LinkedIn — Sales, Market Research… and Networking tool

Many peo­ple think of LinkedIn.com as sort of an Online Rolodex. Oth­ers might describe it as MySpace for busi­ness peo­ple or Face­book all grown up. While these descrip­tions are accu­rate on some lev­els, they are not paint­ing the com­plete pic­ture of what LinkedIn can offer to busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als. There are numer­ous uses for the site that go far beyond basic net­work­ing and con­tact man­age­ment. Notably, the site is a great tool for Sales Pro­fes­sion­als and Mar­ket Research. I got the oppor­tu­nity to present this con­cept to the Day­ton Ser­vice Mar­ket­ing Pro­fes­sion­als group today at a meet­ing which was hosted down­town at Brady Ware. It was an excel­lent dis­cus­sion, and I think peo­ple found it to be infor­ma­tive. I wanted to share a lit­tle of what we dis­cussed here in this post.

First, LinkedIn is just as much “Google” as it is “Out­look”. What does that mean? Well, it seems to me that most users of the site typ­i­cally think of it as online con­tact man­age­ment — which in and of itself has huge value. I use the brand names to illus­trate that idea. How­ever, I am here to tell you that if that is all you are using the site for, you are miss­ing out on a wealth of infor­ma­tion — free infor­ma­tion. LinkedIn is a rich and dynamic data­base, which can be searched, mined, and yield insight­ful and use­ful infor­ma­tion to you and your busi­ness. It is a gold­mine of mar­ket­ing infor­ma­tion, all of which is just a search or two away from you.

With over 20 mil­lion users, the site has infor­ma­tion about com­pa­nies large and small. Who is grow­ing, who is shrink­ing, who is look­ing for help? All impor­tant infor­ma­tion for sales and mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als. You can deter­mine quite a bit about a com­pany and its future plans by sim­ply look­ing at who is adding peo­ple and exam­in­ing the skills they pos­sess. It is all right there for you to view.

How else can LinkedIn help you get the cash reg­is­ter ring­ing? As a sales rep, the worst thing in the world is hav­ing to talk about “The fish on the wall” at your ini­tial meet­ing with a prospec­tive Client. Still, good sales peo­ple know the impor­tance of build­ing rap­port, and engag­ing the prospect in a dia­log about some­thing other than busi­ness. “Get them to like you,” is often how this is described, and it is 90% of sell­ing. It is also damn hard, which is why peo­ple get stuck on “hey, where did you catch that fish?” Pretty lame. Enter LinkedIn. If some­one has a pro­file on LinkedIn, you can find out where they have worked, where they went to school, clubs and social groups they are engaged in, who they know, and who you know that they know. All poten­tial con­ver­sa­tion starters. Bet­ter yet, if you have a com­mon con­nec­tion, you can make a call prior to the sales meet­ing to do some research in advance of your meet­ing. This could cre­ate a very mem­o­rable first impres­sion. For exam­ple, say you dis­cover that your prospect is from Urbana, Ohio. You could bring along a bag of Mumford’s Potato Chips as a small but thought­ful gift. Your friend might inform you that this per­son is on a heart smart diet, in which case you might want to opt for some straw­ber­ries from Michael’s Berry Farm — an equally thought­ful, and slightly health­ier idea. These are the silly lit­tle things that might just make the dif­fer­ence in get­ting the busi­ness. They might also get your name men­tioned to oth­ers — an added bonus. This was an espe­cially appeal­ing idea for using this tool in a room full of mar­ket­ing pro­fes­sion­als who work pri­mar­ily in the heav­ily reg­u­lated indus­tries of account­ing, law, and wealth man­age­ment. Great actions are often eas­ier to pull off in these indus­tries that are great brochures and web sites. In the end, thought­ful ges­tures are more effec­tive anyway.

Yes, LinkedIn is a pow­er­ful net­work­ing tool. You prob­a­bly already know that. Still think about it a lit­tle dif­fer­ently, and pos­si­bil­i­ties begin to emerge for its poten­tial. I will post more on this later this week. Are you using LinkedIn? How?