Don’t Use LinkedIn – Funny and Sad at the Same Time

February 25, 2012 by · 2 Comments

ostrich with it's head buried in the sand

Mic Johnson wrote a funny blog article titled “20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT be on LinkedIn.” I almost fell out of my chair laughing and then realized he had nailed it –  most companies are resisting or ignoring using new tools, such as LinkedIn. It is the number one business networking and referral tool in existence. It just keeps building in importance.

Are you being a ostrich when it comes to using LinkedIn?

This resistance unfortunately allows your competitors to gain a strategic advantage over you in attracting talent, sales, marketing, lead generation and nurturing, and customer service. These tools are here to stay and the more effective and efficient companies are implementing them through-out their business. The real interesting element of social media is that it levels the playing field for entrepreneurial companies and small businesses to do things that traditionally only a large company with lots of resources could do in the past. Now you can achieve comparable results quicker and easier.

I reprint below the 20 funny reasons why you shouldn’t be on LinkedIn (Mic did a great job in pulling these together):

1. You will take a cold call over a warm, or even hot, call every day of the week. 

2. You think business can only be done face-to-face even though relationship building (isn’t that what business is all about?) happens every single day online. 

3. You believe that you (and your employees) 30% complete profile with no summary, no picture and zero recommendations doesn’t reflect poorly on you or your business.

4. You don’t have time to spend a couple of hours on LinkedIn each week to research prospects because you are too busy doing the same sales techniques you’ve used your entire career. 

5. You don’t want to participate in forums that make you or your business look like subject matter experts in your industry.

6. You don’t want to read blog articles and stories from people in your professional network that may help you or your business.

7. You don’t want to take the time to give recommendations to people that you’ve worked with throughout your career that are awesome because there isn’t anything in it for you.

8. When customers or prospects search for you on LinkedIn, you want to make sure they can’t find you. And if they do, you want to make sure that your personal profile and company page don’t tell them anything of value. 

9. You know for a fact that none of the 150 million people on LinkedIn are your customers or prospects.

10. You know that LinkedIn is adding 2 people every second (up from 1 person a second a year ago) but those people probably won’t ever want to buy anything anyway. 

11. You don’t want to share your personal and professional brand with people because that would be bragging. Even though they want to know. Everyone knows that, in business, it’s always better to not give people what they want.

12. You don’t want to know more about people that you are doing business with or would like to do business with.

13. You believe, with all of your heart, that there is no value in keeping up with what is going on in your professional network (such as new business deals, new hires, new products and services, etc.).

14. You have all the business you will ever need and aren’t interested in generating more.

15. You prefer to limit your prospecting and sales activity to the two networking groups you belong to and the five coffees and lunches you try to set up each week.

16. You don’t see any value in updating your LinkedIn status regularly to tell your professional network about things that may help them. 

17. You think tools like LinkedIn aren’t fundamentally changing the way business is done.

18. You don’t want your employees spending time on a tool that can help enhance your brand, your reach, and open up the lines of communication. 

19. You don’t want to find talented people to work for you or get recommendations from people that they are connected to on LinkedIn. A two-page resume and a 1-hour interview give you all you need to make a $50,000 decision. 

20. You think you’ve done your job on LinkedIn by having an “ok” profile “just so you’re out there” and see nothing wrong with having a LinkedIn inbox full of invitations and messages you haven’t responded to.

 

Here’s my personal example of what LinkedIn has meant to me: LinkedIn has allowed me to expand my executive search practice to new clients by at least 30% over the last 3 years, during tough economic times, and at the same time reduce my costs of conducting a search by 50%. This means I can offer my clients better service, at a substantially reduced fee, while my profit increases, and my efficiency improves at a geometric rate. There are thousands of these examples for every imaginable type of business.

After you laugh or cry when you read these 20 reasons of why you shouldn’t be on LinkedIn, I’d like to consider when you’re going to put a plan in place to integrate the tool in the day-to-day aspects of doing business – in almost every function in your company. One of the greatest ROIs can come from recruiting better talent. Start there, and then expand it into sales, marketing, customer service, and employee engagement.

What’s your biggest hurdle/roadblock in not doing this immediately?

To read Mic’s full article, please click the link below:

20 Reasons Why Your Business Should NOT be on LinkedIn

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media ·

LinkedIn Offers Powerful Tools for your Sales Team

January 12, 2012 by · 1 Comment

LinkedIn for Sales

Are you training your sales professionals in how to use the advanced features of LinkedIn for marketing, introductions, and relationship building? If not, are you potentially ignoring a tool that could dramatically leverage your time and effort? If you have not gone down this path yet, what’s holding you back?

Here’s a few ideas:

  • Does everyone in your company have a LinkedIn Account?
  • Has each person input their entire contact list to check who they know is already on LinkedIn?
  • Have your sales professionals used their own contact list and that of everyone in the company to identify potential buyers at target companies who already know someone in your company – through which a warm introduction could be obtained?
  • Do your sales people use the profile manager and tagging to sort, manage, email, and nurture potential contacts?
  • Do your sales professionals all have impressive profiles fully filled out and an extensive LinkedIn Company Page?
  • Are your sales professionals using the advanced features of LinkedIn, such as blogging, presentations, video, reading lists, and others to engage with potential clients?
  • Have you brought in or hired a LinkedIn Sales Trainer to teach and train your team?
  • Have you sent your sales people to online e-courses/webinars to learn how to adapt LinkedIn to their unique selling approach?

Do you have a precise plan of how to bring your entire sales team up to speed on using LinkedIn to improve sales?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: , , , , , , , , , ,

Should you be Business Blogging?

November 13, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Daily Blog Tips

Sometimes I stumble across an interesting article that works for Vistage and TEC Chairs, Speakers, Trusted Advisers, and Members. This might be one of those articles. Is Blogging for everyone? Could your business, consulting, speaking, services, and products benefit from launching a blog?

This a little bit of a “devil’s advocate” post. Everyone is jumping on the blogging bandwagon. Should you join in the parade? Should you wait? Is Blogging NOT an effective strategy for your business? This article on Daily Blog Tips summarized many of the key points related to determining if your company should be blogging or whether it might turn into an exercise in futility?

I liked the way the author laid out a set of criteria or a checklist to determine if you should launch a business blog? There are obviously many benefits from having a business blog – one of the major questions is whether you have the time, patience, and resources to devote to launching a business blog.

There’s a common opinion that your businesses should blog. And that’s true – a lot of them should, but that doesn’t mean you should blog just to blog. Many businesses do the blog thing wrong, and apply it for the wrong reasons. This can create productivity gaps and areas where resources are allocated improperly. Blogging shouldn’t be done just to blog – there should be a clear focus, goals, and actionable metrics applied to it. It shouldn’t be done just because people do it – for the same reasons that Facebook and Twitter accounts shouldn’t be created because you heard “social media’s good”.

To read the full article on Daily Blog Tips, click the link below:

Why Your Business Should – And Shouldn’t – Have A Blog

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: blog information, social media · Tagged: , ,

Do Your Customers or Clients view you as a Trusted Source?

September 1, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Reputation to Revenue Blog

I was reminded how important it is for your potential customers to view you as a trusted source of information in re-reading this blog article in my archive from the Reputation-to-Revenue Blog.

Study after study has shown that a large percentage of buying decisions (both for products and services) are being done through web searches. On these web searches, your content, reputation, references, and recommendations all surface.

Are you establishing yourself as one of the top trusted sources of information for your customers/clients?

Are you producing enough content to establish yourself as the “authority” within your niche or marketplace?

Could you honestly say that for the service you provide – you’re one of the most trusted sources of reliable, non-biased, objective information within your industry or niche?

If you’re not in the top 3, you’re leaving money on the table. Social media – places like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, and other social networking venues – now give you the opportunity to build your own brand, become your own content publisher, and market precisely to your target audience on a very cost-efficient basis.

Are you taking advantage of these new tools and sites to establish yourself as a leading producer of good quality information about the products or services (which you provide) in your niche or market?

Here’s a good case study: My partner, Brad Remillard, and I have systematically developed our reputation as being one of the top voices in hiring and retaining top talent. We generate an abundance of referrals and leads for our executive search practice, speaking engagements, and hiring process improvement consulting business. We’ve put together one of the best collections of FREE content on the web for hiring and retaining top talent. We’re laser focused in distributing that content to our target audience – CEOs of small-to-medium size businesses. We generate a tremendous number of leads and referrals simply by publishing high quality content related to finding, interviewing, assessing, and keeping great talent.

Anyone can do this. There is no barrier to entry other than the time investment required to write and publish your content. Within a very short period of time, you could become one of the most trusted sources of information for your target audience-niche market. Our blogging and social media activity comprise approximately 1 hour per day of time including writing the blog articles, distributing the articles, projects, responding to our audience/connections, and networking on-line.

The future battle for the attention of the buyers of your services or products will be increasingly fought on the field of establishing yourself as a trusted source of information. This approach applies to Chairs, Consultants, Companies, Speakers, and Sales Professionals. How are you establishing your business as the most trusted within your niche?

To read the entire article, click the link below:

Marketing as media: Are you in the top five?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , ,

Is Your Social Media Strategy Based on What Individuals in the Company Post On-line?

August 29, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

 Kyle Lacy Social Media Blog

Carolyn Maul, writing a guest post on Kyle Lacy’s Blog,  describes a number of key issues to think about in crafting an effective social media strategy.

I’m still very surprised by the number of entrepreneurial, small business, middle-market companies that have not yet crafted a strategy or evaluated the opportunity/potential to add social media to their marketing, sales, and lead generation mix. Here are a few questions I’d like to pose:

  • Do you think your business is the exception to the rule – that you are unique and social media cannot apply in your situation?
  • Have you done any type of research or benchmarking to prove/invalidate that social media might help your business?
  • Is the unknown of ROIs, comparable companies doing it, lack of quantitative research, questionable metrics holding you back?
  • Are you so overwhelmed by the sheer amount of what can be done that it is easier to just be an ostrich?
  • Do you lack the expertise within your company to accurately judge the potential of using social media – and you don’t trust consultants?

In my executive search practice, social media has allowed us to communicate with our target audience beyond the obnoxious direct email approach that everyone hates. Social media has allowed us to communicate in the way our clients want to receive information – do they want it as an attachment, a slide deck, on Twitter, Facebook, or through a LinkedIn Group we host. Sometimes, presenting the same message in multiple media/formats helps to reinforce your brand, credibility, and expertise/capability. Social Media has provided the opportunity for us to establish our expertise, credibility, and through leadership far above our peer community in executive search by educating, teaching, and training through social media by using podcasting, blogging, and Q&A style forums. We give away all our trade secrets on how to hire more effectively through social media. The result has been the creation of one of the more popular sites on the Internet for information on how to hire top talent. Once CEOs and other executives begin to take information, their next step is to engage with us on their particular issue, and finally asking us to help solve their problems and issues.

Just telling others you make the best product or have the best service is not enough. Today, customers want to engage slowly, learn from you, have a chance to interact, and keep peeling back layers until the feel comfortable giving you money. The old days of simply having the best sales people calling on customers is NOT enough. Today, most studies reinforce that customers/clients are very selective in whom they will buy from. The Internet has given them transparent information about you and your products/services. Are you managing this communication channel with your customers and clients or are you letting your competitors dictate the dialogue?

Forget about marketing, sales, and lead generation for a moment. Are you using social media to recruit better talent, deeply engage with your employees, and strengthen existing customer relationships by using it in customer service?

What have you done so far to start creating a social media strategy for the various elements of your business in which you can see an immediate payoff?

To read the full article, click the link below:

Crafting a Winning Social Media Strategy

Are you missing  leaving “money on the table” or missing opportunities by not crafting a strong social media strategy right now and using it for sales, marketing, lead generation, customer retention, and recruiting top talent.

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged:

Introverts Love Social Media – Implication for Your Business

August 18, 2011 by · 1 Comment

Mark Collier Blog

Social Media levels the playing field for introverts and extroverts. Social media gives introverts an equal footing with extroverts to let their hair down, be bold, engage in active “real-time” conversation, and a let a little spontaneity shine through.

Have you noticed this introversion-to-extroversion shift occur within yourself or with those around you? Some of the most introverted “in-person” individuals suddenly blossom with social media tools. Consider the struggle to engage the employees in your company to be social media advocates or to convince them to write for your business blog. Many will shy away from this request simply due to being wired as an introvert. Now you can show them how they can shine through on-line. One of the greatest struggles in implementing social media engagement is getting employees to start tweeting or blogging about your company – now you’ve just doubled the number of participants (most studies show a 50/50 split of introverts/extroverts in the population.

Here’s a snippet from Mack Collier writing on his own blog where he describes being an in-person introvert and an on-line extrovert:

 

If you are an introvert that’s active in social media, do people that you meet find it difficult to believe that you are introverted?  I get this often, so much so that I have on my Facebook page that I am “Online extrovert, offline introvert.  It’s complicated.”

But for me, it’s much easier to be outgoing online, than it is offline.  I think that’s why I love social media so much.

For example, one of the things that I hate is being in a room full of people where I don’t know anyone.  I find it extremely difficult to introduce myself to anyone and talk to them, because I assume they don’t know me and don’t want to know me.  It’s a terribly awkward situation for me, and if you’re an introvert you can probably relate.

To read the full article on why introverts love social media, click the link below:

Why introverts love Social Media

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media ·

Do You Get A Ripple Effect Through Your Target Audience?

August 7, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

I really like the idea Mike Sansone wrote about on the Converstations Blog when he referred to amplifying your message by creating ripples in your marketing efforts.

One of the best ways to create ripples is to blog. You’ll be found and heard by your target audience, you’ll gain free publicity by folks on radio, in business publications, and local newspapers, and your content will continue to be “re-broadcast” in expanding circles of influence.

You’ve probably resisted blogging – perhaps considering it a waste of time. Now might be the time to consider starting to blog so that you can create an effective inbound marketing program – where others seek you vs. you trying to find them (outbound marketing). Inbound marketing is less expensive, has a higher conversion rate, and is less complex than traditional outbound marketing programs, such as cold calling, email direct marketing, and advertising.

Here’s the picture he paints in his blog article:

 

Let’s look at it another way. Go to the edge of a lake or river. Drop a stone into the water close to your feet. The ripples extend only outward. Yet, give the stone a throw (complete with extension and follow through) and the ripples continue extending outwarrd, but also come back to you.

 

If you could generate returns/conversion/success at a 4:1 ratio compared to traditional cold calling or emailing techniques to reach your intended audience – would the small time investment be worth it?

Have you started blogging yet as a business, speaker, consultant, or trusted adviser?

Are there social media strategies other than blogging which you use to create a “ripple effect” that extends and is amplified through-out your niche/audience/potential clients and customers?

Barry Deutsch

 

Filed Under: blog information, social media · Tagged: ,

LinkedIn: You Can No Longer Ignore This Social Media Tool

May 18, 2011 by · 1 Comment

LinkedIn Blog

When LinkedIn surpassed 100 million members, the official LinkedIn Blog published an interesting set of fun statistics. All joking and funny statistics aside, LinkedIn is an extraordinary powerhouse of a site. If you’re not using it for recruiting top talent, business development, market research, prospecting for sales, lead generation and nurturing, branding, pr, and content delivery to your target market – then you’re leaving a pile of money and opportunity sitting on the table.

Here’s a couple of simple examples to illustrate how poorly most people and companies use LInkedIn:

We created a simple one-page self-assessment for executive job seekers to evaluate their LinkedIn Profile to determine whether it was effective in attracting the attention of recruiters, hr managers, and hiring executives. Over 1000 executive job seekers sent us back their completed profiles – less than 10% met a minimum standard.

In a recent survey of company hiring practices in the Vistage and TEC Community of companies in the $5-$50 million revenue size, less than 5% use LinkedIn as a proactive sourcing tool to find passive candidates.

In our Executive Search Practice for high level sales professionals and sales managers,we discovered through in-depth interviewing that less than 20% leverage LinkedIn effectively for referral networking – yet referral networking has proven to be the most viable method of generating sales for products/services which lend themselves to solution selling vs. transactional selling.

What’s wrong with this picture?

If LinkedIn is such an effective tool and resource, why do so many professionals and companies underutilize it?

Is it a training issue – most professionals and companies don’t know how to leverage LinkedIn? Then the question surfaces of why they are not getting training? Is it a unconsciously incompetent issue – we don’t what we don’t know. Is it that there is a steep learning curve and no one wants to take the time to come up the learning curve because they don’t yet buy into the value from using LinkedIn?

Help me out – I’m curious why you’re not rushing to start using this amazing tool. Even if you just use it for recruiting great talent and prospecting for ideal customers, are you still not convinced it could bring better people to your company, reduce sales costs, and improve lead generation?

Here’s a few fun statistics from LinkedIn about their membership:

 

  • 1,091 profiles with chocolatier listed as a position
  • 79+ million job transitions/changes tracked
  • 46 profiles with beatboxer listed as a position
  • 428%: Year-over-year membership growth rate in Brazil, one of our fastest-growing countries
  • Lee, Smith and Kumar have alternated over the last 8 years as the most common last name of newly registered users
  • 951 years: duration of back-to-back 5-minute phone calls made by 100 million professionals
  • 50%: year-over-year growth in our iPhone skill index
  • 4 profiles with dog or cat psychologist / psychiatrist listed as a position
  • Some industries with the fastest year-over-year new member growth rates: Education (175%), Facilities Services (121%), and Ranching (112%)
  • 100% of Fortune 500 companies have executives on LinkedIn
  • 1 profile has martini whisperer listed as a position

 

To see all the fun statistics, click the link below:

The LinkedIn Blog – 100 Million Gumballs

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , , ,

Can Social Media Help You Improve Relationship Marketing?

May 15, 2011 by · Leave a Comment

Blogging Tips Blog

Patti Stafford writing on the Blogging Tips website talked about how social media can improve relationship marketing. However, she made an important observation that you have to connect personally with your audience. Sending “form” emails and broadcasting where you had lunch on Twitter is NOT relationship marketing. Social Media can provide a great platform to improve relationship marketing and interactions on a large scale if done properly. Social Media provides leverage in marketing to many vs. the traditional “call – meeting – follow-up process” which is more direct sales than marketing and touches very few prospects. Relationship Marketing through Social Media is a blend of traditional direct selling and marketing/branding/pr/awareness building – all layered on top of tools that give you the opportunity for continuous conversations from the comfort of your computer chair. with very little time investment.

Obviously, you’ve got to eventually meet in person your best prospects to close them;  however, imagine how much more successful you and your sales team could be by engaging hundreds of perfect prospects every week as compared to just a handful.

Here’s one of the key points Patti made from the blog article:

One key point to remember and the reason for relationship marketing is that people buy from people they like and trust. If you aren’t taking care of people and getting them to like you, they will never buy your product or a product you recommend. It’s that simple. You may get a few initial sales but if you don’t get up close and personal with your audience they won’t spread the word about you, sales and traffic will drop off and your business will die.

To read the full article on relationship marketing, click the link below:

What is Relationship Marketing?

  • Here’s a few questions to get the conversation started:
  • Do you have a specific strategy for executing on a plan for relationship marketing with your key prospects?
  • Where do you stand on leveraging Social Media as part of your relationship marketing plan?
  • Is your sales team still stuck in sales engagement, prospecting, and networking that is stuck in a 1970s sales model?
  • What research, tools, and consultants/coaches have you sought out to begin moving down this path of relationship marketing that leads to more effective lead generation and nurturing?

Barry Deutsch

Filed Under: social media · Tagged: , ,

Can Social Media Improve Your Sales Lead Generation?

February 21, 2011 by · 2 Comments

Social Media B2B Blog

Umberto Milletti, in his post on the Social Media B2B Blog, describes the value that using social media tools in the sales process can bring to improving or enhancing lead generation activities for your sales team. He describes some of the key benefits as:

  • If they are not the decision maker, identify decision makers within the prospect’s company
  • Leverage your social connections to identify a common SENIOR connection between you and the decision makers
  • Tap into social intelligence to listen to what the decision makers care about or talk about
  • Learn enough about your prospect’s current business challenges and needs to convince the common senior connection to agree to an introduction
  • Discover which other executives might be involved in the decision making process

I wrote a comment back to Umberto’s post and below is a summary of my response to how he indicates/perceives that social media can improve the sales lead generation process. I have a few major concerns – especially among entrepreneurial-to-middle market companies:

It seems that many senior executive decision makers are NOT using social media. They are not on Faceback or Twitter. They are not actively using LinkedIn. Forget for a moment senior executive decision makers. Most senior sales professionals are not using social media tools in their own sales efforts. We’re still very much in the early adopter phase for most social media practical B2B uses – outside of very young professionals and those in the tech sector.

Has this been your experience? How much are you using social media in your sales function? Are all your sales professionals trained in the latest techniques of using Umberto’s ideas to improve lead generation?

To read the full article on improving B2B lead generation, please click the link below.

Can Social Media Be Used to Improve Lead Qualification

Barry Deutsch

P.S. Is it time to take our Social Media in Sales Self-Assessment to determine if your sales team is leveraging social media and networking to the fullest potential in your company?

Filed Under: sales management, social media · Tagged: , , , ,
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