Get Your LinkedIn Love before Valentine’s Day

Here are some quick LinkedIn Tips to get to the heart of this social network. LinkedIn is lucrative and you will need to actually put time and love into it to see the benefits.

(1.) Laying Plans — What are your industry/niche, product and service offerings? Who are your target customers?

(2.) Add Value — Connect with others and share your knowledge with others – tactical approaches including ranking your name for the best keywords will be added.

(3.) Weak and Strong Points of Action — Get recommendations and referrals — Focus on getting every possible recommendation you can get but be sure to not overdo it…This can lead to a fearful prospect.

(4.) Influencing — Get your name everywhere as the guru of “enter your business here” or as the ultimate service and virtualize that service – Time is worth much, much more than money. These LinkedIn tips are initiated by Los Silva, book co-author, and marketing specialist.

(5.) The Maven — Use your maven referral network as your own personal directory, don’t look at your network as a means to an end. Look at LinkedIn as your ultimate resource… just imagine adding in social CRM (customer relationship management) systems to build out the referral possibilities.

(6.) Energy — What is your directed goal? Look over your primary customers for B2B or B2C markets. Also, be sure to look at the marketplace as a whole so that you are able to access more opportunity – Can your competitors become your salespeople and also can they be your strategic partner? What strategic partners can you generate (thinking outside of the box)? Reseller, white labeling, tertiary customers/untapped mines of gold — What do you really bring to the marketplace and how can you dominate the marketplace even further? These are good brainstorming pieces for action and strategic moves later on.

(7.) Maneuvers  — Choose your strategies and zero in on companies with a clear plan achieving an objective — focus on your sales goals and focus on the interests people would have on which benefits of your product. Don’t be afraid to go after the Fortune 100 companies as clients…they always have managers for various regions and name dropping is the name of the game.

(8.) Use LinkedIn as the directory and setup meetings of any kind with multiple decision makers so as to leverage the scale of a company’s bureaucratic system – When many, many people know you, it is very hard to resist your sales strategy. Make Friends, Don’t focus on the sale. It is ‘Relationship Riches.’

Mitch Axelrod spoke recently at a training event.  He said that he was accused of having “commission breath.”  No mouth wash could cure it. 

If you’re all about the sale and your commission, whether you are online or offline, people will smell it a mile away.  It is so much more pleasant to do business with someone who has the aroma of fresh roses. Instead, connect with a feeling of freshness (like roses) just like would would bring to your date on Valentine’s Day. 

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Sherrie Rose on LinkedIn