Posts Tagged ‘Business Development’

Keith Lampe on Using LinkedIn to Market Background Screening Services

My friend, Keith Lampe, works for OPENOnline in Columbus Ohio.  He’s part of the team who is responsible building relationships with potential customers. (Disclosure: OPENOnline was a client of Social Business Strategies at one time.) When I met Keith a little over a year ago, he hadn’t yet signed up for LinkedIn.  Since that time, he’s been using LinkedIn as a powerful tool to develop business for his company.  I had the chance to catch up with Keith yesterday and get an update on how he has evolved his daily routine to leverage this tool. Serendipity in Social Networking I once had a boss named Ken Galloway who taught me a lot about business and the art of selling.  One day, around the holiday season, I walked into Ken’s office to find him crunching away on his PC. When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, “scrubbing my database clean from all the people I can’t remember anymore.”  Ken later told me that he went through this process at the end of every year so that he could chop out the people who he had met in business, but over time had become meaningless names in his Outlook database.  It was evident that in doing this, Ken may have been missing valuable opportunities for potentially significant relationships. Fast forward a few years to the rise of social networks like LinkedIn, and the dawn of internet-based data portability.  Keith’s story highlights something I think is very important:  we business folk can benefit from reconnecting with our past relationships and reigniting conversations.  Social web tools create an environment where users update their own information (as it changes), giving us the power to stay connected over time even when people move on to their next opportunity.  With the economy in recovery [...]

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How To Use LinkedIn Company Profiles in Business Development

About two years ago when I made the choice to really focus on LinkedIn as a main tool, my average conversion rate from leads to closed deals jumped from about 9 percent, using traditional methods like cold calling, email, letters and networking events.  I’ve seen an average upwards of 27 percent in less than six months, using tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs. The increase wasn’t a result of having better services, products or even pricing.  What I learned is that by using social web tools, I was actually spending my time and effort on what really produced results, and not on some of the mundane old-school tasks mentioned above.  I’d like to teach you some of what I learned over a few years of experimenting and practice. Prospecting Through Company Profiles on LinkedIn One of the very BEST features that LinkedIn provides to business development and sales professionals can be found in the free company profiles.  These profiles are still technically in BETA.  My hunch is that they will come out of the BETA phase as soon as LinkedIn decides how they would like to charge for an upgraded feature set associated with representing companies on the network. But today, they’re still free for all businesses to create and maintain.  There’s been some recent problems with smaller and mid-sized businesses sometimes having the same company profile name but, all in all, the information provided on these profiles rivals more well-known business sites like Google Finance or even Hoovers. Here are a few tips and tricks you can begin using while prospecting for new clients, business partners or even digging up research on your existing clients. Find Contacts by Searching Companies I’m always surprised by how many people aren’t aware how individual profiles are populated on a company page.  [...]

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