Are You Sales Leader?
Do You Know How to Execute a Social Selling Program?
Would You Like to Know How to Find Prospects on Linkedin?
If you're responsible for meeting revenue goals, also known as making sales, you need qualified leads. If you use Hubspot, like we do, you want to make sure 'No Lead Gets Left Behind' Leads are after all valuable. Sure, we love it when decision makers come onto our website and consume all the content we offer, such as case studies, then eventually turn into customers. It means we don't cold call. It also tends to help our conversion rate down the road - a lot.
Leveraging Prospect Information from Hubspot
An Advanced Social Media Based Successful Sales Strategy
But when we want even more leads, including their phone numbers and email addresses, we want to know how to search for prospects on LinkedIn. We also want them to have our phone number and if needed a way to contact customer service. That's why having an up-to-date LinkedIn personal and business page profile is a critical element in having our target audience find us. It is also one of the key elements in what we consider a highly effective sales strategy. It is highly effective at reaching target customers and forms a key part of our overall Inbound Sales Strategy.
Why Creating a Sales Strategy is Critical to Meeting Sales Goals
More importantly, we want each member of our sales team to follow a very specific action plan which we have developed as part of our sales strategy that leads to dramatically higher conversion rates at each stage of our sales funnel.
Mapping the Customer Journey is Critical
Prior to jumping right into using LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Hubspot's prospect tool, it is very important to have mapped out your customer's journey. Much of this sales process involves making educated guesses, especially for new start-ups. But for established companies, it should be very clear how a typical sales process goes. For instance, in my previous job, selling ERP software, the sales process involved +-13 distinct steps.
Past Sales Intelligence
Sales and marketing teams should look to past sales to uncover which sales best practices actually resulted in bottom line revenue. Sales strategies often change when new sales managers take the reins. Customer relationships wax and wane. Products and services evolve. Your sales pitch goes stale. Sales training gets short shrift. The sales pipeline gets lean. CRM platforms change. For all these reasons and more, it's always a good idea to see what can be learned from past sales cycles. It also is usually a good time to reexamine marketing strategies and to make adjustments as needed.
Sales Pipeline Should Reflect This Customer Journey
Your sales pipeline, as modeled in Hubspot, should reflect your customer's journey, even if they don't always follow it, which is not unusual. Your sales and marketing team, working hand in hand should be able to design content to support every stage of the sales process.
Ideal Account Based Marketing Tool Combination
For the sale of complex products and services, it pays to have conducted a SWOT analysis of your offering. During this process, it's a good time to map out the members of your ideal customer's typical buying team. It's also a great input for developing tailored sales training around your product for your sales team. This gives sales management a way to measure the effectiveness of both the training and of the sales rep.
Finding Decision Makers on LinkedIn
Once we knew how to connect Linkedin to hubspot, we put on our 'hunter' hat and started looking at our Hubspot Prospects using proven techniques for successful prospecting. What should you be looking for? People who match up with your Account Based Sales defined roles within the target companies.
Hubspot Prospects
What is the Hubspot prospect tool? It's a key part of how to use hubspot sales effectively.
Provides Many Useful Data Points to Exploit
The Hubspot tracking code tracks every visit to your website, and among many pieces of useful information, in many, but not all cases, it can identify which companies have visited your website. It also can tell you how many unique visitors a company has sent your way and how many pages they have visited.
Breaking Down the Hubspot Prospects List
The first thing you should notice is that the above view is the overall top level view. There's still much more information available if you drill down just a couple of levels.
In this case, you can see that you are presented with two buttons, one which takes you the prospects business page on LinkedIn, and the other which takes you to the prospects activity timeline.
What Have They Done So Far On Our Site
In this case, this prospect is well known to us, with thousands of contacts. We can see from their Hubspot Activity Record that they have consumed a lot of different pieces of marketing and sales content. In this case, we won't be making any cold calls. In fact, it is clear this prospect is already deep in our sales funnel. It may even be the case that we are considered a thought leader among their senior leadership team.
We Can Also Branch Directly to Their LinkedIn Business Page
I've now jumped directly to the prospects LinkedIn business page. From here, I can take the next step in starting to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to organize follow-up activity with any known contact or attempt to connect with contacts within the company with the right job title, who I believe will be a decision maker.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
If you use Hubspot and LinkedIn's sales navigator, these visitors are who you need to track in Linkedin Sales Navigator.
Prior to the implementation of the EU GDPR regulation, it would also tell you which pages they had visited, which could be very useful. It still provides many useful data points to facilitate sales discussions. No one who wants to be successful with these tools to ignore these data points. As a first step in my contact sequence, I always take a look at each contact's past activity and so should you.
Pro-Tip - Migrate All Company Visit Records to the Company Database
Here's the thing - the companies you see listed in the Hubspot prospect tool disappear after a while, usually around six months. If you're a business owner who runs Hubspot, and you want to make use of this prospect information, you need to copy the information over to the company database portion of Hubspot. Remember, it cost a small fortune to generate even a single website visit. If you don't know how much, be glad to show you how much Google is charging for a click...
Hubspot Companies
What does having the data in Hubspot Companies do for you? It helps you easily build up a record of the companies who have visited your website. It also shows you all the contacts you have in your contact database that are associated with that company, or conversely, that you don't have contacts associated with that company. Up to this point, there isn't really a lot you could have done with this information.
Create Tailored Prospect Views
What if I told you though, there was gold in them thar hills? Or, acres of diamonds. After many years of generating thousands of visits to our website, what we've found is that if you create a view that shows you the right information about company activity, particularly the creation date and last activity date, even if there are no contacts in your system from a conversion, you have a lot of information to work with. For instance, in many instances, Hubspot will automatically pull in the LinkedIN Company Profile page of the company.
Going From Target Market to Specific Buyer Personas
Keep in mind that your Inbound Marketing plan has, as a core deliverable, the development of a buyer persona. In fact, for complex sales processes, for instance, SAP consulting, you will have created a number of buyer personas, because many people are involved in making complex system acquisition decisions.
Content for All Decision Makers to Support Your Sales Process
You will have also designed content to address each of these buyer persona's questions and paint points, at the various stages of their buyer journey.
So how do you get from a visit to a contact, even when they didn't 'convert' on your site?
LinkedIn Sales Strategies
A effective sales strategy, as you might have guessed, is to follow them on LinkedIN and connect with them on LinkedIN. Here's where the strength of this approach shines.
Social Media Platform for Business People
LinkedIn is huge (600,000,000 users and rising rapidly) and you need to focus on connecting with the right people in the right industry. Even using Hubspot and LinkedIN Sales Navigator, with all of the incredible search capability it offers, you can still spend an enormous amount of time looking for your ideal buyer if you're not following the right sales strategies. Because of the precise targeting it allows, it is one of the most impactful sales strategy approaches you can follow. I know it is one of my top go-to sales strategies.
How to Prospect Using LinkedIn
Following the approach I've laid out in this blog, and in the associated guide, "How to Combine Hubspot’s Prospects Tool with a LinkedIn Sales Strategy", you will have an executable prospecting strategy that flips this on its head.
Bridging Their Problem to Your Value Proposition
You see, potential customers have revealed themselves when they visited your site. Many more of them will visit than convert, but just about every one of them seems to be trying to solve a problem.
Start Out Focused and Improve Sales Team Productivity
So instead of starting out wide on LinkedIN, you start out narrow and focused with this data in hand. Your value proposition is to be a problem solver, their problem solver! This is how you get your niche to reveal its real self to you.
Step-by-Step Prospecting Process Using Hubspot and LinkedIn and Messaging Sequence
In order to demonstrate how to use linkedin for sales leads, I've laid out the step-by-step process of setting this up, including exactly which views to create where and what messaging sequence to follow. Why should you listen to me?
A Proven Marketing Strategy
How about the fact I've been able to identify 31.107 companies, most of whom are SAP Customers, our primary target? Or that this has helped me build up a LinkedIN network of 7,493 1st level connections? And of all these, many many sales and opportunities have flowed...
Beats Cold Calling!
I define cold calling fairly simply. Calling someone out of the blue with which you have no connection that you really don't know much about. With this system, because it is designed, (whether you realized it not), as a content driven sales funnel, means at least you know the name of a company and that someone there needs your help as a problem solver.
Never Cold Message On LinkedIn Again
If you're like me, a long term LinkedIn user, you are probably getting hit with many unsolicited cold messages a day. Or connection invitations from complete strangers. I recommend you be very selective in which ones you accept or respond to. Mostly, they are diving straight into what can only be described as cold pitch.
Contextually Relevant Content for Massive Lead Generation Success
Though it does take a bit of work, you should definitely be leading with content on LinkedIn. This takes work, and perhaps it is worth it to hire help for this. But the best responses I've gotten are from what I personally produce. Others have a different approach, and go for frequent, massive Facebook style posting. Those are ok, for low to mid-ticket items. They won't get you there for the higher end sales many of my clients are pursuing.
Carefully Cultivate the Right Connections
Most Sales Professionals only need a small number of connections to make quota and ultimately get into the President's Club. By using the insight provided by the Hubspot Prospects Tool, the fact that it provides you the company LinkedIn Business page, you have a map of where to start your LinkedIn engagement. This have proven to be the best way to prospect on LinkedIn for us and many of our clients.
That's why you need to put your Hubspot prospects tool to work.
This is just one possible Sales Strategy based on Hubspot's Prospect tool which I've found useful. In the future, sales process design will incorporate more sources of social prospect information in support of good Inbound Sales Strategy. Do you have other approaches you have used as part of a successful Inbound Sales Strategy? Would love to hear about them and see what sort of results you're getting with them.
More reading:
Get What Is Inbound Sales In A Unified Sales And Marketing System [Ebook]
What's Your E-Mail Marketing Strategy?[Tutorial]
10 Critical Chain Project Manager Tips
How To Use Google Keyword Planner Tool Tutorial
8 Secrets to SAP Enabled Spend Performance Management
Pillar Content Strategy Guide
