Social Sales - The 6 Critical Mistakes You Are Making With LinkedIn

I speak with a lot of B2B salespeople every week who are either not using LinkedIn for social sales or who are not getting the results that they had expected with this platform. Then there are those who, with their 500+ connections, feel that they are doing just fine. “After all, I have a whole bunch of contacts and isn’t that the standard of measurement?” It is not.

LinkedIn is not all that complex yet there are 6 basic and simple mistakes that I see people making with an alarming consistency. Correcting these will certainly improve your effectiveness and will yield substantial returns.

#1 – Your profile looks like hell – You get one chance to make a good first impression and my first impression of you (your profile) is anything but. Spelling and grammar errors. No headline. No photo or geographic location. The list goes on. Not only does your profile leave much to be desired, nobody looking for somebody with your qualifications and experience would ever be able to find you as you have not optimized your profile for search. Then if they do find you, you have to ask yourself the question … “When somebody looks at my profile, does it encourage others to want to connect with me, or work with me, or does it have the opposite effect?”

#2 – You are connecting with the wrong people – I can only think of 4 valid reasons to connect with somebody on LinkedIn:

You already know, like, respect, and trust them
They are current or potential customers
They are potential referrers
They are potential colleagues

“But, if I connect with as many people as possible, doesn’t that expand my potential network of connections!?” Yes it does. However, how do you plan to leverage that? If you are connected to 1,000 people you don’t even know, are they going to be inclined to buy your product or service or refer you to others? I doubt it. While there may be strength in numbers, that is probably more wishful thinking rather than actual results.

Think about this. What is your most valuable asset on LinkedIn? For many people, it is your connections. Do I really want to share my assets with somebody who I do not know? What happens if, without your permission, they contact your valued customer, drop your name, and then turn out to be dirt bags? Whose name is your client going to associate with this negative experience? Give up? Yours.

I would much rather have a limited number of connections that I can manage and build a relationship with than have thousands of connections who I know little, if anything about. You will have to answer for yourself what that target number is but, for sake of example, let’s say my goal is to have 500 high quality contacts. I would then (all of this can be done with LinkedIn’s new contacts interface. If you do not have this yet, don’t panic. It’s coming) …

Go to my contact list and tag each one of these with an A, B, C, or D. “A’s” are by best contacts. “B’s” have the potential to be “A’s”. “C’s” are too soon to tell. “D” stands for delete. You will want to look at each very critically. I would say that “A” contacts should be no more than 10% of your total.
Set a callback schedule for each tag. For example, you might want/need to touch base with “A” contacts weekly, “B’s” monthly, and “C’s” quarterly.
If “C” contacts can’t be moved up to “B” or “A” status, it might be time to cull the herd and move them to “D”. For that matter, you should always be looking to improve the quality of your stock.
This is important. The only way that you are going to be able to effectively and accurately assess this situation is by you making the effort to build this relationship in the first place. It makes little sense to label a connection as worthless when you yourself have made no attempt to increase its value.

Now let’s say I am looking at 400 quality connections and I want to take that number to 500. You will do that by mastering LinkedIn Search. Search for:

Specific contacts
Contacts that your connections might offer
Contacts with keywords in their profiles
Contacts at specific companies
Contacts with specific titles
Combinations of many of the above

#3 – You don’t take the time to personalize invitations – There are 5 chances only for you to private message someone on LinkedIn:

You are 1st. degree connections
You have a premium account with InMail privileges
They are a premium account and allow OpenLink messages
You both belong to the same group and …
You are sending them an invitation to connect

You are sending these invitations and you are not taking the time to personalize them!? You are not giving that person any reason to connect with you!? You are not taking this opportunity to tell them why you wish to connect and what you can bring to the relationship!? Are you nuts!? More likely you are lazy. And nuts.

This being said, and I have called LinkedIn out on this, LinkedIn has limited your ability to write personalized invitations if it thinks that you already have an association with this individual and/or it determines and recommends that you “might wish to connect” with this person. You should be able to write personalized invitations if you do so from their profile pages but, I have not found this to be consistent. Therefore, it’s not always your fault. However, my guess is that it most often is.

#4 – You are in groups but are not active – I’m guessing that less than 10% (maybe less than 5%) of the members of any group are actually “active”. Guess what, my friend. Cream floats to the top and your activity will be highly visible. While you can be in up to 50 groups, I would limit that to 10 that you can be active in. You should only belong to groups that either represent your target market or ones that represent your industry/interests and where you can share best practices. Please do not succumb to the allure of being a “badge counter”.

The most powerful part of groups is that they are “connection agnostic”. You will be given the opportunity to engage on all levels with folks who may not even be in your network and you will then have the chance to easily formalize your connection status. Groups are a great way to move cold calling to warmer climates.

#5 – You fail to engage with others or even to respond – Do you view your contacts like notches in your gun and treat LinkedIn as nothing more than your Rolodex? If you want to turn cold calls into warm calls and move acquaintances to relationships, then you must engage with others! You must also respond to their efforts to engage with you! You can start out simple with likes, comments, replies, and messages sent to their attention. If you are confident that you can do it with sincerity and accuracy, endorse one or more of their skills or write them a recommendation. Where possible and appropriate, send them a private message. Not a “spam” message. A personalized message.

Just today I was sent a private message on LinkedIn. This individual pointed out to me that we had been engaging on Twitter and that he wished to take our relationship to the next level. I recall seeing him tweet some of my articles and me responding with “thanks”. He softened me up with Twitter (engagement) and moved me over to LinkedIn. I like this guy already.

#6 – Finally, If you want to attract others … provide value! Share your expertise or a great article with your network or to a specific group. When your activity stream shows nothing or nothing but connects, you have your Rolodex. LinkedIn might make a great card file, might serve as your online resume but, most importantly, LinkedIn is one of the best inbound marketing tools that you have in your arsenal. By the way, with inbound marketing there is no cold calling and what’s not to love about that!

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I’ve been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.

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Craig M. Jamieson

Managing Member at Adaptive Business Services

Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. Adaptive Business Services provides solutions related to the sales professional. We are a Nimble CRM Solution Partner. Craig also conducts training and workshops primarily in social selling and communication skills. Craig is also the author of "The Small Business' Guide to Social CRM", now available on Amazon!