The Center for Sales Strategy Blog

The starting point of being a thought leader on LinkedIn is to use social selling as a way to connect with high potential prospects. Through social selling, you can illustrate empathy, expertise, and problem-solving ability which helps you build trust and create value for those who want to engage with you.

I am still surprised by the number of salespeople I meet who don’t use social selling as part of their attempts to connect with a high-potential account. Many tell me they are connected with current customers, but not with prospects.

I tell every salesperson who doesn’t attempt to connect with prospects on LinkedIn that they are missing out. For every seller I talk to who doesn’t use social selling, I know of one who is, and who is successful at generating new business. So why wouldn’t a salesperson add social selling to their approach?

In this video, Kim Alexandre, VP/Senior Consultant at The Center for Sales Strategy, shares tips to get more engagement and attract great candidates from your job postings on social media. 

They don’t know you.
They don’t trust you.
They won’t respond to your emails.
They won’t engage in a conversation with you.
They won’t meet with you!

These are some of the challenges we face from new business prospects when it is early in the sales process. Each is a hurdle we have to overcome to connect and move the sales process to the next step. When you boil it down, the problem is linked to a lack of trust and value. Simply put, you are not valued or trusted in the eyes of new business prospects.

Ouch! How can this be when you have some much going for you?

If you’ve wanted to update your LinkedIn profile, but each time you start, it feels like an overwhelming task, remember that the best profiles on LinkedIn were not written in one session, but layered in over time.

Your LinkedIn profile is one of the first signs of your professional brand that a prospect or potential business partner will find online.

Here are three things that you can do quickly, that will have an impact on the message that you’re sending out on your profile. 

Recently, I shared a blog post called 10 Social Media Best Practices for Salespeople, and I wanted to expand on a few of them specifically related to how you can put these best practices into play on LinkedIn. I’ve gathered some specific examples from our team of experts, so check out the previous post here, then read on for actionable steps you can take in one hour or less of your time, to enhance your LinkedIn social selling efforts.

Social selling. It’s not just an industry buzzword. It’s a legitimate technique that salespeople should use to build and maintain relationships within a social network that a salesperson and their customers already trust.

When a fad reaches saturation, it’s often ready to start dying out, or at least transition into something else. Since it seems that everywhere you turn, someone is talking about the mistakes and must-haves for your personal brand, has this fad run its course? Are you a skeptic or fanatic for personal branding?

Where do you stand on personal branding?

• Do you read the hype about a personal brand and roll your eyes?
• Or are you an established thought leader in your industry?