Marketing is Not Pulling their Weight to Empower Salespeople
Marketing has long been the owner of the brand strategy as well as the publisher of website content along with content such as case studies, webinars, white papers, technical documents, to name a few types of content published by Marketing.
Considering that 59 percent of survey respondents have published no media content to their LinkedIn profile, this is a huge missed opportunity for Marketing. The company’s website is the main online property used to attract visitors who consume information about the company’s products and services. But most companies only have one website.
If you employ 100 sales reps, each rep’s LinkedIn profile has the potential to be an extension of the company website when the rep displays content on their profile. LinkedIn allows you to display content formats on your profile such as PDF, videos, PowerPoint, Word, jpg, text among others. This allows reps to display content supplied by Marketing to extend the reach of the brand beyond just www.companywebsite.com. Imagine having 100 mini-websites, each displaying relevant content supplied by Marketing used to communicate to buyers engaging with sales rep’s LinkedIn profiles. If each rep has 500 connections, that’s 50,000 people (in this example) who can get exposed to the company’s content.
Add to this the known fact that people buy from people and consider information from people more credible than information supplied by a brand.
Marketing executives need to consider one more powerful fact:
“62% of decision makers look for an informative LinkedIn profile when considering talking with a sales rep.” This finding is from the LinkedIn State of Sales 2018 report.
Marketers MUST recognize the opportunity to extend the reach and communication power of their sales reps by arming them with relevant content to display on their LinkedIn profile.
Training is Not Recognized as a Priority
The good news for sales leaders about their reps learning how to become effective at selling with LinkedIn is that it’s not rocket science. The bad news – sorry to break it to you – is that effective training is not realistically achieved in a one-day workshop.
Blame no one for this. It’s just human nature. We simply don’t learn anything in one day. Did you learn an entire college course in one day?
I’ll clarify this statement…People don’t change behavior based on what is learned in one day. If you want your sales team to sell with LinkedIn effectively, they must learn techniques to find, engage and connect with people. To learn these techniques, they need to learn how to use the PVC method which we teach in our Digital Selling curriculum, spread across nine modules.
For sales reps to find relevant people, they need to know how to use LinkedIn’s advanced search function. 78 percent of the survey respondents conduct an advanced search less than 10 times per month. Why? Because, they have NOT been trained to use advanced search features in LinkedIn, otherwise they would do it more often to find more prospects!
We don’t need to train salespeople on the value of a referral from a trusted customer to a prospective customer….Or, do we? 92 percent of survey respondents asked for a referral or introduction from someone in their network ten times or less in the last three months…..Why? Because they have not been trained in the two-step referral process to ask for a referral.
These three game-changing takeaways should be a wake-up call for any sales leader who is struggling to achieve a robust pipeline and close-won rates that meet your goals.