Here are a few more questions from my recent appeal on LinkedIn. If you have a sales or sales management question, you can send it to me via LinkedIn  https://www.linkedin.com/in/digkatedunn/ or send it to me via Email at [email protected] or use the contact form at the bottom of this post. 

Question 1: I get many messages from sales reps on LinkedIn. I usually delete them. Is using LinkedIn necessary for salespeople today?

Using LinkedIn correctly is necessary. Using it incorrectly, like those reps reaching out to you, is not.

According to LinkedIn Research, 82% of B2B buyers review a rep’s LinkedIn profile before replying to outreach efforts. If your reps are calling on senior B2B buyers, those buyers are looking at their profiles. They will not waste their time if they don’t see a reason to engage.

An IDC Study, Social Buying Meets Social Selling: How Trusted Networks Improve the Purchase, notes that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level executives use social media when making purchase decisions. We Are Social’s Digital 2020 October Global Statshot report found that 30.7% of B2B decision-makers saw social media as “very influential” when researching products and services.

Engage Potential Buyers Early in Their Buying Journey

Key B2B stakeholders seek ideas that can help improve their organizations. They need perspective to help them identify those ideas.  When professional sellers post on relevant topics and make their audience think about new ways to tackle tough objectives, they plant seeds that grow into leads and qualified opportunities.

When B2B stakeholders determine what they want to buy, advertising helps them locate potential suppliers, and price plays an important role in decision-making. If that’s your model, I recommend considering an inside sales rep or team to handle inbound leads and investing in more marketing and advertising to drive inquiries.

If you have a direct rep or team and expect them to find new business and grow existing accounts, they will need to engage stakeholders before they know what they want, help them define their problems, and advise them on ways your products and services can help them improve their organization. Besides phone and email, LinkedIn offers reps another channel for outreach, but its most crucial role is positioning your company and reps as trusted advisors.

Demonstrate Expertise and Insight

Rep profiles must demonstrate expertise and insight to draw the attention of B2B Buyers early in their buying journey.  Too many reps in the printing industry don’t give decision-makers and influencers a reason to want to talk to them. I’ve seen profiles with no information beyond the rep who has worked at the company for 20 years. No insight or passion for solving business problems is evident. Half of the profiles I see don’t even explain what the company does beyond print. Titles and contact information are incorrect; I’ve even seen a few where the company name wasn’t correct. Would you want to entrust your business problem to someone with so little attention to detail that they can’t get their company name right?

Reps should post content that demonstrates they have insight that can help organizations accomplish their strategic objectives, whether that is creating awareness (signs, vehicle wraps), generating leads (direct mail and omnichannel campaigns), keeping employees engaged, motivated, and safe (environmental graphics, safety signage), helping them sell (brochures, promotional products, POS, event graphics, pocket folders) and delivering a great customer experience (signage, graphics, marketing collateral, direct mail, wayfinding signage and more). Everything posted on LinkedIn is searchable, meaning more prospects can find your company.

Demonstrating insight is more than sharing an article or posting a picture of a recent job. It helps people understand why others thought investing in that application was essential and its impact on that organization. I like to ask myself – will this post make someone think? Will it help someone fix a chronic problem or see an opportunity or risk they didn’t know existed?

Improve Sales Productivity

I was working with a rep yesterday, and he mentioned he had been trying to break into an account for six years. While I applaud his persistence, sales costs increase with each contact, and his owner still hasn’t realized any revenue.

Direct salespeople are costly. Prospecting is a critical part of the job but is inherently unproductive. Getting a prospect to talk to you takes between 5 and 21 touches. That’s a lot of emails, phone calls, and stop-ins. Reps aren’t particularly good at follow-up, with long gaps between touches. Maintaining mindshare as the customer’s needs evolve is critical.  LinkedIn is a great way to remind prospects of the power of print to solve business challenges. 1000s can see one great post if the rep has built their network. Two or three weekly posts are more efficient than using 1000s of direct touches by phone or email to maintain awareness of what your company does and how it can help.

Question 2: What activity expectations should I set with my new rep?

I like to build a little incentive plan based on activities to give the rep a way to earn commission before they are fully ramped up. I also like to include sales activities in the early weeks of onboarding. Most companies have the rep spend most of her early days learning about print, what your equipment does, and how your company functions. After a couple of weeks of spending time with customer service reps, working on the production floor, and going on sales calls with the owner or another rep, the company pronounces them trained, and they are left to figure the rest out.

During the Onboarding Process

I like to include sales activities along with production and process training. The first week is a good week for researching target markets. The second week is a great time to build prospect lists of target accounts and research their assigned accounts. By the third week, they should be working on questions to ask customers when they engage, and by the fourth week, they should create phone and email talking points. The owner or sales manager should work with the rep to validate their understanding and to role-play the rep’s messaging.

If the rep will have existing accounts, another great activity during the initial weeks of onboarding is creating a white space analysis of accounts, which captures what they currently and could be buying.

The next consideration when coming up with activity targets is the role characteristics. If the rep writes up their orders, performs customer service duties, and makes deliveries, they will have less time for prospecting. They will need to incorporate prospecting activities into these tasks to be productive. Reps need to learn how to extract critical information that can help them sell additional products and services while they are in conversations where they and the customer are focused on a current project.

Lastly, before finalizing your new rep’s activity targets, take the time to understand the results of your current lead generation tactics. Know how many web leads, referrals, and marketing campaign responses will be given to the new rep.

Activity Categories

The activity categories change depending on the characteristics of the role. Here are my favorites:

·      Prospect initiations – a first touch to new prospects: These can come from networking, referrals, inbound leads, or self-generated prospecting activities. This number is usually between 3 and 15, depending on the rep’s other responsibilities. I tell reps the faucet can be turned down based on workload but never turned off.

·      Proactive Outreach to Clients – a first-time touch to an existing client designed to initiate a new sales cycle. These can be to existing contacts, referred new contacts, or self-generated to expand sales to the account.

·      Conversations – the number of times the rep talked to or received an answer to an email. If the customer is talking, the door has been cracked open, even if the prospect is not ready now. This will be low in the first weeks as the rep works out the kinks in their messaging. It should start with a goal of 5 and can increase as the rep improves their messaging and confidence to as high as 12 – 15, especially if the rep is using networking events as a tactic.

·      LinkedIn Connections – if the rep is talking to customers and prospects, they should be adding LinkedIn connections. This number is closely tied to the conversations and will decrease over time as the rep connects to his customers and target prospects.

·      Weekly LinkedIn Posts – LinkedIn is a great way to maintain mindshare with prospects needing more time to be ready when first contacted.  This should be a minimum of two and can be as high as 4 or 5. Once the rep is confident using LinkedIn, I like measuring LinkedIn engagements because it tells you the rep is making relevant posts. Still, as the rep builds their network, engagements will be low in the beginning.

·      First-Time Meetings with prospects or clients – A meeting is a pre-scheduled virtual or in-person meeting with a calendar invite to sell something. If the rep is focused on new business, this number can initially be as low as two and should grow to 5 to 7.

·      New Qualified Opportunities Identified – the customer need must be defined. The customer must want to pursue a resolution and have acknowledged that the rep and the company have the expertise to help them. I don’t count every request for a quote. Still, I count new opportunities identified with prospects and significant opportunities for direct mail or omnichannel programs, portal solutions, or large one-time projects like graphics or sign projects. The number and value of opportunities vary widely depending on your business and whether the rep handles existing accounts. Count the number first and then set a goal for the revenue after you have a history.

·      Prospecting Cadence Completions – after eight weeks, start tracking prospecting cadence completions. Because it takes an average of 8 touches to engage a prospect, reps must use multiple channels and contact prospects over a compressed period to drive engagement. I use an eight-week cadence which works for most reps whether or not they have a CRM system to help them keep track. The number will align with the number of first-time touches and tell you if the rep is conducting the cadence as planned. It may not be one-to-one alignment because some prospects will engage and not be ready, others will be disqualified, and some will turn into opportunities before reaching the 8thtouch. The combination of those three should total the number of prospect initiations.

·      Sales – once the rep is through your onboarding process, which varies by the role characteristics but can be anywhere from 12 weeks to a year, depending on what they are selling and to whom. Reps should have sales goals that are tracked. Sales goals include overall sales, account growth, or new business sales. If you give reps a goal early in the process, it should be low and ramp up through the first year.