Jun 29 2008
Selling Geek podcast #5 - LinkedIn: the social network for business
One of the essential principles of good selling is: people buy from people. No matter how much we might like to live in a world where buyers make purchase decisions without human involvement – or on second thought, perhaps not – the fact of the matter is that person-to-person interaction is a requirement for most kinds of sales.
And as a result, for many sales professionals, success depends as much on who you know as it does on what you know. The best salespeople are expert social networkers – they develop relationships with customers and prospects, with suppliers and business partners, with anyone that might help them find new buyers. In the past, this was all done at industry conferences, trade shows, and business meetings, and also in civic organizations, social events, or on the golf course or tennis court.
But today, we live in a web-enabled world, and this provides sales pros with whole new ways to connect with people – ways that reach far beyond the physical limitations of the old network building standards. And one of the key web-based tools that has emerged to help foster interpersonal business connections is LinkedIn.
Today, more than 23 million registered users in more than 150 countries have joined the LinkedIn site. LinkedIn is arguably becoming the standard social network hub for business professionals all over the globe.
Why has LinkedIn become so popular with business people? And, more importantly, what value does this facility provide, if any, to sales professionals?
What is LinkedIn?
Basically, LinkedIn is an online facility for recording your connections with other people. It records those with whom you have developed trusted business relationships, and enables you to leverage the relationships with those to whom you are connected, thereby extending your network. Over time, through LinkedIn, you can develop an automated network of business contacts that enables you to reach out and interact with literally millions of people, all in a secure, well organized system.
This is a potential gold mine of interpersonal contacts for salespeople – but we’ll say more about that later.
Registering on LinkedIn is free, and after doing so, you can create a profile. Your profile is similar in structure to a typical business resume. Here you can put all of your professional credentials, background and experience. In fact, most LinkedIn profiles read exactly like their resume – my own included. Your profile is searchable, both to those in the LinkedIn network, and to those who aren’t members, too. This enables your profile to be found by current and former business colleagues, fellow employees, customers, and other industry contacts.
LinkedIn, in a word, is where you can build connections with other people. After establishing your profile, you can send invitations to record a connection on LinkedIn with other people. If the recipient of your invitation is a LinkedIn member, they just have to accept your invitation, and the system lists each of you on your respective profile as connected. If they are not a LinkedIn member, they are invited to register, and if they do, then your connection is forged. As people find your LinkedIn profile, they can likewise send you invitations to connect to their network.
You also have the option to upload your contacts from your personal information management system, if you wish – LinkedIn supports import of contacts from Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL. Or you can import contacts from Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, or the Mac OS X Address Book, or from any contact file in the correct comma-separated or tab-separated format. LinkedIn will analyze these contacts and establish invitations for each.
You can also register to join Groups on LinkedIn, which gives you access to “networks within the network.” For example, I joined a couple Notre Dame fan groups (Go Irish!) and a few sales profession industry groups. Further, LinkedIn makes it easy to search for former colleagues or classmates, or for specific people inside the network, and you can then invite them to your list of connections. By importing my contact list, doing a few searches, and joining some relevant Groups, I expanded my immediate network to more than 500 people – through them, I have over 100,000 “friends of friends”– and through them, I can reach nearly 5 million professionals in LinkedIn.
Here is where the power of LinkedIn can be brought to useful purpose. Let’s say I want to make a sales call on… Xerox, for example. I may not know anyone that works there right now, but by going to the “Companies” tab in LinkedIn, I can search Xerox, and discover that 29 people who work there know someone that is in my direct network. I can then issue a request for an introduction to the appropriate contacts in my network, and they can forward my request to the person I want to reach. This is a great way to generate “warm” leads, instead of just cold calling.
Paying the LinkedIn Piper
Here is where we discover how LinkedIn makes money. In addition to some advertising displays in the LinkedIn system, which are presented in a fairly unobtrusive way, LinkedIn also charges for advanced access to their network. A free personal account allows only five network introductions at a time, and you can’t take advantage of some LinkedIn features, such as the ability to send mail messages directly to people in your network. A Business account costs US$19.95 per month or US $199.50 a year, and allows up to 15 introductions, and more in-network communication options. A Business Plus account costs $50 per month or $500 per year, and allows up to 25 introductions. And there is a variably priced Enterprise subscription as well, for large organizations. LinkedIn also charges other fees for services targeted mostly at corporate clients such as US$195 for a 30-day job posting.
Are these premium subscriptions worth the money? Well, that depends on the value of your network. As you add more connections, the ability to reach more business contacts grows geometrically. I had a free account for several years, before I discovered that I was hitting the introduction limits consistently, and then I decided to upgrade. If you use the LinkedIn network a lot, you won’t mind paying the small fees required. If you don’t, there’s always the free option.
The Answer is… 42!
If you get a premium LinkedIn subscription, you can use the Answers feature, which I have found interesting, and sometimes very useful. You can post a question to your network, and collect responses. For example, I asked a selected group from my network if anyone was using LinkedIn as a sales prospecting tool. Within one day I received over 40 responses, including these:
I did have a LinkedIn connection contact me recently asking for a referral to a company on my list. I didn’t even realize I had a connection with the company. I was able to make an email introduction and the two of them are now doing business. It was as simple as this guy searching his LinkedIn connections to see if anyone had a connection to his targeted prospect.
You have to be careful about using LinkedIn as a sales tool. Someone that prospects blatantly will quickly ruin their reputation and destroy their own efforts. There was a group on LinkedIn that went into hard-core sales mode and they quickly got squashed with complaints.
I use Linkedin to look for specific people to see if they are connected to anyone within my network. Linkedin provides the ability to become connected to a potential prospect through a “warm call.”
I use LinkedIn for qualifying sales opportunity, but not to identify them. When I have a qualified lead, I will usually see who else is at the company. If I happen to know somebody in the account, I reach out to them for information and guidance. I get “inside” information on how the company runs, and the potential issues, etc. This way I am usually much more informed than my competitors.
If you have a question, LinkedIn Answers capability is an interesting way to get some diverse perspectives quickly. But you have to be careful – if you use it for questions like, “Hey, anyone wanna buy something?”, you can get in trouble quickly. People don’t like being harassed in any medium.
A Little Trouble in Network Paradise
Although LinkedIn can be very valuable to aspiring salespeople, it is not a perfect solution for all sales problems. There are a few blemishes on LinkedIn that take away from the beauty of the system.
First, building a good network on LinkedIn takes time and effort. And the more connections you add, the more work it takes to maintain. I must admit that after reviewing some of my 500+ connections recently, I had no recollection who some of these people were. I had to view their profile to remind myself why I had added them – and for a few of them, I decided to disconnect them because we no longer had a real relationship. I now mark my calendar to review my LinkedIn contacts, import new ones, and cull out some of the old, stale connections, every quarter. It takes a few hours, but I think it’s worth the investment to keep the network current.
Second, as a LinkedIn user, you will discover that there are two types of network builders: I call them conservatives and liberals. Conservatives, like me, keep their networks limited only to those people with whom they have a real relationship. This is important to me as a sales professional, because I use my network for introductions, and I want those introductions to be of high quality, for both me and for the person I want to meet. On the other end of the spectrum are the liberals, who want to be “friends” with everyone – or, more precisely, they think everybody should be connected to everyone. These people drive me insane, as they care nothing about the quality of connections. Rather, they think only about the number of people with whom they can connect.
Here is where LinkedIn users discover the positive and negative aspects of recruiters, who use LinkedIn extensively, and who are all ultra-liberal connectors. There isn’t a week that goes by before someone I’ve never heard of invites me to connect to their LinkedIn network. Invariably, they are recruiters. When I first joined LinkedIn, I thought, “What the heck? Why not?” What a mistake. I was immediately deluged with repeated requests to pass on introductions through my network. Total time consumed: considerable. Total value to me: zero. I’m in sales – time wasted is money lost. So, goodbye connections to recruiters. (snip) Ahhhh, welcome back, peaceful, productive network.
I must admit, however, that my ultra-conservative stance on network purity made things a little too quiet. I found that without a few liberal connectors in my network, it was difficult to get introductions to some prospects without having to go through several degrees of people, and that made for some awkward introductions. So, I carefully reviewed some of the super-liberal recruiter connectors, and invited two of them to connect – they both immediately accepted, of course. Those two connections increased my network size by almost one-third, so I actively cultivate those relationships, helping them with their occasional recruiting requests, in exchange for introductions to key people. Indeed, I’ve learned that a little diversity goes a long way, when it comes to LinkedIn: a couple liberal friends I can tolerate – but more than that, and I start to get a headache. I leave it to your own sensibilities to determine how open you choose to be with your own LinkedIn connections. For me, a moderate conservative model works best.
I also discovered one of the problems with having a substantial network: poachers. You can, if you wish, leave your list of connections open on your public profile. This allows anyone that finds you to review all of your connections at their leisure. I figured that was the right thing to do, since the purpose of LinkedIn is to help grow business networks. But I didn’t take into consideration that some of my competitors are also LinkedIn users, and one of the brighter ones found my list of connections to be very, very interesting indeed. I suddenly found that my clients were getting calls from one of the “bad guys.” It took me a while to see the pattern, before I realized that he was trolling through my LinkedIn connections. I toyed with the idea of setting up a dummy connection and creating my own “sting” operation, but that seemed like too much work for dubious results – and besides, that is a violation of the LinkedIn user agreement, and I’ve found LinkedIn too useful to risk getting banned. Instead, I simply turned the visibility of my network off. People can still request introductions through my network, but they can’t browse it on my profile. That stopped the bad guys cold. So, learn two lessons from my experience, please: first, if you are a sales professional, guard your network, and second, if you know who your competitors are, check out their profile – you never know what you might find there, if you know what I’m saying. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)
Sales Pro Value Score
Earlier, I asked why LinkedIn is so popular. The answer is clear – it’s darned useful, especially for sales pros who want to develop their network of valuable business connections. Is it the perfect social network for salespeople? No – it takes time and effort to become truly useful, and it has a few non-fatal but potentially annoying flaws. But if you are willing to make the effort, and if you are aware of the possible trouble spots, LinkedIn is fertile ground for development into an invaluable sales tool.
So, for it’s widespread user base, invaluable potential as a sales research and prospecting tool, a fair value-based pricing model, and interesting group networking features, despite a few minor flaws, Selling Geek gives LinkedIn a Sales Pro Value Score of 4 out of a possible 5.
UPDATE: LinkedIn starts new targeted advertising program.
UPDATE: LinkedIn and Moo form alliance to print business cards.
UPDATE: LinkedIn updates groups features, and breaks them
Some useful resources about LinkedIn and business networking
- Dave Stein gives a good example of what business networking is really all about on his blog…
- …and Dave also makes a good point about what salespeople should have on their LinkedIn profile
- Jill Konrath wrote a great post and a white paper on how LinkedIn can be used to sell better
- Jason Alba wrote a terrific book on how to use LinkedIn, and has a very good related blog
- Sales Team Tools blog asks: “What does your LinkedIn profile tell others about you?”
- Blogger extraordinaire Chris Brogan advises: “Write your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future“
