Relationship Selling on LinkedIn
Santiago, from Tangoo Marketing, held a webinar last month about relationship selling on LinkedIn. Relationship selling, as the name implies, is a sales technique based on using relationships to close sales. In the webinar, he identified common challenges that many businesses face, such as how they can increase sales and generate business, the effectiveness of relationship selling, and using LinkedIn as a sales tool.
“I Need More Business”
What is your business doing right now to increase sales? Have you been outsourcing lead generation to third parties? Buying lead lists? Running email campaigns or cold calling? You have most likely tried at least one or all of the above either currently or in the past. However, there are major pitfalls to the above strategies:
Outsourcing Lead Generation - expensive and ineffective
Buying Leads - poor quality
Email Campaigns - poor conversation rates
Cold Calling - bad, just bad
So how do I get more business? - Referrals
Many businesses in various industries rely on referrals to generate business. And they should! Referrals are a great source to generate business. Referrals are easier to work, 4x more valuable than non-referral leads, 36x more valuable than a cold call and word of mouth/referrals are the primary factor behind 20-50% of purchasing decisions.
Oftentimes, successful referrals feel like you just won the lottery or you made a wish and it finally came true. Instead of viewing referrals as a rare opportunity that you were lucky to have, consider referrals in a systematic and scientific way. What if you could, to a certain extent, control how much business came in every month from referral sources? It is possible but first considers reviewing your current referral system:
How are your referral partnerships working for you right now?
How many referral partner relationships are you fostering?
Are you actively building a referral partner roster?
In order to generate more business and engage in relationship selling, you need more referral partners.
How to Build Referral Partnerships
In order to build beneficial referral partnerships, you need to go deeper into the referral conversations and do more to nurture these relationships by creating an exchange of value. However, there is a limitation. Building any relationship takes valuable time that you may not have. So what should you do? What if I told you that building and nurturing relationships at scale IS possible and that those relationships will generate continuous referrals and sales for you?
Level Up Mortgages
Take Level Up Mortgages for example. Level Up Mortgages is built off of trust through education and relationship building and relationship selling, specifically on LinkedIn. And as a result, we’ve generated:
6 active referral partners generated through LinkedIn → 25 closed deals
Built a mailing list of 450 realtors
10 applications/month → 2-5 closed deals/month
$11,000,000 in gross sales and $70,000 in gross commissions, all in 9 months!
Level Up illustrates the potential of generating active referral partnerships and having a roster of referral partnerships, through LinkedIn.
Why Use LinkedIn?
You may have doubts about LinkedIn, because of the difficult interface, or too much spam in your inbox, but LinkedIn is a great tool for sales for many reasons.
Multiple points of entry into organizations
Decision-makers are on LinkedIn
Easy to identify mutual interests on their profile to start conversations and build trust
Customers may also on LinkedIn
Common connections to leverage
How does Relationship Selling on LinkedIn Work?
Relationship selling is not done overnight. It's important to invest the time to see desired results. There is a tried and true process of first building a foundation, then activating new partnerships before converting leads to clients.
The process seems like a lot of work, but what if you could build referral relationships and sell while you sleep? It’s an automated system that has worked for Tangoo, Level Up Mortgages, and many other clients.
Check out the full webinar to learn more about how to successfully utilize LinkedIn and sell on one of the biggest platforms in the world.
How does relationship selling fit into your business?
A systemized approach to relationship selling will help you take your business to the next level.