By using social tools to generate leads, you can take the cold out of your calls and increase your sales. LinkedIn is the perfect tool to generate social leads because it is the premier social platform for sales professionals. You still need to leverage your leads to make the sale, though.
Reach Out
According to Daniel Kushner of socialmediatoday.com, you generate social media leads by:
- Offering a webinar
- Developing a relationship
- Producing awesome content
- Sharing information about resources
What comes next?
Relationships start out tentatively, especially between sales professionals and prospective clients. While LinkedIn encourages connections with people you actually know, knowing someone and knowing them for business purposes are two different things. Offering content, then hitting up someone you barely know for a sale is a good way to fall flat. Instead, reach out first. Get to know them. Chat about the content you’ve provided. Talk about the content they’ve posted. Build up that tentative relationship without pressing for a sale.
Offer Individual Value
If you build the relationship into something familiar, then you will be in a better position to know what they need. If you can match something they need—like information—to what you have available, you can offer something of individual value.
Discover what interests your target. You may have come across a piece of content they haven’t seen that offers insights and information they’ll value. Send them the link and tell them why you think it’ll interest them. It doesn’t even have to be something you or your organization has produced; it just has to be valuable to them. It’s like a “thinking of you” card for a business associate.
Make the Sale a Solution
Some of your “thinking of you” tips will succeed and some won’t. That’s okay because it gives you more information about what your targets value. You will want to track this information and use it in the future for social selling, especially when you’re about to pitch a product or service.
Once you know what is and isn’t of value to them, you can tailor your offering to their needs. Instead of wringing the highest possible sale out of them, start with a sale you know will benefit them. For example, you can say something like, “I know you really liked X (content tip you sent), so I think Y (product or service offering) will help you with Z (problem or opportunity).”
Become the solution to their problem. Become the lever that lifts them to a new opportunity. If you can do that, you can make social selling the key to your success—and theirs!
Topics: Winning with Sales Navigator
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