Selling Yourself on LinkedIn: Sales Skills for Networking
As you may have discovered placing ads, signatures with links, and in general being “sales-aggressive” is not very fruitful on LinkedIn. In fact, if you do it for a while you will likely find yourself with a LinkedIn version of the plague. People will start to avoid you.
Selling yourself on LinkedIn requires a different set of selling skills. In this post I’ll try to give you some ideas of how to sell yourself properly on LinkedIn; doing it right will help you be more effective at monetizing your networking efforts.
Sales Skill #1: Sell your wisdom NOT your wares
Success on LinkedIn comes from others observing you and being enticed or impressed enough to check you out. Selling yourself or your company is best accomplished by heavy participation in the Question and Answer Forum asking and answering questions giving each your all.
It is much like writing a novel, you don’t “tell” the reader you “show” them. In the Question and Answer forum you want to show the readers that you really are an (exceptional) expert and know your stuff. Don’t worry about giving away any secrets the people who could do it themselves aren’t your prospects anyway. Just impress the heck out of them.
One word of caution, you must be careful not to make your answers in any way “egotistical.” You don’t brag or even try to mention yourself (though there are places you can get away with it) you simply want to give the person who posted the question the best possible answer. (Hint: if you are getting “best answers” you are probably doing a good job.)
Remember also that if you have negatives to present, you may consider putting them in the private part of the answer so as not to embarrass the poster. In some cases you may have to give a completely private answer – this is all a judgment call.
Sales Skill #2: Focus your profile on what you can produce
A profile is much like a resume but far more dynamic. Most people write their profiles and their resumes telling others what they did or can do. Wrong! What you should do is write your resume from the viewpoint of what you produced or could produce.
Your competition in the marketplace for business, or for a job, does or did the same things you do or did. The difference is what you produced. Example: You have two sales managers – they both do the same thing except one produces record sales and the other never hits her target – production is what people are interested in.
Sales Skill #3: Help others
Networking is NOT about how many connections you have but about how many you’ve made. Help others get connected with both people and resources. It is also very useful to just offer to give free advice with no expectation of a return.
I will frequently finish an answer to a question with my telephone number and an offer to help in the private section of my answer. Even if people don’t call, and they don’t very often it is a strong gesture of giving. I usually do this by offering to give more detail and see if I can’t point them in the right direction or to some other resources.
You will quickly know if you are doing the right things on LinkedIn when people ask you to connect because of your content – now that’s a valuable connection.
Please let me know what you think of this post by leaving your comments below.
Thanks.
From Flyn…
If you haven’t seen my letter to readers please check it out:
http://onlinebusinessnetworker.net/blog//2009/07/a-short-letter-to-my-readers/
Thanks..
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