Episode 100: 100% Perfect LinkedIn Sales Features

Bob Woods  00:00

Greetings, everyone and welcome to Making Sales Social LIVE! I’m Bob Woods. With me today, as always, is Brynne Tillman. What’s going on, Brynne?

Brynne Tillman  00:08

Hey, Bob, good stuff! I’m excited to be here today.

Bob Woods  00:12

Yeah, today is very exciting because we are celebrating 100 episodes of Making Sales Social. 

Intro:  00:22

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live! as we share LinkedIn, and social selling training strategies and tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week. Making Sales Social Live!

Bob Woods  00:30

Time flies when you’re having fun. I’m speaking only for myself, but I think that Brynne would agree with me. (Brynne: Oh I’m having fun, lots of fun.) Yeah, this is just tons of fun doing it. So because we’re in that celebration mode, and I wish I had like, you know, streamers, or you know, (unintelligible) or something like that. Maybe a little champagne, but it’s a little too early for that. But because we’re in that celebration mode, we’re whooping it up with the five features of LinkedIn that we think are 100% perfect. See what I did there? 100 episodes, 100% perfect, (Brynne: Good job!) when it comes to salespeople using the platform. 

So before we get into those top five bullet points, let’s just talk about just LinkedIn in general. And you know, it’s the professional community with people looking to network already on it. So everything that we’re going to be talking about is going to come into that, but LinkedIn in and of itself, it’s not, you know, it’s not perfect, but it is the perfect place to find people who are interested in what it is that you do, and how you can help them out.  

Brynne Tillman  01:44

Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn is the ideal B2B networking platform. Hands down in this 24/7, conference, trade show, business card exchange, it’s about finding the right people, but LinkedIn, and I’m sure everyone has experienced, there are a lot of gaps inside of LinkedIn, there are things that we wish it did, they’ve given us stuff and taken it away. But Bob and I have identified five things that we think currently are 100% perfect.

Bob Woods  02:15

100% is what we are looking for here, batting a thousand, as they say in baseball. So the first one is a brand new addition to your LinkedIn profile and that is a new link that provides you to a specific call to action that you can set up yourself.

Brynne Tillman  02:36

So loving this, I can’t even tell you, it’s amazing. So in the top of the fold in your profile, you are able to put a link, and you can name that link. In your contact information, you can put three links, but nobody ever really sees it. This is front and center right under your location. And you have a ton of characters to be able to tell your visitor what it is that they are visiting. And I think it’s 30 characters, which gives you a lot of opportunities and then those words are hyperlinked with a little box and an arrow. And so people can now go out to your specific call to action link that can really help drive traffic to your website or a download where you can capture their information, or video. Many, many places that you can take them that can really bring value. We have or I have I don’t know what you have but I have… (crosstalk)

Bob Woods  03:40

Yeah, I don’t have it yet. So yeah, I just want to point that out. Not everyone has this yet but when you, if you don’t have it already, when you do get it, jump on it, jump on it hard.

Brynne Tillman  03:50

So mine says free resources and it goes to our LinkedIn library, which is socialsaleslink.com/library and we’ve had so many people sign up simply from finding it on my profile. So that’s number one.

Bob Woods  04:03

That’s number one. Number two has to do with the content in the newsfeed and specifically though not with publishing content, with engaging with other people’s content. Now you, it’s much, much, much easier to do it either as a person or yourself, as well as a company page that you might manage.  

Brynne Tillman  04:24

So one of the things that I love about this is, you know, for a long time, LinkedIn made it really hard to engage as a company page. You had to follow certain hashtags or have been mentioned in order to engage as the company. This new change is 100% perfect if you manage a company page when you go to comment there is and this is only available on desktop right now but I hear it’s coming out on mobile. To the left of the like button or reaction button, there is a drop-down that allows you to choose who is going to be the engager. 

So your face will be at the top if you have a company page. So we have a company page, and a podcast page, Making Sales Social Podcast, you’re welcome to go, follow that and so I can engage as any of these. Here is the trick, if you engage as the company, mention you and then you could go back and respond, go back and do the drop-down and pick your face and respond as you or you can mention the company. And now you can actually have a conversation between you and the company on a post and man, you will get a lot of attention from both the author and the other people commenting. I love that!

Bob Woods  05:47

Yeah, just hugely, hugely powerful stuff. It’s fantastic. And speaking of powerful, our next one actually does have to do with content and that is LinkedIn polls, some people hate them. Other people love them, when you do them, right. People will love them.

Brynne Tillman  06:06

100% love them. And LinkedIn has done it right. (Bob: Yes.) Why? Because first of all, they limit your characters, which a lot of people say, “Oh, that’s frustrating”. I love this, because you have to be concise, and you’re going to attract more people when they can look at this quickly. Number two, you don’t get to see — you can see how many people voted, but you don’t get to see how they voted until you vote. This is amazing. If I put out a poll and you’re interested in the 285 votes, what other people said, you don’t see it unless you vote. 

So, people, if you can put out a poll that your audience wants to see the results of, you’re going to have exponential growth, organically, with the poll. And I’m not going to get too much into the algorithm, but a vote on the poll is worth more than a like and a comment put together. So the more votes you get, the longer your polls stay in front of your audience, the more likely you are to get engagement. And you can, only you the author can see how each of them voted.

Bob Woods  07:21

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know, all of that, with what Brynne said, combining the fact that whenever you do a poll, you should be seeking out what your audience and you should know who your audience is first and identify them within the post part of the poll, you know, find out good information from them. So in other words, don’t put out a generic poll. I mean, this should be specific that’s really going to not only spark some thought on the other people’s side but also spark comments in the comments section, too, because that’s where the real gold lies. The polls are one thing, but if people care enough about your poll to comment on it and really give their opinions, fantastic.

Brynne Tillman  08:00

Absolutely. I love that. I love that. Okay, what’s next?

Bob Woods  08:04

Next new followers search. So this has to do with the search function, which search in and of itself is very powerful on LinkedIn. And another reason why you should be there in general is because you can search people. Yay, but new followers search.

Brynne Tillman  08:18

This is so exciting to me why we decided to put this in our 100% done right is because what LinkedIn allows you to do is search the followers of influencers and creators. So, if, let’s say your target audience is engaging on Tony Robbins content, you can search with filters, CEOs in the United States, Canada or English speaking countries or non-English speaking countries, specific industries, you know, so many filters, and then you can look at the connect… — not connections, not connections, the followers of these influencers. So where I got nervous was the connections piece. For example, I have just about 30,000 connections. And part of what I like about LinkedIn is only my second-degrees can search those but I have another 35, almost 36,000 followers, Those are searchable. 

If I connect with one of those followers, they’re no longer searchable in this so these are only the people that are following these influencers, not their 1st-degree connections. Why is this amazing? What a fabulous way to start a conversation. I see, you know, my ideal prospect is following Brene Brown and I reach out and say “Hey, I noticed that you know, you’re a big Brene Brown fan, so am I. Have you heard her on this podcast? I’m happy to send you a link. It was amazing.” And so we can start these conversations with our first-degree connections that follow them, and even our second-degree connections easily, because we know that there are followers of a particular influencer.

Bob Woods  10:16

Yeah, you can connect with someone on a commonality or common interest, that’s just Sales 101. And that is really, a really good LinkedIn way to do that, taking that technology and applying traditional sales, and quite frankly, you want to connect with people who have the same interest anyhow, so I mean, it’s a human emotion thing, too. So that’s why I love it as well and why it is 100% perfect for our 100th podcast. So the next one we’re going to do is number five is account search, which is huge as well.

Brynne Tillman  10:52

Yeah. So why I believe that this is 100% perfect is because of one filter that is only available in the free LinkedIn, not even available in Sales Navigator, which is first-degree connection. So if you are looking at what companies do you already have a connection in. This is amazing. So when you go in and you click on the search bar and hit enter, and you hit companies and all filters, you can filter out by company size, by industry, and then scroll all the way to the bottom and click first-degree connection and you can build a list of all of the targeted companies based on the industry and size that you already have a connection. 

And I really believe guys that this is 100% perfect in LinkedIn. Yes, Navigator’s missing the vote on this one. They used to have the relationship button. They took it away. So in this particular case, the LinkedIn.com rocks over Sales Navigator.

Bob Woods  12:01

Yeah, which is few and far between. It’s like when they had Oreo Cakesters then they took it away. So hopefully, Oreo Cakesters are back now and hopefully LinkedIn will do the same with Sales Navigator. (Brynne: So funny.) Those are the five. If you want to add anything, just put them in comments. We can actually, if you’re on LinkedIn, put them in comments or even if you are on YouTube, put them in comments. We’ll come back and reply later. And who knows we may do a follow-up on this, although we can’t do 200% perfect, can we?

Brynne Tillman  12:37

No, I think 100% perfect, I mean, there are more. The fact — (Bob: There are plenty more.) Bob and I had a list of 30, we had to bring it down to five. So these were, there are a lot more but I think these were my favorite for today. (Bob: Yeah, same here.) Congratulations, Bob! 100, (crosstalk)

Bob Woods  12:55

100! Congratulations to you, too. And yeah, this has been just, this has been too much fun. So thanks again for joining us on Making Sales Social Live! If you’re with us live on LinkedIn right now, we do this every week, so keep an eye out for our live streams. If you’re listening to us on our podcast and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that Subscribe or Follow button. We do two shows weekly, this one and the Making Sales Social interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more areas. And we’re 100 episodes strong now. If you want more info, socialsaleslink.com/podcast, and when you are out and about make sure that you’re making your sales… 

Brynne Tillman  13:41

Social!

Bob Woods  13:43

Excellent. Bye-bye, guys. Hit Subscribe now and click the notification bell to get the latest videos from Social Sales Link. Give this video a like and comment down below. Register for free resources at LinkedInlibrary.com.