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How LinkedIn trains its sales reps
- 1. ©2013 LinkedIn Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Live Webcast An Inside Look on How LinkedIn Trains its Sales Reps February 11th, 2016 Dominic Archibald Head of Marketing LinkedIn Sales Solutions, NAMER www.linkedin.com/in/dominicarchibald/en Krishna Zulkarnain Head of Marketing LinkedIn Sales Solutions, APAC www.linkedin.com/in/krishnazulkarnain
- 2. LinkedIn Confidential ©2013 All Rights Reserved Buying and Selling in the Social Age Q&A Webinar Agenda LinkedIn’s Secret Sauce
- 3. Krishna Zulkarnain– Head of Marketing APAC LinkedIn Sales Solutions Singapore Buying & Selling in the Social age
- 4. 4 SALES PROFESSIONALS in10 WILL ACHIEVE QUOTA LESS THAN 38% - Aberdeen Group
- 9. 1.Online Research 2.Social Proof 3.Third Party Validation
- 10. of decision makers say they never respond to cold outreach 90% of B2B buyers now use social media to be more informed on vendors 75%
- 11. 11 Seth Godin – Founder of Squidoo.com Selling to people who actually want to hear from you is more effective than interrupting strangers that don’t.
- 12. My friend Dan A social selling story
- 13. 13 A social selling story
- 14. LinkedIn Sales Solutions Mission: Connect the world’s buyers and sellers to build relationships
- 15. The Secret Sauce – How we teach LinkedIn reps
- 16. Hunting on LinkedIn Building an expert brand Warm outreach Selling through relationships The Secret Sauce – How we teach LinkedIn reps
- 17. Professional photo is your first impression • Tagline should be action oriented, not just a title • Summary should describe your passions • Rich media should illustrate your story • Educate potential buyers who visit your profile Building an Expert Brand Your LinkedIn profile should inform and inspire
- 18. Building an Expert Brand - Great Example
- 19. 19 Hunting – Step 1 is to build a lead list Lead Builder is the key to finding 5+ decision makers
- 20. Let LinkedIn do the hunting for you Hunting – Step 2 is to engage recommended leads
- 21. Hunting – Step 3 is to find team connections Take advantage of your entire company’s rolodex
- 22. Hunting – Step 4 is to listen for selling moments Social triggers create golden selling moments
- 23. XYZ Company An example of a selling moment The rep sees an insight in the feed…
- 24. XYZ Company ABC Company XYZ Company’s An example of a selling moment He reaches out while prospect is in the moment…
- 25. XYZ Company …Magic happens An example of a selling moment
- 26. A warm hand-off is the best way to build trust Selling through relationships – Introductions
- 27. • Fast and lightweight, yet powerful • Best used for less senior prospects or if connection is tenuous • Appropriate to name drop without permission Name Drop Selling through relationships – Name Drop Get the value of an intro with a fraction of the effort
- 28. Appeal first to emotional (right) side of the brain… • Personal interests • School pride • Articles and posts • Recommendations …Before challenging the logical (left) side of the brain • Insights • Data • Rankings 1 2 Warm outreach As a last resort, “cold” outreach can still be warm
- 29. Visit us at Sales.LinkedIn.com Want to learn more?
- 30. ©2014 LinkedIn Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Editor's Notes
- Intro: – 2 minutes “Good Morning to all of you who’s joining us across countries in Asia Pacific. We are all excited to be here with you as this will be the first webinar of the year and we are so glad that we have a special guest joining us today all the way from Silicon Valley. We have an action packed agenda for you today filled with useful tips and tricks and we will share a bit of our own secret sauce on how we do sales. so we hope you stick around till the end. Hi everyone. My name is Krishna Zulkarnain and I am the Head of Marketing of LinkedIn Sales Solutions in APAC. LinkedIn fastest growing business line, Sales Solutions. I'm responsible for generating demand for our sales team across APAC via digital platforms and educational events such as this. On today’s webinar I’m Joined by Dominic Archibald Head of Marketing for North America all the way from San Francisco. Dom, tell us a bit about what you do for LinkedIn (Dominic) short intro (Krishna) We’re just about to kick off but before we start, I just want to through a few housekeeping items. Because of the big number of people we have on the line today, If you do have any questions, we are going to hold that off until the end of the presentation. How ever, you can ask questions throughout this event through chat. On the bottom right corner, you’ll see a chat panel. You can type your questions there during the presentation and at the end, we’ll try and get through as many questions as time allows. Make sure you send that through to both host and panelists so we can all see the questions. This webcast is strictly 30 minutes long so we will do our best to stick on time.” Thank you again for joining our webcast.
- Intro (KRISHNA): “On today’s webinar we will talk about the challenges of buying and selling in the social age. The market place as we know it has shifted and it shifted dramatically. We will talk about why social selling is important and that’s its already the new norm for doing sales And as the highlight of the program toady, we will reveal our own LinkedIn secret sauce on how we do sales. This is why all of you are here, to learn form Dominic as he takes a look under the hood of the LinkedIn sales engine. we will leave you with practical tips and best practices from around the world so that you can get started with becoming a social selling expert yourself. And of course we will end with the QA so please make sure you ask your questions on chat and we will answer them at the end.
- Monologue Pleasure of leading the Marketing across APAC In Marketing and sales for 15 years Worked in Jakarta, Manila, and Singapore. Unilever, wet markets, MTV Networks Selling Ads, Teleco working with Distributors What I see, Todays buyer has more choice and voice than ever before They are a social animal, at scale, with access to unlimited information. And they are exercising that advantage. In this digital age, your Network has become YOUR NETWORTH The fundamentals of ABC has changed forever. It’s no longer ABC, it’s ABC. (Always be Closing, Always be Connected) It stands to reason that the way we sell has had to evolve too. There are 2 MAIN reasons that you need to evolve. No. 1 – “social selling” is proven to make your reps more successful. No. 2 – however is a little more SERIOUS. You do not have a choice. It’s time to evolve or risk EVERYTHING. The good news is people STILL buy from people. They just do it in a fundamentally different way……
- Lets begin by acknowledging this hard hitting fact from the Aberdeen group. On average, only 4 in 10 Sales pro will achieve Quota. Its an upstream swim for our reps Its getting harder and harder to make your bookings The buyer has become more elusive, critical, self-reliant Long gone where the days where marketing tells the buyer why they need it and sales people tells them what they needed So how this happen? What drove this phenomena, How did the buyer become social?
- I’d like to share with you 4 images to that tell us a very interesting story. 1st of all here is a picture from 2005, of the Vatican in Rome. Pope Benedict XVI inauguration in April 2005. I think you’ll agree, a pretty good turn out! Its massive Fast forward only 6 years however and we see a very different picture…..
- If we need no other evidence that we live in a digital world this picture should encompass the shift. I’m willing to bet a sizeable sum for example that every single one of the attendees in this Webinar have a smart phone on their person. Whereas even 6 years ago this would not have been the case. It’s generally the 1st thing we touch when we wake up, it’s the tool we use more than any other throughout the day and guess what. Before we sleep it’s pretty much the last thing we touch. (I’m instantly glad my wife isn’t here to hear me admit such a relationship…) Our data backs this monumental shift up. Here at linkedin, only 5 years ago 2% of the billions of interactions that happened on our network were mobile. Today it’s over 50% and rising at an incredible rate. This sea change has given rise to social in an unprecedented manner. The world has changed people…
- Add to that the fact that social has changed the way we buy ANYTHING and we have an interesting story to tell 3rd party validation is KING. I’m ashamed to admit that I’m old enough to remember actually going to a travel agent to book a holiday…. I mean I actually walked and spoke face to face with a human being. I told them where I fancies going and let them do the rest. I have people in my team that scoff and laugh when I share this anecdote. Because there are people in todays workforce that just can not believe that’s how we used to function. Todays world is social to a degree that you would rather take the word of some random german guy whom you’ve never met or are ever likely to meet over the $millions advertising spent by the actual provider trying to market into you…. We are a social species. Technology has simply given us the ability to be social beyond our physical bonds. My wife is literally a better travel agent today than all of the travel agents I ever met in my life….. What you need to recognise however is that this is translating to B2B too. Your buyers are searching for and finding (or not finding) their own 3rd party validation on you…..the seller
- The Last image I wanted to share with you is to highlight something called “social proof” Let me take you on a journey…. You’ve researched, booked, paid for and arrived at your self sourced holiday destination. Your hungry. You and your significant other decide to go for food and for once, you’ve decided to go old school…. “lets just have a wander and find somewhere that looks nice to eat…..” After a lovely stroll you end up on a street where at one side there is a gorgeous looking restaurant, it’s new, plush, full of waiting staff but unfrotunately, it’s empty. Across the road however, is a old, “tired” looking restaurant, the chairs are a little wobbly, the tables “well used” the décor in need of updating but the main difference is it’s absolutely rammed full of diners, the hustle, the bustle, the smells, the sounds…. Which restaurant do you go to? This is social proof. You can see SP in every facet of life, from advertising to where you go to pick up your baggage in a busy airport. Yes people. You will subconsciously follow the crowd in an unfamiliar environment rather than actually read a sign!!! Why is this important? Well put simply, if you don’t have a strong DIGITAL brand, If you don’t invest in social media – you risk being the empty restaurant….
- So in summary - Buyer’s Journey is Evolving B2C & B2B… we rely on new pieces of information to make our buying decisions. And we CERTAINELY do not rely on Sales People anywhere near as much as we once did….
- Here are some stats that hopefully will resonate through out the day. 75% of B2B buyers use Social to be informed, the goes up to 85% if we look at C level execs…. We also know that traditional methods are no longer working in the same way – 90% of the people in this room statistically would not accept cold outreach….. But wait, it gets worse. We know that buyers in todays world are 50-70 % of the way DOWN their entire process BEFORE engaging your reps…. So it’s not just a case of finding the 10% but it’s a case of finding them BEFORE they have pretty much decided what they are going to buy…. So to have one of our most skilled and expensive resources (our reps) waste 90% of their time looking for a digital needle in a haystack is pretty much the very definition of madness in my opinion. AN opinion thankfully shared by my company.
- I really simply but incredibly impactful quote. Lets now take a look at how we can help you find and engage with those that are interested!
- I wanted to set the scene for this next session with a quick story. About two years ago, I started managing a Sales Development hunting team here at LinkedIn, and was trying to understand this social selling that I was hearing about. Back in those days, even here at LinkedIn, we taught our reps that their success was tied directly to the number of calls they made, and social selling just seemed like a fun idea. Then, one morning, I got a phone call that changed everything. This call was from a Sales rep on another team at LinkedIn, and he asked me a simple question. He said “Do you know Dan Laughlin?”
- Turns out that this rep had been planning his strategy for one of his accounts, and noticed in our Sales Product, Sales Navigator, that I was connected to a senior leader at the company named Dan. He told me that he had been trying to crack this account for months, and would love an introduction to Dan. I reached out to Dan and made the intro. A month later, the deal was signed. I realized at that moment that I needed to find a way to create that moment at scale in my Sales team.
- In case you werent familiar, we have three major B2B lines of business at LinkedIn: hire, market, sell. For hire we provide services for recruiting and job seeking. For marketing we provide content marketing, advertising, and lead nurture solutions. And for my business unit, Sales Solutions we provide ways to help sales professionals. Our mission is to connect the world’s buyers and sellers to build relationships. And what’s exciting about that is….
- What you are about to see is the playbook that we developed to teach our reps to do social selling at the speed of a hunting team.
- Once you have selected accounts you want to focus on, the challenge becomes finding the right people to engage. This is where Lead Builder serves as a tool that our most savvy reps use from the beginning. For anyone who has ever bought a lead list, consider this as similar. Only It taps into the biggest professional database in the world The contact data is updated by the user who has incentives to keep it fresh And most importantly, it tells you how everyone knows each other So the big advantage reps have once they focus on a subset of accounts is that they can save these into lead builder – save a lead for IT Decision Makers across a set of 20 select tech companies for instance, and render a list of individuals then drill down on who they are connected to, and where they have a path for an introduction via a teammate or external connection
- Next we’ll talk about finding and engaging the right contacts. When I managed sales teams, I found that much of their time was spent searching for the next person to call, and that they often struggled to find the key players at their accounts. Along came LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and searching for new prospects changed forever. Now, all a rep has to do is describe one time for LinkedIn the type of person she typically looks for, say for example Marketing professionals at VP level and above at Pharmaceutical companies. From then on, for any account that she looks at, LinkedIn will automatically run this search, identify the key people, and put them in front of the rep. We call this lead recommendations, and in the Sales Navigator screenshot here, you can see that LinkedIn is recommending the top people at the account who meet the rep’s search criteria. By identifying all the key players at the account on LinkedIn, we make it possible for the rep to find the 5.4 players who we need to connect with in order to close a deal.
- In addition to searching for new leads, we teach our reps to quickly spot team connections into these accounts. These connections can turn into warm introductions like we saw earlier with Dan. I like to describe this to new reps as the death of the rolodex. For most of the history of Sales, a rep’s success was largely defined by his rolodex – how many personal connections, how many business cards, could he call on to start a deal. But now, with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, even the most junior rep can read the rolodex of the entire company. When a rep looks at an account in Sales Navigator, he can see every potential relationship that exists between his company and that account, and ultimately turn these company connections into warm introductions. I like to think of this as coming into the office in the morning to find a line of your co-workers waiting at your desk, each offering to put you in touch with somebody they know in your accounts. This is completely game-changing for the Sales rep, and was not possible before LinkedIn We will talk more about how to get the most out of these relationships in a few minutes.
- In addition to actively hunting for the key prospects in their accounts, we also teach our reps the power of what I call passive hunting. This is the art of listening for social triggers on LinkedIn and across the web that can turn into ideal selling moments. Each morning when my reps get in, they pull up their Sales Navigator feed, which provides real-time insights and updates about the people and companies they are trying to sell to. These insights include: New team connections into the account Company news updates And shares or posts by a key prospect
- In those situations that a full introduction doesn’t make sense or will require too much legwork, we teach our reps a powerful alternative: what we call the name drop With this move, our reps reach out directly to the contact who is connected to somebody at LinkedIn, and simply drop the name. This might sound like “Hi so-and-so, I see that you are connected to Dominic Archibald – do you know each other?” It’s amazing how effective a name drop can be, and it takes a fraction of the effort.
- So far we’ve taught our reps to hunt with LinkedIn and to sell through relationships. However, we’re not always going to have a magic silver bullet team connection. So now we fall back on “cold outreach” to try to get in the door. However, there is a simple, powerful way to turn this cold outreach into a warm interaction, even without a relationship. The approach we teach is based on the science of neurolinguistics, the study of how the brain processes language. Once of the findings of this discipline is that the brain processes information best when it connects emotionally with an idea before grappling with a logical argument. This intuitively makes sense to all Sales people – we call it establishing rapport. However, what I find is that most reps forget about rapport when it comes to email outreach, and that they typically go straight for the logical argument before making a personal connection. This explains the 20 cold emails I get every day from sales reps at other companies that include nothing personal about me. The simple, and powerful, method we teach is to send a first message that leads with a personal fact gleaned from the LinkedIn profile, and then reaching out with subsequent messages that focus on how our solution can meet a business need.