The Secrets of Social Selling - a guide for everyone week 4 - growing a network

Growing a network

We haven't finished crafting a brilliant profile/personal brand yet, and we will come back to that, but here's something else that you can be doing immediately - growing your network.

Let's be honest, talking to strangers isn't easy for any of us. But having a big network in the right places is crucial to your success.

When you connect to somebody you get to see their content. But perhaps even more importantly, they get to see yours too. This means that by connecting you have built a digital bridge between them and you.

Of course, once you have someone in your network it doesn't mean that they will see everything that you publish and it doesn't guarantee that they will read everything of yours even of they do notice it...but it's a start.

From a sales perspective, getting coverage within a client is a really good (and simple) way of starting to develop a toehold in a business.

As an example, according to LinkedIn, Unilever has 125,000 employees on the platform. I however am not connected to any of them at all.

This means that no matter how good my content is and how pertinent it may be to Unilever, it is highly unlikely that anyone will actually see it unless I am very lucky. Any fantastic insights I might share, any alignment there may be between my company and theirs, any chance there might be for us to do business with them would require some sort of miracle.

By contrast, Salesforce, a company that has 70,000 employees on LinkedIn I am much better connected in to.

I have nearly 250 connections here which is a great start.

Building that network is a crucial first step to penetrating an account and achieving conversations there.

So, rather than randomly connecting to people on LinkedIn start sending connection requests to people in your target areas.

HOWEVER...don't just send empty requests, and certainly do not try to sell or talk about yourself. Send a nice friendly request saying how you've stumbled upon them and because you want to connect to interesting people you would like to add them.

Do not sell.

Do not pitch.

Do not even tell them what you do at this point because the important thing is not to qualify them in or out, to identify their appetite for when you do, or even to understand if they have a need. The objective is to get them in to your network at this stage...to build that digital bridge.

If you have a premium subscription to LinkedIn you can send 100 or so personalised invites per week (if you have the free version you can only send 5 per month) so this might be the catalyst for you to upgrade your subscription.

Remember, there are a lot of people on here that do all of this very poorly and seem to be dead-set on annoying people...don't be one of them.

You should set yourself a personal objective to send 100 (or more) connection request per week the the people you would like to get to know.

Well done. You've managed the task for the week.

(or if you haven't...drop me a line)

If you would like to find out more about our team or individual training programmes please drop me a message or an email to adam@dlaignite.com for a no obligation chat.

Typically Social Sellers have a much greater ability to start conversations with their ideal customers and as a result have a more robust and dependable pipeline and typically close more business than their noon-social counterparts.

#socialselling #pipeline #digitalselling #salestransformation #sales