Launched in 2003 and with 80 million registered users in 200 countries, LinkedIn is the foremost business oriented social networking site. In Australia, LinkedIn already has close to 1 million users and continues to grow at double-digit rates. A majority of these users are mid-to-senior level managers, professionals and business owners, making LinkedIn an invaluable sales tool for the new millennium.

Here are seven things you must do to succeed in business development using LinkedIn:

1. Ensure your profile is sales-ready
Most new users list only their current employer in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. Fill out your profile like it is an executive bio and include past companies, education, affiliations and activities. This will help you build your network by enabling people from all your current and past affiliations to find you easily.

There is a critical difference between a profile written for a job-search (a majority of profiles read like this) and one written for sales. A good job-search profile emphasises that you are a choice employee and lists your responsibilities and achievements. A good sales profile emphasises that you are a trusted, subject matter expert for your company and the product or service you represent. It should contain information on your target customers, how you help them and what results you have delivered for them.

Take a look at my profile to see the difference between the description for my current role with Salescraft and prior role with FedEx Kinko’s http://au.linkedin.com/in/pritamsarkar

2. Keep building your network
By inviting people to connect with you, you grow your first, second and third level contacts exponentially. Your first level connections see all your public activity - new connections, recommendations, status updates, groups joined and questions answered. This is a great way to constantly get noticed and build top-of-mind-recall with them. When people search using LinkedIn’s functionality, you get listed ahead of those who are outside their networks.

There is a simple rule of thumb for invitations: invite people you know, might know, have known, those known by someone you know or people with whom you share a common affiliation. Do not invite people you don’t know, as most often, people will decline an invitation from a total stranger.

There are a few ways to accelerate the growth of your network:
i. LinkedIn provides the facility to search your Web-based personal email account (hotmail.com, gmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com) and tell you which of your contacts are LinkedIn users.
ii. Always look at all the connections of your connections. Once you find someone you know, invite them directly. If it is someone you are keen to know, ask your first level connection for an introduction.
iii. Join groups and invite people of interest to connect after you have built your presence through active participation in the group.
Inviting new contacts needs to be a prioritised, regular activity.

3. Ask for recommendations
The top two questions prospects usually ask are:
i. What’s in it for me? (What problem can you solve for me?)
ii. Why should I trust you? (What makes you competent and reliable?)

Recommendations are a great way to communicate both. If you have ever received or given a recommendation on LinkedIn, you know that the system ensures that it is genuinely written. Make it a priority to build the number of recommendations you receive. Every time you exceed a client’s expectations, ask for an endorsement. It is reasonable to ask for an endorsement as well as mention what aspect (trust and value) you would like them to touch upon. By and large most people are happy to oblige. It is also important to recommend those who have provided an exceptional service or value to you.

Finally, when contacting new people within LinkedIn, invite them to read your recommendations so that they can read what other people experienced while working with you. You can also include your public profile in your email signature and invite people to view it, read your references and connect with you.

4. Research people and companies using the ‘Advanced Search’ feature
You will need a premium account to get the most from this feature, but the expense is worth it. This powerful search utility enables you search by city, company, industry or any other keyword. The results of your search criteria give you a list of people’s names and a link to their public profiles. You can read and research people’s profiles and plan your next steps to engage the contact electronically, by phone or even snail mail.

You can save your search criteria and categorise and bookmark people of interest. Being able to keep notes in the ‘Profile Organiser’ make this a powerful and up-to-date CRM system as well.

5. Follow Companies to see their employees and their movement
LinkedIn allows Companies to create their own profile and provide information about themselves. People can link to these pages in their work profiles, therefore a number of Company pages have an extensive list of employees linked to them.

For example, Microsoft (http://www.linkedin.com/company/microsoft) has almost 95,000 employees on LinkedIn and almost 200,000 people following it. If you wanted to get in touch with someone at Microsoft, LinkedIn would be a great place to start.

In a company’s ‘Overview’ tab, you can see their Employees, New Hires and those (from the company) that are in your network. You can also see ‘All activity’ which lists the movement of people associated with that company’s LinkedIn profile page.

This is a great way for Account Managers to increase their relationships within their major accounts.

6. Expand your network and influence through ‘Groups’
LinkedIn allows you to join a maximum of 50 groups and you should use the full capacity available to you. Groups attract people with common interests. Search for groups within your target markets and join them. Another way to find groups of interest is to look at a target contact’s groups at the bottom of their public profile and join the relevant ones.

Participate in these groups by showing interest in other people’s needs and problems. Not only does this build relationships, it also helps demonstrate expertise. Though no one grudges you your commercial interests, people are always attracted to those who are willing to give rather than get. You can ask questions, initiate discussions and share useful articles and resources that will be of interest to your groups.

7. Establish your credibility through ‘Answers’
LinkedIn provides a section called ‘Answers’ for people to ask questions and get input from their network. This is a great way to showcase your knowledge and establish expertise. It is important to give valuable information through this channel rather than just use it for self-promotion as, needless to say, this is not looked upon favourably by the information seeker. That said I believe that givers gain, so expect something to come back your way!

In summary, how we interact and associate has been irrevocably changed through social media like LinkedIn and Facebook. Therefore, for the contemporary sales professional, it is critical to learn how to navigate the vast amount of publicly available information to gain a critical advantage in the business development process. It’s time to evolve or face extinction by the end of this decade!

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The Christmas and New Year Season is just around the corner. For most businesses, things slow down and people prepare to take time off and travel, perhaps do some home renovation or just relax. People have more time on their hands.

Now is the PERFECT time to meet people who are otherwise too busy through the year. Here are 10 types of lead generating meetings you can have before the Christmas break:

    1.   Meet with customers to review the year gone by and the opportunities ahead
    2.   Meet with people who were clients at a previous company, but moved on to new companies
    3.   Meet with key influencers in your target companies who can refer you to key decision makers
    4.   Meet with past colleagues who can make that all important introduction in the future or share valuable information
    5.   Meet with sales people from other vendors, who sell into your target market(s) so as to trade information
    6.   Meet with LinkedIn connections who might be able to offer valuable information or introductions
    7.   Meet with people with whom you exchanged business cards at a networking function, seminar or trade show earlier this year
    8.   Meet with clients who have become inactive over the last six to twelve months
    9.   Meet with people who are new in your client organisation and could be potential customers
    10.    Meet with replacements for previous key contacts in companies, before they form strong alliances with competitors.

Pick up that phone and book those appointments. Speed up when others slow down this Christmas and get ready to enjoy big results on the other side of your well deserved break!

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So You Think it’s hard to win in business? Think again. Fortunately it’s not nearly as dependant on chance as picking a winning Americain. Take charge of your success with these 10 tips that are sure to help you race your team to victory!

In February 2005, I took on a new Sales management role with the challenging task of turning around a non-performing business. The average sales performance over the last 12 months was only 75% of target. By 2006, my team of 12 sales people was consistently achieving an average 110% of target!

The following principles, learnt through experience, over a number of years of success and failures, will help any business leader improve their team’s performance.

1. Two ears and one mouth, use them proportionately 


For the first six weeks, I spent most of my time with my direct reports, peers and my boss, asking questions, listening and then asking even more questions so I could understand the problem(s) really well.

2. Rules before Relationships = Rebellion


Coffees, lunches, drinks and joint sales calls were a great way to get to know people better and build individual relationships.

3. Evolution or Revolution?

Choose and clearly communicate
I made the decision that we were going to work on small, systematic, degree changes. I shared the plan with the team individually and as a group.

4. Inspect what you expect


I set up a system of weekly, monthly and quarterly reviews, focusing on tasks ranging from tactical activities to strategic outcomes as the periods got longer. The existing Customer Relationship Management system was invaluable in helping me review activity and sales so I could appropriately praise team member progress and redirect unacceptable attitudes.

5. Drive vehicles with full tanks


Soon, those who were ‘in-it-to-win-it’ became evident more through their actions, less so through their words. I invested more of my energies on mentoring those who were motivated to succeed. I discovered that Darren (name changed) wanted to take his girl-friend on a holiday to Bali. I helped him break down his sales target to a daily activity rate and focus on achieving it daily. His dream became reality!

6. Confrontation is healthy


The ‘others’ were given direct feedback in a respectful manner. It was very clear that there would be an escalation of known consequences, meaning one verbal discussion, then a written warning and a performance-improvement-plan which culminated in termination if performance did not change after repeated opportunities.

7. Always upgrade with replacements


Intentionally, we worked with external help to replace with people who fit the team and the role a lot better. This included increasing salary ranges, improving incentive packages and working harder to attract and keep talent in the team.

8. Train them to fish


We built a culture of constant learning by introducing annual professional training as well as a 30-minute training component at every weekly sales meeting. This reiterated the core concepts taught at those events. Finally, these were recapitulated after each joint sales call to maximise real-time performance.

9. Share the good news


People were encouraged to share wins and peer recognition spontaneously, as it happened, as against the worn-out company ‘newsletter’. This empowered people to recognise others as good stuff happened and share wins in a timely manner. All of this contributed to a constant sense of a successful team.

10. Share and live the vision


Leaving this to posters in the board room or sections on corporate websites can be a tragic mistake! Our team’s vision was to be the best across the 10 operating locations of our Company, across the world, so as to make a tangible difference to the organisation’s people and customers. We used every opportunity to talk about and reiterate the vision through events and activities - both big and small. Vision is usually ‘caught’ by people from their leaders, not ‘taught’.

Our community of readers (who are leaders) and I, would love to hear any principles you have used to make your team win. Please click the Comments link below to share.

Leadership guru John Maxwell divides the world into two – those who lift you and those who lean on you. If you were in an elevator with the first half, they take you to the ‘top floor’, while with the others its always ‘basement’!

So, which of the two are you?

There is no doubt that what we think affects how we feel, and what we feel affects how we act. So to improve the actions of those around you, make them think better of themselves, so that they feel better about themselves and therefore act better than they usually do.

Where do you begin? Encouragement. And lots of it.

Take the word apart and you have “En-courage-ment”. As the World English Directory defines it, it is the act of inspiring someone with the courage or confidence to do something.

So, look around you and ask yourself, “What do my sales staff need more courage for?” Perhaps, it is to reach higher targets, handle more rejection, fight greater competition, stay committed when sales cycles get longer, client loyalties seem questionable….

Now, make the commitment to encourage one person at least once a day. From sharing others' successes in a positive light to noticing the little things that people do well, there is so much that can be used to create a culture of encouragement.

Of the few hundred sales people that I have worked with or employed over the last 15 years, across four continents, not one complained about having too much encouragement or quit a job because of an encouraging culture in the team. In fact, many said that it was the courage to believe that they could do it, that enabled them to go ahead and do what it took to make them successful.

Encouragement builds courage in people. Courageous people achieve great things. Start encouraging people around you today!

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