7 Ways Inside Sales Teams Use LinkedIn to Accelerate Their Sales Process

Often Inside Reps have a database of a decision maker inside of an organization and their contact information. They call, leave a message and if they have their email, follow-up with a canned message. And, although this can work, by leveraging LinkedIn and Social Selling to make some quick touches, amplify our brand and make things just a bit more personal, the Inside Sales Rep can begin to see even more success.

There is some pre-work, however. It is vital to have powerful profile that attracts, teaches and engages your targeted buyers. Make sure your focus moves from resume to resource, so when they do visit, you are offering content that gets them thinking differently about their current situation, company or industry. This will get them to want to take your call.

Here are 7 of the many ways Inside Sales Reps can have a significant impact on their conversation conversion rates.

1. Position your Reps’ profiles as subject matter experts because if the profiles are simply their resume there is no incentive or motivation for a prospect to return a call. When their profiles are a resource that gets your prospects thinking differently about their situation, company or industry, they are much more likely to want to take the time to talk with them.
2. Open your prospect’s LinkedIn profile simultaneously to dialing and follow them. It isn’t a connection request, but they will see you looked at their profile and will receive a notification that you followed them – it is 2 additional touches. If you have positioned your profile well, it should help you to get a returned call.
3. Look at their recent activity and “like”, share or comment on it. It takes 3 seconds and gets your face in front of them again. From their profile click on the drop down next to the connect or message button and choose recent activity.
4. Pull something from their profile that can help you build rapport. They know you  have visited their profile so don’t be afraid to say something like, “When I visited your profile I noticed you went to Villanova – congrats on the big Basketball win!” This type of reference can warm up most any call.
5. Identify all of the stakeholders within a targeted organization. Often Inside Sales Reps are given a name and contact information, but they may not be the only decision maker. In fact, we know from CEB that there are 5.4 decision makers on every enterprise sale opportunity. So, for a Rep to be really effective they can identify the other players. Visit LinkedIn company pages, click on the # of employees, drill down by the titles of potential stakeholders and begin to engage with them based on your cadence.
6. Connect with the people you talk to thanking them for their time and confirming any next steps you have established. Even if they aren’t interested, if they are indeed a viable decision maker, by connecting with them it is easy to keep and touch and stay top of mind through content and other engagement activities.
7. Develop a cadence for your Reps to follow that includes social selling along with calls and emails. When you make it simple for your Inside Sales Reps to know what to do, how to do it and what and when to say it – they will do it.

BONUS: Follow on twitter. Some reps have 2nd twitter account that is branded for their company. They use it for sharing company content, following, engaging and retweet to stay relevant to your prospects.

If you are interested in learning more about how your Inside Sales team can leverage LinkedIn better, I invite you to have a conversation. Whether or not we decide to do business together, I am confident our call will be full of insights and activities you can implement right away. Here is a LINK to my calendar, please pick a time that works best for you.