How Can Linked In Be Used For B2B Sales Lead Generation?

For several months now I have been experimenting with Linked in but until recently I was    not convinced about its value for serious generating business sales leads.

Typically I would connect with a few contacts
but my approach was not really successful. Coming from a sales background

I kept falling into the trap of trumpeting what our company was doing without much success in building a network or getting visitors to our website.

I noticed that most of the discussion topics were similar – basically people shouting about what they could do but with a low % of discussions containing valuable content.

Recently I made an effort to learn more about the full range of Linked in Capabilities and slowly it sank in that this was indeed an incredibly powerful communication process to generate sales leads in a professional manner.

Why is Linkedin so Important for B2B?

Well if you think about it any network with 40m Business users, covering all major industries and with the ability to target by job function, company, interest area and location has to be a highly useful direct marketing tool.

Whats more 7.7m users are active in Linkedin each month and with proper planning and execution, can be targeted and communicated with in an appropriate manner.

Even more importantly it can help identify people asking questions on topics that you are an expert in. This creates an opportunity to put your company on the radar of many serious business prospects and with regular communication and the use of quality content to stay on that radar until they are ready to buy.

From my years in business sales and marketing, some lessons I have learnt from selling to smaller businesses would be:

• Identifying new prospects who need your product or service is relatively easy
• Identifying their business problems and solution requirements is more difficult
• And the most difficult challenge is to stay on that radar until they are ready to make a buying decision.

I believe that Linkedin, if used correctly offers a method of overcoming that challenge.

A View On Some Of The Most Useful Linkedin Features?

I am not claiming to be an expert but what I have found so far is that:

1. You can readily do a search to identify professionals looking for answers to questions that are in your area of expertise. This is incredibly useful, particularly if you sort by date to highlight the most recent answers requested. For example if you search by a keyword in your area of expertise (In our case “SEO Software” or SEO Tools”) you will get a list of people looking for answers to question such as:
   • What SEO software is available
   • What good SEO tools are out there
   • Why should I look at paid SEO software when there are so many free tools available?

1. Asking open questions around what you do can generate comments and discussions.
2. As far as I can see your profile is very important and you cannot spend too much time on that. I know that when I am researching contacts I will always look at their profile to see what their interests are. This will enable you to establish if they are useful contacts to have in your network.
3. You can search for contacts by industry, interest group, job function, or location enables precise targeting for your network building activities.
4. Additional applications:

• Any Wordpress blog can be integrated into your profile. This will update your profile with new blog posts and anyone who looks at my profile will see the blog post topics
• A feature exists to easily share relevant articles with Linkedin interest groups and with your network.
• Surveys can be deployed to get market feedback and you can do these with a Linkedin add-on application.

These are just a few of the reasons why I believe that Linkedin can be developed to generate highly targed qualified sales leads.

Please let us know your experiences and opinions on this topic.

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