Improve Your Social Selling: Lessons from Boulder Startup Week

5 minute read

Upland Admin

I attended several marketing presentations at this year’s Boulder Startup Week, but as a digital marketer who loves social media, one especially stood out. The presentation was What Wikipedia Won’t Tell You About Social Selling: Sell Your Brand on LinkedIn, put on by our local friends Rachel Lataitis, Jessica Hayt, Sara Kingsley, and Arthur Velasquez at LogRhythm. I was excited to hear about the ways social selling can be an opportunity for sales and marketing to unite and target their audience on social media in new ways.

I waited all week for this presentation, and when the day arrived, I snuck in the back just as the session was starting. I pulled out my notebook in case I wanted to jot down a few ideas. Next thing I knew, I had more than three pages of handwritten notes. With so many important takeaways, I knew I couldn’t keep all this valuable information to myself. So when I got back to the office, I got straight to work on this blog. Enjoy!

Why Are You on LinkedIn?

Keeping up with thought leaders, former coworkers, and college classmates are all valid reasons, but building a personal brand to help drive revenue for your organization through social selling should be among your top reasons for being active on LinkedIn.

90% of top performing salespeople use social media as part of their sales strategy.

By taking the time to build and amplify your online reputation, you can seriously step up your performance at work.

When building your personal brand on LinkedIn, think about what you want to be known for and what kind of impact you want to have on others.

People with strong personal brands:

  • Embrace technology
  • Share new ideas
  • Exhibit business acumen
  • Communicate effectively
  • Leverage data
  • Seek collaboration

Already have a reliable personal brand and want to step up your game to become a thought leader in your industry? Successful thought leaders share relevant and current content along with industry insight in digestible ways from trusted sources.

Tips for Social Selling on LinkedIn

Throughout the presentation, the LogRhythm employees gave insight into their company’s journey to implement a social selling program. According to them, a large part of their success came from developing a program based on a simple 30-minute social selling routine.

The social selling routine has four parts, represented by the acronym FEED, which stands for Find, Educate, Engage, and Develop. Outside of having their sales team follow the FEED routine, they gave other tips on how to improve your LinkedIn presence:

Give Your Profile Page Love

On your profile page, your about section should be so much more than a repeat of your resume. It should be your value proposition. Give people a reason to want to work with you and trust you. You can do this by telling a story about why you chose to work in your field, what motivates you, or what differentiates you from the rest.

Post with Personality

The post you share needs to be more than a link with the caption, “check this out.” To be honest, not many of your followers will “check out” that link unless you give them a reason to. Your caption should be authentic, share insight, and tell a story. If you do that already and are still searching for ways to get more engagement, consider starting a conversation by asking a question or tagging relevant people and companies.

Another pro tip I learned was to write your posts like you would an email with double spaces between short paragraphs. This makes it easier for your audience to read—and you should do everything in your power to make every experience as easy as possible.

Focus on the Bigger Picture

One major takeaway was that you have to be involved on both sides of the conversation online. You can’t just push your content without actively engaging with others. You can’t expect others to interact with you if you don’t also interact with them. So after you share a post, take a moment to scroll through your feed to like and comment on other people’s. Another critical point is that when someone comments on your post, comment back. Don’t leave them hanging. That’s just rude.

Sales and Marketing Unite To Conquer LinkedIn

As marketers, it’s important for us to be active and build relationships on social. But it’s even more important for us to enable our friends in sales to do the same.

Social media is where a lot of the content we marketers create is shared—and it’s a significant part of the customer journey. By aligning revenue teams internally on the power of social media, we can improve the customer journey and increase revenue for our organizations.

Now, I’ll leave you with Arthur Velasquez from LogRhythm’s final words from the presentation, “what are three actions you will take using what you’ve learned today?”

I’d love to see how you’re conquering LinkedIn, so connect with me!

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