Posts Tagged ‘LinkedIn’

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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LinkedIn Profile Organizer for Premium Users Delivers CRM Functionality

LinkedIn seems to be moving into the realm of a true CRM.  If you are a premium user, you may have noticed a few changes being released on your profile earlier this month. Profile Organizer allows you to build and organize lists of contacts based on whatever criteria you would like.  I am in the process of using this to organize the connections I meet from conferences and speaking events.  But, there’s also an opportunity to apply this new feature to prospecting and business development efforts. So far, I like what I see.  Profile Organizer has been designed to be integrated into a user’s normal work flow patterns with one to two clicks in mind to complete a task. Ease of use takes down barriers to adoption and makes the feature easy for networkers to adopt into their LinkedIn patterns. As I stumble across or specifically search for profiles, I now have the ability to save (or bookmark) those profiles on the spot. This is particularly helpful when building prospect lists, or simply researching thought leaders in your industry whom you might want to connect with at some point in the future. You can even capture the full offline contact information and store it in LinkedIn, along with notes for each profile you save.  The ability to capture this data begins to position LinkedIn as more than just a network, but as a much more robust CRM-like tool for full relationship management. Downfalls What’s missing is built-in fields that allow users to add other social networking profiles like Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media outposts.  Batchbook Blue, also a subscription-based service, and one which I use, falls around the same price point and does contain a feature that delivers this type of functionality via a “Super Tag” system. Why [...]

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Working Out with Pumpkins to Help the Make A Wish Foundation

It’s getting close to Halloween and the smell of pumpkins is in the air.  OK, not really.  But you know we will be seeing a ton of these veggies floating around through Thanksgiving.  There’s even the Circleville Ohio Pumpkin Show happening later this month.  The family event is a great time with lots of good eats and totally worth checking out if you live in and around Ohio. But Jason Yun is doing something really creative.  He’s a self-employed personal trainer who has come up with a fun idea to help raise money for the Make A Wish Foundation.  The event is called Freaky Fat Loss Pumpkin Charity Workout and will take place on October 17th, the day before the Columbus Marathon and BETA launch of TweetMyTime. The hook is pretty interesting – bring your own pumpkin and Jason will take the group through what looks like a pretty intense workout using only the vegetable as weight.  Seems to me like a pretty cool idea for a fun and relevant workout during Halloween season.  Jason has committed that ALL of the proceeds generated from the workout go directly to the Make a Wish Foundation.  I’m down with Jason using his talents to help a worthy cause, and the fact that he’s smart enough to see the value in using social media to help spread the word and get people there.  Jason even approached me on LinkedIn (the right way) to ask for my help. Here’s a short clip of some of the exercises that Jason will be doing during the event. So what say you?  Are you in for a fun workout and helping Jason raise some money for the Make a Wish Foundation? And if you’re not the “working out with a pumpkin type,” will you help get the [...]

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