Top 4 LinkedIn sales trends with Salesloft
Whether you’re a Salesforce user or not, keep reading to learn about the current sales trends and how the business environment is predicted to change
We know what you’re thinking. Time is flying and the future is already here! From self-driving cars to 3D printers, we’re being introduced to technologies that were inconceivable at the beginning of the century.
With the world evolving at such a rapid pace, it’s essential to prioritize change and adaptation at the forefront of your business strategy in order to gain a competitive advantage and become an industry leader.
Something we love about Salesloft is how they are not afraid to embrace change. Salesloft acts as an innovative solution to centralize business activities involving customer outreach and is a direct response to the needs of Salesforce users. While the enterprise began as a startup, it soon evolved into the #1 sales engagement platform after gaining momentum from major clients.
Keep reading to discover why you should integrate LinkedIn into your sales strategy if you haven’t already!
Top 4 LinkedIn sales trends
1. Social selling is the new mass marketing
Up until recently, the art of selling has prioritized quantity over quality. From the dreaded cold call to the mass marketing email campaigns, sales reps are typically pressured to convert as many leads as possible.
While this used to be an effective tactic, people are becoming increasingly aware of these superficial strategies and giving priority to brands that they feel like they can build a genuine connection with.
Social selling has become the new gold standard, especially for B2B sales.
While people tend to assume assume that social selling is limited to making sales on social media (as the name suggests), there is so much more to this strategy than simply making deals. In brief, social selling prioritizes building long term relationships with clients while targeting their unique pain points. This gives prospects the opportunity to purchase if and when they are ready — taking the pushiness out of the sale.
As a powerful sales trend, social selling most often takes place on platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, given how easy it is to connect with wide target audiences. In terms of B2B sales, most of social selling takes place on LinkedIn due to its professional nature.
LinkedIn is a network made up of almost 800 million professionals so if you’re not sure where to begin with social selling on LinkedIn, it’s a great place to start.
In fact, 80% of B2B social media leads come from LinkedIn.
Social selling is much more profitable in the long-run than its mass marketing counterpart, because it attracts customers that are highly qualified and almost guaranteed to stay. Let’s face it. It’s exhausting to constantly switch tabs and copy and paste information to the CRM when prospecting on LinkedIn.
To help you retain your momentum, Surfe integrates with Salesloft so that you can enrich contacts and add them to your desired cadence without leaving your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. For more information, check out Surfe’s article written in collaboration with Vengreso which covers The Truth About Social Selling.
2. Adopt a funnel-based marketing approach
Part of social selling encompasses reaching out to prospective customers through different channels.
Because your leads will proceed at their own pace, they will be in different stages of the sales process at different times, depending on how close they are to conversion. This makes it harder to track which call needs to be made or which email needs to be sent to which person, in which timezone, at which time.
Sound overwhelming? With Salesloft, it doesn’t have to be.
Within Salesloft’s interface, you can create a specific cadence for each of your leads and customize it accordingly. On your Dashboard, you will see an overview of the tasks that need to be completed every day and have access to all of your prospects’ profiles including personal details, notes, cadence steps, and more.
You even have the option to take actions directly from the Salesloft platform such as booking meetings, sending emails, and making phone calls.
All of your activities will be logged automatically, allowing you to tailor your marketing approach to each person’s unique stage and proceed with moving them further down the funnel.
Surfe is a chrome extension that serves as a bridge between LinkedIn and Salesloft. Traditionally, after you prospect on LinkedIn, you would have to copy and paste your prospect’s information into Salesforce, manually enrich them, and push them into the right Salesloft cadence.
Now that Surfe fills the gap, you can automatically turn LinkedIn prospects into Salesloft contacts, send them to your desired cadence, and track their progression with a single click, all from LinkedIn. Surfe also records all of your LinkedIn and Salesloft activities in Salesforce to eliminate manual lead capture and data entry.
With Surfe, you can spend more time on the things that really matter.
3. Use data-driven decision making
With all of the tools that we have available at our disposal in the modern day and age, collecting data is easier than ever. But what’s the point of collecting this data if it’s never put to use?
Data is a critical weapon in the modern sales environment, so if you aren’t already collecting insights about your leads, prospects, and clients, now is the time to start.
Data comes in many forms, so think about the question you’re trying to answer or the decision you’re trying to make to determine which information is most valuable.
Too often, people fail to take advantage of the data that people willingly choose to share on LinkedIn. From contact details and company to interests and schooling, this information can be used to directly appeal to the wants and needs of your prospect.
Whether it is making a connection about a company that you both previously worked for or sending them a message in a shared language, there are many ways that you can use a prospect’s LinkedIn profile to your advantage when making a pitch.
With Surfe, you can add custom fields to your prospect’s LinkedIn profile to make note of relevant information and automatically synchronize it to your CRM.
Salesloft also acts as a supplemental data tool, because it provides insights based on the actions that are taken within the platform.
In the Analytics Overview tab, you can view and compare the different analytics that Salesforce tracks and even customize the panel to best suit your needs. This feature allows you to make educated business decisions based on immediate data.
For example, if you see that one of your prospects opened an email but didn’t reply, you immediately know to send them a follow up and can even set a reminder or timer for it to deploy after a certain period of time.
4. Integrate external tools
We all want to excel in our jobs, right?
Stop making your life harder and go browse the Chrome Web Store or App Directory on your CRM platform to see if there’s anything that stands out.
Our advice is to apply automation in moderation, because if you try to implement a tool for every single step of the sales process, you will lose touch with your prospects. On the other hand, using tools to capitalize on your weaknesses can greatly improve your success.
Here are our top 3 picks for LinkedIn tools
- Surfe: Surfe serves as an “all-in-one” solution, because it combines many features from existing tools on the market. From synchronizing data to the CRM to enriching contacts, Surfe has many features will assist you through every step of the sales process. Update your CRM from LinkedIn without breaking your workflow!
- Sales Navigator: Sales Navigator is an essential tool for business professionals, because it acts as a lead generator. More specifically, Sales Nav provides filters to help you narrow down your search while browsing for prospective clients. Once you find a contact that appeals to you, Sales Navigator provides you with an overview of their professional profile and allows you to group different people according to pre-selected criteria.
- Lempod: Lempod is a unique tool that organically boosts LinkedIn engagement. This is done by joining relevant pods made up of real LinkedIn users from around the world. Once you join a pod, you are agreeing to automatically like, comment, or re-share other pod members’ posts, and they will do the same for you (with no added work on your end).
Here are our top picks for Salesloft tools
- Crystal: Crystal is an integration that spruces up your sales, hiring, and training processes by providing insights to empathetically connect with people based on components of their personalities. Crystal helps you build more meaningful relationships and gives you the necessary resources to adjust your communication strategy on a person-to-person basis. The Crystal integration is included within Salesloft’s enterprise plan.
- Gong: Gong is an integration that automatically records, transcribes, and analyzes your sales calls to highlight areas for improvement or reinforcement. By understanding which calls yield the highest number of conversions, you can evaluate your own performance and mimic the tactics that are working best. By rewatching your team’s calls, you can identify the techniques that the highest performing sales reps are using and use the videos to train others.
Bottom line
The times are changing, and you can either change with them or get left behind. This doesn’t mean you have to reinvent your entire sales approach, but try taking advantage of these LinkedIn hacks to strengthen your presence on the platform.
Salesloft is a great resource to centralize your daily social selling, marketing, and data-driven activities, and Surfe is here to bridge the gap between LinkedIn and Salesloft.
Eliminate the hassle of manually transferring data between platforms, and never miss a beat when it comes to keeping everything up-to-date.