inboxes, more time to engage with those that seem interesting and a far greater likelihood of prospects responding. The challenge during the summer months is timing: making sure that your message arrives when a prospect is in the office and paying attention. That’s why InMail is such a powerful option for reaching out at this time of year. The real-time delivery feature ensures that it appears at the top of your recipient’s inbox when they are actively engaged on LinkedIn. It connects you to the moments in the summer when your prospect has time and space to think about what you’re saying – whether they are enjoying a more open schedule in the office or checking LinkedIn while on holiday.

Maximise the effectiveness of InMail by using insights about a prospect from their profile or feed. In LinkedIn’s recent State of Sales study, 90% of B2B buyers in Europe said that a clear understanding of their specific role was an important factor in deciding whether to engage with a seller or not. LinkedIn Sales Navigator users benefit from icebreaker suggestions when composing InMails that draw on relevant profile data, LinkedIn posts and activity in the feed.

Curate holiday reading lists for your prospects on PointDrive
More time allows prospects to think strategically, and read through the interesting content that they’ve been meaning to come back to when their calendar clears up. A lot of professionals take the opportunity to do this when they are out of the office and in a more relaxed frame of mind – and many of them expect trusted sales contacts to contribute to their strategic thinking. B2B buyers in Europe describe sales reps sharing applicable content as one of their most powerful motivating factors for engaging, with 88% agreeing that it’s important. In Germany and France, top sellers rank the ability to provide ‘strategic counsel’ as one of the most important factors helping to close deals.

That makes the start of summer a valuable opportunity to share content that can help to shape buyers’ thinking. The PointDrive feature in LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you create customisable reading lists of relevant content assets – and share these via a personalised link rather than through difficult-to-read attachments. You’ll be able to track engagement with the content throughout the summer, with alerts when your prospects open different assets – and when they share them with others.

Be the conduit for intriguing content
It’s not just your business’s content assets that can help to strengthen buyer relationships. This is a great time to take on a role as the conduit to interesting content that your connections might easily miss while they’re away from their desk. Sharing a great TED talk, or posting your thoughts from an event that you’ve attended will help to raise your profile and establish your thought-leadership credentials. Recording your thoughts as video is a great way to communicate your personality and start the process of building a human connection.

Set your strategy for the second half
It’s not just buyers who have more time available over the summer. If you’ve got fewer meetings scheduled, it’s worth investing the extra time to set you up for the second half of the year.

Start by activating the CRM Synch feature in Sales Navigator, which enables you to save all of your LinkedIn activity to your CRM – and means you can seamlessly integrate CRM insights into your Sales Navigator activity going forward. Being forced to work with sub-standard data and correct names, titles and contact information is one of the biggest threats to sales productivity. You can do away with it in just a few clicks.

Taking extra time now can help to lay the foundations for more efficient outreach later on. That could involve exploring promising accounts that match the criteria of deals you’re already closing – and using the advanced search and suggestions in Sales Navigator to surface the likely decision-makers at those businesses. You can plot your route into new accounts by identifying common connections and the people able to refer you to buyer and influencers. Lead recommendations will help you with multi-threading and strengthening relationships at existing clients too – and the more you use these features, the more recommendations you’ll receive. 

It feels like time has a different quality in the summer months – and that’s especially true when it comes to sales. You may be filling the hours in your day differently but they are no less valuable for that. Use the summer months for creating quality moments with quality prospects. It will help you to feel as fired up and recharged as the time you spend out of the office.