Selling on LinkedIn: The best strategies to know

With more than 760 million users as of 2021, LinkedIn provides an extensive network of potential leads across diverse industries for selling on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s unique focus on professional networking sets it apart from other social media platforms, offering a unique environment to build relationships and trust, crucial in the modern sales process. Furthermore, the vast amount of professional information readily available on user profiles enables a more targeted approach when identifying and qualifying potential leads for selling on LinkedIn.

The role LinkedIn plays in the sales process is multifaceted. Beyond the initial stage of lead generation, it’s a platform for nurturing relationships, promoting products or services, and gaining valuable insights about prospects and competitors. Its ability to enable direct, person-to-person engagement makes it an effective channel for outreach and follow-up. Additionally, the concept of social selling on LinkedIn, which involves leveraging one’s network to find the right prospects, has gained significant traction through LinkedIn, transforming the sales landscape.

Meet Surfe, your new ally in the selling on LinkedIn journey. Designed as a chrome extension, Surfe brings the power of your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool directly into LinkedIn. This allows you to seamlessly add prospects to your CRM directly from their LinkedIn profiles in a single click, saving valuable time and increasing productivity. But Surfe isn’t limited to simplifying CRM integration; it also enhances selling on LinkedIn with additional tools.

Surfe’s message template feature allows you to quickly send personalized messages based on each contact’s information. This helps to establish more meaningful interactions, enhancing the likelihood of a positive response. Furthermore, Surfe’s email lookup tool can find and validate professional email addresses of LinkedIn contacts, enabling you to broaden your outreach efforts. By integrating these features, Surfe is redefining selling on LinkedIn, empowering them to prospect, connect, and sell more effectively than ever before.

The role of selling on LinkedIn in modern sales strategies

In today’s interconnected business landscape, LinkedIn has become a critical tool for both B2B and B2C sales. Its power comes from its vast network of professionals that spans across industries, roles, and geographies. For B2B sales, LinkedIn provides access to key decision-makers, often at higher-level positions within organizations, who are typically harder to reach through conventional means. It also allows for nuanced targeting and segmentation, enabling sales teams to find the exact type of businesses that would be interested in their products or services when selling on LinkedIn.

For B2C sales, LinkedIn enables brands to create and cultivate a professional image, foster relationships with consumers, and generate leads. The platform’s focus on content sharing and thought leadership provides a unique opportunity for B2C companies to showcase their expertise, develop trust, and nurture customer relationships when selling on LinkedIn. With the right approach, LinkedIn can transform one-off transactions into long-term customer relationships based on trust and mutual benefit.

Selling on LinkedIn is particularly powerful for SaaS companies. SaaS sales often involve targeting business decision-makers, and LinkedIn is overflowing with these individuals. The ability to utilize advanced search functionalities to target by job title, industry, or company size allows for more effective prospecting when selling on LinkedIn. Additionally, SaaS products often require a degree of education and trust-building before a sale can take place. LinkedIn’s emphasis on content sharing and thought leadership makes it an ideal platform for SaaS companies to demonstrate their expertise, provide value, and build trust with potential customers.

Moreover, LinkedIn’s professional community is technologically literate and often looking for solutions to improve their businesses, making it a receptive audience for SaaS offerings. By strategically utilizing LinkedIn’s features, SaaS companies can not only identify and connect with potential clients but also educate them on the benefits of their software, setting the ‘selling on LinkedIn’ stage for successful sales conversations.

Selling on LinkedIn has unique aspects that set it apart from other platforms. Unlike platforms like Facebook and Twitter, where personal and casual interactions dominate, LinkedIn is a professional network where business discussions are not only accepted, they’re expected. This enables more direct and targeted sales conversations.

Furthermore, LinkedIn’s advanced search features make it easier to identify and segment potential leads based on specific criteria, from job titles and locations to industries and company size. This granular level of targeting is difficult to achieve on other platforms. Additionally, LinkedIn’s algorithms favor meaningful engagement and content, providing a unique opportunity for companies to position themselves as thought leaders and build credibility through content sharing.

Moreover, LinkedIn offers a suite of analytics tools that provide insights into how your content and outreach efforts are performing, which can be invaluable for refining your sales strategy and these can be super valuable for selling on LinkedIn. Lastly, the platform’s emphasis on connections and relationships aligns well with the modern sales approach, which prioritizes relationship-building and value provision over aggressively selling on LinkedIn.

In summary, LinkedIn offers a unique and potent environment for sales, particularly for B2B and SaaS companies to get involved in selling on LinkedIn. Its professional user base, advanced targeting features, and emphasis on content and relationships make it a compelling platform for modern sales strategies. With the right approach, sales professionals can leverage LinkedIn to identify prospects, build trust, and ultimately, drive sales.

Streamlining your LinkedIn prospecting

Prospecting on LinkedIn involves a strategic approach to identify, engage, and convert potential leads. Let’s break it down into a step-by-step process.

Define your ideal prospect

Before jumping into selling on LinkedIn, have a clear picture of who your ideal prospect is. Consider their industry, job title, location, company size, and other relevant factors. 

Use advanced search

LinkedIn’s advanced search is a powerful tool for prospecting. You can filter by location, industry, current company, past company, and school, among other things. It even allows for Boolean searches, enabling you to combine keywords and phrases to refine your search further.

Join and participate in relevant groups

LinkedIn Groups are a goldmine for prospects and selling on LinkedIn. Find groups that are relevant to your industry or target market and join them. Once you’re in, actively participate by sharing insights, answering questions, and engaging in conversations (i.e. don’t make it obvious that you’re ​​selling on LinkedIn). This not only positions you as an expert but also allows you to connect with potential prospects.

Leverage your existing network

Your existing connections can provide introductions to potential prospects. LinkedIn’s ‘Connections of’ filter is a great tool for this. Additionally, pay attention to who interacts with your content – they might be potential leads.

Publish and share value-driven content

Regularly sharing useful, relevant content can attract potential prospects and establish you as a thought leader. Make sure your content speaks to the interests and challenges of your target audience.

Engage with prospects’ content

Engaging with your prospects’ posts and articles is another effective way to get on their radar. Comment on their content, share their posts, and take part in the discussions they’re involved in. This helps keep your selling on LinkedIn more organic by building relationships.

With Surfe, this prospecting process becomes even more efficient and productive. Surfe’s Chrome extension allows you to directly add prospects to your CRM from their LinkedIn profiles, saving time and making the prospecting process seamless. No need to juggle between LinkedIn and your CRM or manually input data, Surfe does it in one click. This means you can spend more time engaging with prospects and less time managing data, improving your productivity and efficiency. Surfe is truly a game-changer for selling on LinkedIn.

The power of personalized messaging for selling on LinkedIn

Personalized messaging is a critical component of successfully selling on LinkedIn. With the abundance of generic sales messages flooding LinkedIn inboxes, a personalized message can help you stand out and make a memorable first impression. Personalization signals to the recipient that you’ve taken the time to understand them and their needs, fostering trust and rapport, which isn’t everybody’s approach when selling on LinkedIn.

Moreover, personalized messages are more likely to elicit a response. A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates. People appreciate when you address them by their name and reference specifics about their role, industry, or company. It shows that you see them as more than just a sales lead. Just to enrich your lead even further provide them an easier way to contact you, attach your digital business card at the end of the email for quick contact details.

But personalization goes beyond just using someone’s name. It involves tailoring your entire message to align with the recipient’s interests, needs, or challenges. This could involve referencing a recent post they made, a shared connection, or a common interest. The more personalized your message, the more relevant and engaging it will be to the recipient, and the more likely to make an impact when selling on LinkedIn.

Surfe’s message templates for LinkedIn feature is designed to streamline and enhance the process of personalized messaging on LinkedIn. It allows you to create customizable message templates that automatically populate with the contact’s information. Instead of having to manually input each contact’s name, company, or other details, Surfe does it for you in a single click. What’s more, you can actually receive analytics from Surfe about which of your message templates is performing the best. This way, you can quit using the ones that don’t get great response rates and increase the usage of your best performing messages to power up your selling on LinkedIn.

This not only saves time but also minimizes the risk of errors, which can easily happen in manual personalization. It also ensures consistency across all your messages while still allowing for a high degree of personalization. Whether you’re sending a connection request, a follow-up message, or a sales pitch, Surfe’s message templates can help you craft engaging, personalized messages quickly and efficiently.

By combining the power of personalized messaging with the convenience of automation, Surfe empowers sales professionals selling on LinkedIn to conduct more effective and efficient LinkedIn outreach. It’s about working smarter, not harder, to connect with prospects, build relationships, and ultimately, drive sales.

Mastering social selling on LinkedIn

Social selling refers to the practice of leveraging social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects. Unlike traditional sales methods, social selling focuses on building relationships and establishing trust, rather than just pushing products or services. You can start social selling on LinkedIn by sharing relevant content, interacting directly with potential buyers and customers, personalizing outreach, and showing a genuine interest in their challenges and needs.

The benefits of social selling on LinkedIn are plentiful. Firstly, it allows salespeople to engage with prospects earlier in the sales process, influencing their preferences and decisions. Secondly, it fosters long-term relationships, which can lead to repeat business and referrals. Lastly, social selling allows for more precise targeting, as salespeople can easily identify potential leads based on their social media activity and connections.

LinkedIn, with its professional focus and extensive user base, is an ideal platform for social selling. Here are some strategies to maximize your social selling on LinkedIn:

Optimize your profile

Your LinkedIn profile is often the first impression prospects have of you. Make sure it’s professional, includes a clear description of what you do, and highlights your expertise and achievements.

Build a strong network

Connect with individuals in your industry, potential clients, and thought leaders. Also, consider joining relevant groups to expand your network.

Share valuable content

Regularly post and share content that your network will find valuable. This could be industry insights, tips, or thought leadership content. Selling on LinkedIn basically isn’t going to happen without this one.

Engage with your network

Don’t just post content, engage with others too. Comment on posts, share others’ content, and participate in discussions.

Personalize Your Outreach

When sending connection requests or messages, personalize them. Reference common connections, shared interests, or their posts.

Monitor Insights

Use LinkedIn’s analytics tools to track your social selling efforts and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Remember, social selling isn’t about immediate results. It’s a long-term strategy that involves building and nurturing relationships over time. But with patience and persistence, it can yield significant rewards.

Your Social Selling Index (SSI): What it is and how to check it

This is a little known secret that LinkedIn offers and it’s one of the easiest way to make quick-wins in improving your selling on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) is a measure of a user’s social selling efforts on the platform. It takes into account four key factors: establishing your professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. The SSI is calculated daily and scores range from 0 to 100, with a higher score indicating that a user is effectively utilizing social selling strategies.

The significance of the SSI stems from its ability to provide a quantifiable measure of your social selling activities. It gives an indication of how effectively you’re leveraging LinkedIn to connect with prospects, share relevant content, build your personal brand, and establish professional relationships. The SSI can be a powerful tool to track progress, identify areas for improvement, and ultimately, enhance your social selling on LinkedIn strategy. A higher SSI has been linked to more successful outcomes in sales, including generating more leads and closing deals.

To check your SSI on LinkedIn, follow these steps:

1.  Visit the LinkedIn SSI page

Go to the Your Social Selling Index page on LinkedIn.

2. Log in to LinkedIn

If you’re not already logged in, you will be prompted to log in to your LinkedIn account.

3. View your SSI score

Your SSI score will be displayed on the screen along with a breakdown of the four components of the score. This includes your ‘Establish your professional brand’ score, ‘Find the right people’ score, ‘Engage with insights’ score, and ‘Build relationships’ score.

By keeping track of your SSI, you can get a better understanding of how effectively you’re using LinkedIn for social selling. This can help you refine your strategy, focus on areas where you may be lacking, and ultimately, become more successful in your sales efforts on the platform.

Boosting Your SSI on LinkedIn

Improving your Social Selling Index (SSI) involves enhancing your performance across the four factors that LinkedIn considers. Here are some strategies to do so:

Optimize Your Profile

Create a professional, comprehensive profile that showcases your expertise and achievements. Include a high-quality photo, a compelling headline, and a detailed summary. Hiring an event photographer can ensure that your profile picture is of the highest quality, making a strong first impression. Remember, your profile is often the first impression prospects have of you, so make it count if you want to improve at selling on LinkedIn.

Connect with the right people

Use LinkedIn’s search and filter tools to identify and connect with potential prospects. Also, consider expanding your network by joining relevant groups and connecting with thought leaders in your industry.

Share and engage with relevant content

Regularly post content that your network will find valuable, such as industry insights, tips, or thought leadership pieces. But don’t stop at posting – engage with others by commenting on their posts, sharing relevant content, and participating in discussions.

Build relationships

Personalize your outreach, engage with your connections regularly, and show genuine interest in them, not just that your priority is selling on LinkedIn. Remember, social selling is about building relationships, not just making sales.

Surfe can play a significant role in boosting your SSI. By streamlining the prospecting process and enabling efficient management of LinkedIn connections, Surfe allows you to focus more on engaging with prospects and less on administrative tasks. It saves time and reduces the risk of errors in data entry, allowing for more consistent and efficient outreach. 

Moreover, Surfe’s message templates can significantly enhance your engagement with insights and relationship building. By enabling quick and easy personalization based on contact information, Surfe ensures that your outreach is relevant, personalized, and engaging, all of which contribute to a higher SSI.

Lastly, Surfe’s email enrichment tool can help you connect more effectively with your LinkedIn prospects. By providing validated professional email addresses of LinkedIn contacts, Surfe enables you to extend your outreach beyond LinkedIn, opening up more opportunities for engagement and relationship building.

In essence, Surfe empowers you to maximize your social selling on LinkedIn, contributing to a higher SSI and, ultimately, more successful sales outcomes.

Supercharging your outreach with email enrichment

Email enrichment refers to the process of enhancing the data associated with an email contact to get a more complete and accurate picture of them. This often involves adding data points such as their professional title, company, industry, location, social media profiles, and more. The enriched data can then be used to personalize and target your outreach more effectively.

The importance of email enrichment lies in its potential to significantly improve the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. By providing you with a richer understanding of your contacts, email enrichment allows you to tailor your messaging to align with their needs, interests, or challenges. This increases the relevance of your emails, which can boost engagement, response rates, and ultimately, conversions. Additionally, email enrichment can help you segment your contact list more accurately, allowing for more targeted marketing campaigns, and thus, (you guessed it!) improved selling on LinkedIn.

Surfe’s email enrichment tool takes this process a step further by providing validated, professional email addresses of your LinkedIn contacts. By leveraging our partnership with ZeroBounce, Surfe’s tool can find and validate email addresses associated with LinkedIn profiles, so that your emails never bounce again.

This feature can be especially useful when a LinkedIn connection does not have their email address publicly listed or when you’re looking to extend your LinkedIn outreach to email. Moreover, having a validated email address reduces the risk of sending emails to non-existent or incorrect addresses, increasing your email deliverability rate.

The tool is easy to use and seamlessly integrates with the Surfe extension. When viewing a LinkedIn profile, the tool automatically searches for the associated email address. Once found, it verifies the email address and adds it to the contact’s information in your CRM. With Surfe’s email enrichment tool, you can enhance your contact data, personalize your outreach, and ultimately, drive more successful sales outcomes.

To wrap up, LinkedIn has become an indispensable tool for sales professionals, offering a vast network of potential prospects and a variety of tools to connect and engage with them. However, to truly maximize your selling on LinkedIn, it’s important to understand and effectively leverage the power of prospecting, personalized messaging, social selling, and contact enrichment. Surfe, with its suite of features designed to enhance LinkedIn selling, can be your valuable ally in this journey. By streamlining your LinkedIn sales process, enhancing your social selling efforts, and enriching your contact data, Surfe empowers you to connect more effectively with your prospects, build stronger relationships, and ultimately, achieve more successful sales outcomes.

Happy selling!