2001

A salesperson makes a cold call and asks for a meeting.

2012

On LinkedIn, Adam, a sales person discovers a prospect at a major international company whom he wishes to secure a meeting with. Adam and the prospect Geoff, share a common connection on LinkedIn. Adam made contact, referenced the common connection and a conference call was scheduled.

Prior to the conference call, Adam checked LinkedIn again. He discovered one of Geoff’s colleagues was connected to three people that Adam was also connected to on LinkedIn. These people were individuals who were very satisfied clients of Adam and his company.

Adam further discovered that Geoff had a direct report that was yet another one of Adam’s connections.  Adam had a very strong relationship with this person.

How was this call different to the one in 2001?

While it’s no coincidence that I publish on this topic at the same time First Approach launches a new program, “LinkedIn, Unlocking It’s Potential”, it is none the less important to note that these posts will be geared towards helping you – the B2B sales person – unravel the complexity and worth of LinkedIn, because, it’s not what you think it is.

In the coming weeks, I will post a series of blogs dedicated to unlocking LinkedIn’s potential; that is, how you can start to restructure your presence, participation, and strategy leading to a more productive experience and result with LinkedIn for you, the B2B sales professional.

LinkedIn is a fantastic tool, but it won’t be if you use it the way LinkedIn intends for you to use it.

Most people approach LinkedIn as they would any other social media offering. They have a look, maybe a client or colleague suggested joining, and then make the leap and sign up. Of course, when it comes to LinkedIn, this is no easy task, because LinkedIn isn’t a user friendly or well sorted website. Not at least if you want to really understand  it’s myriad functions and features . Its menus and prompts can be confusing, even daunting. We will work on that in future posts.

The two subjects to be covered in this article will focus on who uses LinkedIn, and why it is far and away the best business directory in existence today.

The ultimate goal? More new prospects. More new Clients. More new business.

There are basically four different types of LinkedIn users. They are; Hunters, Targets,   Corporate leaders, and Recruiters/job seekers.

Hunters;

The most obvious Hunters are sales people looking for their next prospect. They’re the folks who surf through LinkedIn, hopeful they will identify their next opportunity, hoping that they can make a new connection. Most often, the LinkedIn Hunter – a LinkedIn neophyte – attempts to follow the road map prescribed by

LinkedIn with the expectation that someone will accept their overture. The majority of times, Hunters use LinkedIn in the attempt to create reactive or inbound enquiries. Who will see my profile and reach out? Who can I send a request to connect to? And by that, can I get a new lead?

Hunters generate the most unsolicited and meaningless traffic on LinkedIn.

Targets;

Targets are the people that Hunters are constantly attempting to connect with. They are whom we would generally describe as “clients” or “Prospects” but almost always, they are individuals who have budget to spend with outside suppliers. Think VP of marketing, or VP HR. The list goes on but the one thing all targets have in common is that they have something a hunter wants.

Hunters send Targets “InMails”,”Requests to connect” and constantly up-load posts,  up-dates or meaningless commentary on LinkedIn “Groups” chat rooms, again, believing the LinkedIn myth that such activity will create a tsunami of people hoping to do business with them. When will my phone ring?

Generally, Hunters are the bane of the Targets LinkedIn experience.  Targets receive so much un-solicited communication through LinkedIn, usually from people they don’t know (and have no interest in knowing) that they become numb and jaded with respect to the whole LinkedIn experience. They could be best described as the people who always say “I keep getting all these requests to connect, it’s a pain.”

Corporate Leaders;

A Corporate leader is the person who is in charge, or leads a large number of people within an organization. Think CEO, EVP, or CFO if you like.

They often use LinkedIn to extend their brand and “I care about you” vision to the rank and file. Corporate leaders use LinkedIn as a medium to offer a “personal” connection to their employee, in a world where that employee may be many layers removed.

The Corporate leader is most likely to have copious amounts of LinkedIn “connections” Sadly though, they rarely understand or utilize Linkedin beyond this basic dynamic.

Corporate Leaders are the ones most often accepting invitations to connect from others, with those others most often being people from their own company. They are seldom the one sending invitations. In my experience, corporate leaders, or senior executives, generally speaking, have little understanding of what LinkedIn is, or what it can offer, nor do they utilize LinkedIn beyond the above description.

Recruiters/job seekers;

This is the easy group to define, but also a group with little relevance to utilizing LinkedIn for prospecting. The Economist magazine suggests that while just one fifth of LinkedIn’s reported revenue came from premium subscriptions, sixty percent came from their recruiting business. I believe you can expect to see LinkedIn’s future focus to be in this area.

While it is true this segment is getting most of LinkedIn’s attention right now, it is also true that without the other group’s ongoing participation, it will cease to be a valuable data base for recruiting.

In any event, as I said, Recruiters/job seekers have little bearing on what your LinkedIn experience and dynamic should be. This group is dedicated to those who are seeking a new position and those that are attempting to fill those positions.

It is important to categorize which user group you fall into, because how one uses and manipulates LinkedIn is different for each group.

This series of posts will focus exclusively on Hunters and specifically, how a B2B sales professional should be using LinkedIn versus how LinkedIn would prefer you use it.

So, what makes LinkedIn the best data base for new prospects?

I’ve been at this prospecting game for a long time, and in that time have witnessed the evolution and transformation of big data’s move towards helping B2B sales organizations identify new opportunities.

Prior to the digital age, we had the usual suspects in the business directory industry. There was, and is, D&B, Scotts Directories, Yellow Pages, Manta to name a few. Prior to the net, and other than banging on doors, this group of directories were the only source for discovering and identifying new prospect opportunities. They promised “best in class” or “the most accurate” data to be had, and required a costly investment to access never mind the laborious commitment of time and energy to wade through. As we all know, the quality was usually lacking as well.

Supplied as leads to sales people, the usual result was a discouraged and contemptuous sales force as they invested, and subsequently wasted un-told hours following up on data that was stale, out of date, and plain in-accurate.

Post dinosaur age, new offerings became available. Thousands to be exact, all of whom declare their site to be the best, most up to date and cost/time effective options for discovering the Holly Grail, the new client.

In the spring of 2003, LinkedIn was launched. A stock market darling, LinkedIn has grown to become the social media portal for business to business networking.

Most importantly, LinkedIn has become the most significant resource for the B2B sales person that needs to find that next and ever elusive new client.

As for the others, the same systemic problem that plagued the legacy business directories – and this is where LinkedIn takes a different fork in the road versus all the others – is that the new digital entrants still gather, maintain and update their data bases from the inside. In other words, their “staff make sure” that when they say John Doe is the man, that he is the man. They claim that if you want to know who the I.T. managers are at the ABC company, they can tell you. The truth of the matter is they can not.

There have been some attempts to raise the bar on accuracy. Sales Forces’ acquisition of Jigsaw – a data base that is essentially built by users trading “up to date” contacts in exchange for contributing their “up to date” contacts – and relaunched as Data.com could at best be described as a feeble attempt because again, it relies on others, or third parties to maintain and update the information.

At the rate at which people move these days, get hired, resign, redeployed, transferred, promoted etc., it is impossible for any third party to be up to date, and that’s where LinkedIn comes in.

LinkedIn, to the best of my reasonably certain knowledge, is the only user maintained business directory available with any mass.

LinkedIn doesn’t have “staff” or third parties list to maintain their data. You do!

And because of that, most LinkedIn members are keenly aware, interested, and in control of how their presence on LinkedIn represents their brand and place in the business community.

Most LinkedIn members are fastidious, if not obsessive about keeping their profiles accurate and up to date. Most LinkedIn members – now some 300,000,000 plus – recognize that if you’re not on LinkedIn, you probably won’t be taken seriously in your career.

Imagine now if you will, a business directory with 300,000,000 plus users who have listed and maintained their own information? If only half are accurate – and I know from first hand use that that number is way higher – you’ve just discovered the pot of gold.

Next post? So if it’s a pot of gold, how do I get to it? Understanding the right approach to connecting on LinkedIn and why it isn’t Facebook.