p2w2 blog

LinkedIn is a good tool. But it’s boring. When was the last time you found something funny in LinkedIn? Yeah. There are articles talking how to use LinkedIn. But most of them are equally boring laundry lists of all LinkedIn can do. Not something that will be useful to you. Some just waste your time. “Talk to [people] on phone” lists LinkedIn’s own blog as one of the things you can do using LinkedIn. That list has no meaning for a small business. As a small business owner, my priorities are simple. Generating revenue is one of the highest priorities I have. Can LinkedIn contribute to that? How?

Using LinkedIn is about how you get in touch with people, and do business with them in various contexts. Below are some practical ways to help you in your small business.

Account opening and lead generation

If you have list of target customers (individuals), titles or companies, search them. You can search by industry, current or previous titles, current or previous companies, within a postal code etc. Get your target list of individuals in this search. Then figure out the most trusted route to those individuals. The most trusted route is the connection to the target through a first degree connection. You could preferably ask for a referral and you have a leg-in the company.

Finding the decision makers and influencers

When you sell to large corporations, understanding who you are talking to and who the decision maker/influencer will help you strategize your sale. There’s no use selling to someone who can’t do much. Using LinkedIn, you can find out who the decision maker is and could have alternative ways to reach them. You can do it by looking at job titles in an organization. But very often, that gives you partial and incorrect information. You can get more accurate and ‘tacit’ information by gathering information from others in the company.

Accumulate reputation and make referrals long lasting

Recommendations feature in LinkedIn has an eBay or p2w2 effect on your reputation. All your contacts can see it and are on for a long time. It’s an accumulation of your online reputation. When you delight a client, ask them for a LinkedIn recommendation. Those who visit your profile can see your reputation. In the offline world, a referral you get can only fetch you a few contracts. But here, you can make the recommendation long lasting and touch many more than just a few referrals.

Follow your customers and de-risk from personnel changes

With LinkedIn, when your clients shift from one company to another, they move with you because you connect with the person – not the company. That’s good for you. With your contact’s move, there’s a known person in the new company that gets your leg into the company (that’s assuming you have good terms with the client. If you have bad reputation, it moves across companies too.)

Using the same strategy to know the ‘influencers,’ i.e. making your connection wide within the company so that when your key contact leaves the company, you have others to fallback on. You de-risk your account from personnel changes.

The above are the ways you can generate revenue. If you are keen on exploring more about this, I suggest you read this eBook (Can LinkedIn increase your sales) published by Jill Konrath. Pages 5-8 have the crux of what this eBook has to offer. It’s worth the read.

Tap into push button expertise; position yourself as a subject matter expert

LinkedIn Answers has been reasonably successful. We wrote about it in our previous post (5 good marketing and HR websites for a small business). If you ask a question related to your business, you can be reasonably certain that you get multiple good answers. As a small business, you have many questions and few answers. You can use LinkedIn Answers to tap into expertise of many people. Just ask.

Alternately, you can position yourself as a subject matter expert in the subject you want to be viewed as an expert and answer questions posed by others. The more ‘best answers’ you accumulate, the better you will be treated an expert in your subject.

In my opinion, the above covers the ‘high impact items’ of how LinkedIn can help small businesses. That gives you 80% of the value understanding 20% of the items. If you are really interested looking for a laundry list (other other 80%) of all you can do on LinkedIn, here are a few links that will help you do just that.

20 Ways to Use LinkedIn Productively

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn

The Right Way to Use LinkedIn

Picture credits: 1. LinkedIn (top): Mario Sundar 2. Enlightening (middle): Jurvetson 3. Sunset & the Thinker (bottom): Esparta

Small businesses have different DNA. If you are a small business, you are small, with limited budgets and they have a lot to do. You constantly have this urge to ‘scale up’ – in revenue and people. You have meager resources and employees. And face high risk. So want stuff to work out-of-box and give you returns.

That’s why we have put together 5 great resources for small businesses that will help you. These resources will give you strategic assets. Like if your employees use Manager Tools, they will be far better employees right away and that improves the quality of employees you have without having a pay a bomb to a soft skills trainer. The other resources below are equally good.

Marketing voices

Marketing Voices is one of THE best Internet marketing podcasts I have ever heard. Jennifer Jones, the host, interviews the who’s who of social media marketing and you get to hear the cutting edge of Internet marketing. Of late, the podcast has become shorter and better. Jennifer Jones hits the nail on it head and gets it over with. There are no long conversations. She does not look to fill the time as much as she wants to give the most within the shortest span of time.

SpyFu.com

SpyFu is a very different resource. It’s a website where you can key in a competitor’s website and get great competitive insight on PPC (pay per click) and Organic search results. E.g. You can get how much ad budget your competition spent, on which keywords, who the major competitors for certain keywords are, and on which keywords does the website rank high in organic search results.

Manager-Tools

Manager-tools is a podcast that gives ‘tools’ to managers. Michael Auzenne and Mark Horstman strike a conversation every week about soft skills – how to manage your time, how to leave voice mails, how to have one-on-one conversations with people who work for you. What I like about the podcast is that the suggested behavior is sensible and practical. Though they do talk about what managers do wrong, they do that well and only enough to make the point.

If you wanted a mentor who taught you or your employees what to do, you can find one in Manager-tools. If used well, Manager-tools can convert ordinary employees into strategic assets and can influence the culture of your company positively.

LinkedIn Answers

You may know LinkedIn but am not sure if you know the power of LinkedIn Answers. Whatever questions you face in your business, you can pose that in LinkedIn and get very good responses to your questions. What’s even more wonderful is that you can search the archives and see if someone else posted the same question and check out what the responses have been. It gives you insights from multiple experts (or not so experts) at the same time and saves you time.

Entrepreneur.com

You can find many articles of topics important to you entrepreneur.com. What I like about entrepreneur.com is sensible advice. E.g. Check out this article - How to Sell in 60 Seconds. The author upgrades your selling capability. There’s a large archive of such articles.

I hope you enjoy these resources. If you know some other resources that are as good as or better than these websites, please let me know. Many small businesses read this blog. You will be able to help them by telling me.

Picture credit: tanakawho