Get Disruptive with Your Sales Force Using Linkedin

All right, my first video blog hangout on a solo basis for 2014 and the new features in Google Hangouts make it easy to hangout and record solo!

Today’s topic is about online branding, and specifically, enabling your sales team and salesforce, whether it’s a force of 1, 5, 10 or 100+, into lead generation beacons of your brand, and most importantly, a way to deliver qualified leads through social media. Also, think of it as building a database for your business.

Social media is really an indirect way to build a database. When you get into tools like LinkedIn, it’s actually a direct way to build your prospect database. LinkedIn contacts can be added into a follow-up sequence and a nurture campaign. But most importantly, the point of enabling your sales force is to do the things for them that they typically get in the way of doing for themselves. If we can create a process of turning your sales force into a sales automation tool, leveraging their LinkedIn network, however big and small it is, for distributing educational, informative content that indirectly promotes your brand. But most importantly, identifying prospects for your company.

Sounds easy? Well, it really is. It’s nothing more than getting back to having a messaging strategy for your business.

At Mint Social we feel that the rule of five is the best way to get started. Think of it in terms of this, there are ideally five pages on your website that prospects are most interested in. Those five pages are your top products and/or services that your company offers.

Next, we’re going to develop a marketing campaign, with multiple headlines to capture prospective clients’ attention. These headlines are either:

1. Evergreen topics- meaning that these topics are non-seasonal and are relevant throughout the 365 days of a year
2. Seasonal topics – think of it in terms of quarters. and how should our messaging change as we go from spring, summer, winter, fall?
3. Maybe it’s seasonal but event/date specific.

Between these two things, the next thing we want to do is look at your sales force. Is your sales team positioned as jacks of all trades and masters of none, or are they specific in a niche area? Are these niches aligned with those top five call-to-action landing pages on your site that are talking about your specific products or services?

In an ideal world, we would look at taking your sales force and dividing them up, possibly through those five products or more, and making them experts in certain areas of your business. Then we develop a messaging strategy which updates their LinkedIn profiles while indirectly updating each sales person’s network with educational, informative, and non-pitchy content that ties in your brand with the headlines your prospects say;

“Hmm, I need to learn more about this?”

By simply being a LinkedIn connection with your sales force, you are growing the reach of your marketing message to a targeted audience.

A good rule for your sales team is, whenever they meet someone new, whether it’s virtually online or face-to-face, pressing the flesh, make sure that they add these contacts into their LinkedIn database, and through that we can develop marketing strategies which will nurture their prospect lists in LinkedIn while implementing a good plan for bringing in new business through your sales force.

Hope this was helpful.