6 steps to selling anything (including yourself) on LinkedIn

From: http://www.bizjournals.com/

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s a whole lot happening over on LinkedIn right now.

From a new, freelance marketplace to the ongoing, furious debate about whether or not the world’s largest professional network is becoming too much like Facebook, there’s plenty to ponder.

Long story short, LinkedIn is improving by leaps and bounds — particularly in its ability to facilitate business deals between its 433 million members.

Below are six specific, proven steps that I’ve seen work time and again in studyinghow to sell your products and services over on LinkedIn.

Step 1: Create a client-facing profile

This is the most important – and overlooked – step in the entire process.

To summarize: Instead of having a profile page that reads like an online résumé, instead you talk about the unique value and benefit your product or service provides to your ideal clients and customers.

( Here’s a step-by-step, free video training on how to create a killer LinkedIn Profile.)

Step 2: Target and engage your ideal prospects

One of the most under-used features on all of LinkedIn is the site’s built-in search engine.

With access to nearly 450 million professionals in 200-plus countries, LinkedIn has enough data on you and me to make the National Security Administration blush.

With a few keystrokes, you can immediately build a prospect list that is both hyper-targeted by job title, industry type and/or location, along with adding in personal markers like where someone went to college or even what his or her non-work interests/hobbies are.

Best of all, there are now automation tools in place that help you quickly build and scale personalized, 1-on-1 interactions with new prospects you discover on LinkedIn.

Step 3: Create content

You can’t go fishing without bait, and you can’t market or sell your products, services or even yourself (for a potential job opportunity or to a recruiter) without content.

The good news is that it’s easier than ever to create and share all sorts of original content.

LinkedIn makes it easy to embed podcasts, videos, images, sound clips and more both on your profile page and inside of blogs on the platform.

The best type of content should reverse engineer the type of product/service you want to sell by demonstrating your expertise in a given niche or area of your industry.

Step 4: Add a call to action

If you’ve done all the work to craft a great piece of content, topped it off with a killer headline and then published it on LinkedIn, don’t forget to give prospects an easy way to take the next step and engage you further!

Follow these tips to build in a lead-generating call to action (CTA) for each piece of content you create and share on LinkedIn.

Step 5: Build in sales funnels

As you build out a thriving network of targeted prospects and connections on LinkedIn, it’s critical that you both organize your connections and put a sales funnel in place to ensure you maximize your interactions and efforts on the platform.

It’s also critical to recognize and engage with the inbound, warm leads and opportunities that arise every time you’re active on LinkedIn.

Remember, timing is everything!

Step 6: Earn the ssk

This is perhaps the most important step of all.

It’s a lesson my business coach taught me a few years ago, and it’s made an immense difference in my ability to close deals as a result.

Here it is: Your “ask” must be in direct proportion to the amount of trust you’ve earned with the prospect up to that point.

That’s why steps one through three in this post are critical — they help you build the “know, like and trust” factors that are key to any business or professional relationship.

The more value you give someone, the more helpful and useful you are, the more right you have to ask for time on the phone, or a free consultation, or make a sales offer.