Sales is about people. Orders get signed by people and the appointments needed to get those signatures come when a level of trust is established. If there is one single factor that determines sales success, it is a relationship.
In “Old School” relationship prospecting, salespeople would spend lots of time taking buyers to dinners, lunches, and on the golf course. During these events you would not only strengthen your existing relationship but you would also ask for new prospects. However ask any salesperson if these tactics work as well now as they did in the past and you will hear a resounding no! Today’s buyer is spending less time going to lunch or being social on the golf tee because they are under much more pressure to produce results with less and less resources.
However there is hope. There are new ways to build new business relationships. In fact these new ways allow you to build relationships faster than you could before and more relationships than you could before.
The new method of finding prospects and building relationships with those prospects involve using a business network called LinkedIn. Using LinkedIn to start relationships with people in your target markets is much more efficient than ”Old School” methods and you can do so without ever leaving your office. Using LinkedIn search functions can help you find the prospects by job title, company name, or even by business types and all within a local region. Once you find your prospects you can use the messaging capabilities to send an introductory letter. Of course when you get a response you will want to deepen that relationship with a phone call and/or a face-to-face meeting. The human voice is and always will be the most desirable and pleasant way to communicate.
Additionally, LinkedIn tells me who the people I know in turn know. Its the equivalent of calling all the people I know to a meeting and telling them to bring their Rolodexes to the meeting then going through their Rolodexes to find the prospects that I am targeting. When you search for a company on LinkedIn, the results page will tell you who you know at that company. All other contacts listed that you to not know will display how many degrees of separation away from you they are. If you do not know the person you are targeting at that company, you can ask your known contacts to introduce you using the “Introduction Request” feature provided by “LinkedIn”.
I will discuss more ways to use Linkedin in the future, but if you are trying to build your business, I highly recommend that you take the time to become a member of LinkedIn.com.
