LinkedIn Almighty - for the B2B Industry

31/03/16

(by Hillel Porath - Director of Marketing - IsraelExporter.com & Skylimit)

For many marketing/biz dev/sales professionals LinkedIn falls under the category of 'respect & suspect'

They know it's important, they see everyone they know on it....but they have no clue how to actually use it for their own business/company, how to integrate LinkedIn into their marketing and business development efforts.

I often hear things like (usually on weekly basis!):

"We understand social media but LinkedIn is a mystery"
"We tried it for a while but nothing really happened"
"I created an account several years ago but I have no clue what to do with it"
"It doesn't work!"
"LinkedIn is for job seekers"

For over 7 years we've been using LinkedIn for Israeli companies.

Over the years we have helped many many companies establish powerful connections that resulted

in sales of millions of dollars.

When we first got started using LinkedIn, we showed up every once in a while, posted a few articles

here and there, connected.... but we weren't exactly sure how it could help our clients.

When did things change?

Around five years ago we began focusing our efforts on improving our research skills.

This means:

Improving our B2B channel partner research, improving our competitive research, improving our research capabilities in multiple languages and improving our ability to provide value for any industry (from medical devices to agriculture to security doors)

Inbound marketing methods can bring in a boat load of leads, but the tragedy is that for many manufacturers and companies a great deal of those leads are not relevant.

We find that companies prefer speaking to 15-20 relevant, pre-researched, accurate contacts every month.

It's very simple: accuracy in research = leads to more sales!

Where does LinkedIn come in?

At the end of the research process.

In a nutshell the process should look like this:

Stage 1: B2B Research (off LinkedIn): finding the right potential companies/partners/distributors etc..
Stage 2: LinkedIn: search for the right contact and getting on their 'radar screen'
Stage 3: Reaching out and following up and following up....

LinkedIn is actually a very simple tool - the main part here is accuracy in the research process, and how to do it is a whole other story....

LinkedIn Almighty!

Contact us to learn about our "LinkedIn & How To Generate Leads" Seminar - contact@israelexporter.com