Daniel Disney - The Ultimate LinkedIn Sales Guide

If you follow my advice on how to design a fully optimised profile and back it up with content and building a personal brand, you'll be in a good position to start generating regular inbound leads.

However, LinkedIn also gives you an opportunity to generate OUTBOUND sales opportunities. For everyone working in sales, this is important for you. Your job is to sell! Whilst everyone in sales loves a good inbound lead, our job in sales is to go out there and CREATE opportunities.

One of the ways in which you can do this on LinkedIn is to message people who view your profile. It's one of the best features on LinkedIn and is available on both the free account and the paid upgraded Premium or Sales Navigator account.

It's also worth noting that on the free LinkedIn account you can only see the most recent three or four people who have viewed your profile. As you start to check regularly, as long as you check this two or three times per day, you should be able to see everyone who has viewed your profile that day. As you start to increase your use of LinkedIn, grow your network, share content and start building your personal brand, you'll start to direct a lot more traffic to your profile.

Along with a few other key reasons, this is where I would then recommend looking at the paid upgrades on LinkedIn, which allow you to see everyone who has viewed your profile, not just the most recent few.

I'm going to share a real story of how a simple view of my LinkedIn profile helped me generate a fantastic, six‐figure B2B sale.…

One day whilst doing my daily prospecting on LinkedIn, I noticed the CEO and Sales Director of a company had viewed my LinkedIn profile earlier in the day.

It had been three hours since they had viewed my profile to when I checked.

During those three hours there had been absolutely no messages asking me for information, no phone calls, no emails. They had just simply viewed my profile.

(What I later found out had happened was that during their regular monthly 1‐2‐1 between the Sales Director and the CEO, the topic of LinkedIn had come up. The Sales Director had been following me on LinkedIn for a while and mentioned some of my content that got them thinking about whether they could get more from LinkedIn as a sales tool. They both pulled up my profile on their phones, discussed it briefly and then continued the 1‐2‐1.

As with most conversations like this, it was pinned to the wall along with many other thoughts, ideas and initiatives, with the conversation then focusing on the more urgent matters that needed addressing. Perhaps they would have messaged me later that day, perhaps later that week, maybe later that month, or maybe never at all. How many conversations like this do we have that we never action?)

As I was scrolling through my profile views, I noticed they were both from the same company, so I looked the company up. It matched my target customer for LinkedIn/social selling training.

I then used this opportunity to send them both a message.

Now, what I didn't do was send a spammy sales message desperately pitching my product or service, nor did I send a spammy message with a link to my online calendar! (We'll cover this in more depth in the messaging chapter of this book!)

This is the exact message that I sent …

Hi (name),

Thank you for checking out my profile today. I'd love to know how your company is currently using LinkedIn to sell?

Kind Regards,

Dan

Simple, personal and relevant. Within five minutes I received a reply from the CEO. It read:

Hi Dan,

Thank you for your message. Funnily enough, we were just talking about this today. We're using LinkedIn quite a lot, but we're keen to see if there is more we can do with it. Could you please arrange a call with (name), my Sales Director?

Kind Regards,

CEO

I was then able to arrange a phone call with the Sales Director the next day.

After that, there were several more phone calls, two emails, two face‐to‐face meetings, and lunch before I was able to secure a training and support deal with them. Not only that, but following a successful delivery of training a few weeks later, they also sent several great referrals my way, 75% booking within the following three‐month period.

A single profile view that generated six figures in revenue.

A single profile view that, had it been ignored, may have resulted in ZERO revenue.

Now, of course, I could have left it to chance.

Perhaps THEY would have called me or emailed me. But, perhaps they wouldn't. We all know what it's like in the real world, we have conversations, discuss ideas and then get distracted by everything else that is happening.

It is also very important to realise that had my profile not been fully optimised and properly designed, there is a very high chance that they wouldn't have replied to my message. If they had looked at my profile and it in no way showed me as a credible person within the LinkedIn training world, they would have moved on and probably looked at other people. This is why it's important to first make sure your profile is optimised and well designed, and then look at your outbound LinkedIn strategy and include profile views as part of that.

The question many salespeople and sales leaders need to ask is, should salespeople leave opportunities to chance?

Or take control?

In my experience, and in my opinion, real salespeople go out and hunt for opportunities; they don't sit around waiting for them.

Have a little think about how many people have viewed your profile over the last few days, weeks, months, maybe even years, which you never checked. How many of those may have been potential prospects? How many of them might have replied to you had you messaged them?

You can't change the past, but by hopefully seeing the opportunity there you'll be able to impact the future. Read through this chapter and then go and update your profile first. Once you've done that, make sure you're checking your profile views on a regular basis; build it into your daily routine and make it a part of your outbound sales strategy.

Sales professionals and sales leaders spend a lot of money to look as professional as possible. In fact, anyone looking to professionally impress someone will make a significant effort to look as smart as possible to make sure they make a good impression.

Men will spend lots of money buying suits, shirts, ties, shoes, accessories, etc., women will spend lots on dresses, blouses, suits, smart wear, shoes, accessories, etc., all to make sure they look as smart as possible in front of their prospects and customers.

They do this to make the strongest possible first impression and to ensure that they build and maintain trust and respect from their prospects and customers alike.

After all, if you were about to meet a valuable prospect, someone you were hoping would buy from you in the near future, would you go dressed in a tracksuit?

The reality for many of you reading this book is that the first impression you'll actually make won't be physical, but digital. For many of you, the first impression that your prospects will have of you is what they see when they visit your LinkedIn profile.

This has been the reality for years and yet most salespeople don't think about this or do anything to control this situation.

You no longer just have to be smart and presentable physically; you now have to do it digitally as well.

The question you need to ask yourself right now is …

If my prospect viewed my LinkedIn profile right now, what would they think?

Would they think, ‘Wow. this person looks smart, professional and trustworthy’, or would they think, ‘Oh, look, it's just another salesperson’?