Articles

Listen to the podcast here.

In the second of a two-part June 2017 SalesProChat interview, LinkedIn expert and best selling author Shanna Landolt takes us through the paid-for options from LinkedIn and when each could be applicable in your career. Shanna will provide tips on how to complement LinkedIn with the use of other social selling tools such as Twitter and Facebook.

Listen to hear Shanna's thoughts on: 

• How can sales people use tools like those mentioned today to come across as authentic and an industry expert?
• Are there services out there that can help executives with optimizing and managing their personal brand on LinkedIn?
• What other paid services does LinkedIn offer? Can you advertise through LinkedIn? If so, how targeted can you get and does it have a good ROI?

The free version of LinkedIn provides sales professionals with essential ways to build their professional identity online, stay in touch with colleagues, clients and leads, and discover professional opportunities.

LinkedIn also offers premium services including LinkedIn Sales Navigator, one of the most popular social selling tools on the market. What extra benefits can a salesperson get from a LinkedIn subscription? What are other the options? What’s the ROI? Should sales pros use different accounts at different stages of their careers?

Shanna Landolt has worked in Executive Search for almost 20 years. She has been featured on NBC, FOX and City TV and CTV and she has been cited by CBS and ABC as a LinkedIn Expert and Job Search / Career Expert. Shanna is also the #1 international best-selling author of the book LinkedIn Secrets From a Top Executive Recruiter.

Bill Banham: Shanna Landolt, welcome to the June 2017 SalesProChat Podcast.

Shanna Landolt: Bill, thanks so much for having me here. I'm excited because I love talking about LinkedIn.

Bill Banham: Beyond LinkedIn, what other content and sexual selling tools do you use and why?

Shanna Landolt: I have a number of different businesses so for my recruitment business I use video a lot. That could be just me filming a video on Zoom and sending a video conversation to someone which is pretty unique, still. I also use Facebook and I use Facebook for LinkedIn profiles that I do for people.

The reason I use Facebook is LinkedIn does not let you advertise a service for LinkedIn. They only advertise their own services so I have to go to another platform so for that I use Facebook. I also own an online store. It's a baby clothing store called Kara Baby Creations and it's here in Canada. So for that I use Facebook. But then I also make sure that I'm on social media a lot. I use Hootsuite to then schedule all of my posts so I'm not, while I post four times a day, that that material gets curated and sent out in an automated fashion.


Bill Banham: For those of you who have never heard of Hootsuites, check it out. It is awesome, you can do so many things with that tool and you can set things up and put your feet up and have a cup of tea. Safe in the knowledge that your distributing awesome content across lots of different channels.

Shanna Landolt: The other tool that I used, I used to use Infusionsoft but now I use I believe it's called Constant Contact so that when people engage with me oftentimes their first engagement is they're signing up on a lead page to get some free information or a free report and then that free report is followed by other valuable information and essentially a sales file so that by the time I actually call them, they know me. So for sales professionals, if you don't have any kind of funnel, talk to your sales director and see if that's possible for you because it will make your selling so much easier.


Bill Banham: Now, let us go offline entirely for a moment and talk about activities which perhaps more traditional. I'd love to hear from you, what other channels or events, phone calls, emails, and so forth. What still works and how should a sales professional tie in use of sales navigator into some of those other channels?

Shanna Landolt: Well first of all, events are fantastic. Some of the best advice that you're going to get about how to network at an event, I'm gonna give a plug here to Mike Koenigs, it's Mike and then K, o, e, n, i, g, s. He has a book called Money Phone and he talks about the fact that he never gives out business cards at events but when he meets people, he will take his phone and he'll say, "Do you mind if I take a picture with you?" Or sorry, he'll take a little video with the person and say, "I'm here with such and such. We're at this conference and this is a reminder to follow up about this." Then he then sends that video to the prospect and says, "Just a reminder, here's where we met and I said I would follow up with you about this." And then he follows up. I absolutely would pick up that book if you're in sales. It's called again, Money Phone by Mike Koenigs. 

Phone calls are hard because people are not reachable by phone very much. I mean, text and message these days are so much better than phone calls. Now what I use and increasingly I'm seeing people use this because it's so much less of an interruption, is to send a link. Now I use a program called Time Trade but people can and there's another one that people have used that I've seen called [inaudible 00:04:04] but I could send a message to someone saying I'd love to talk to you specifically about this, here's a link to my calendar. Do you mind scheduling a time that works for you? Then you're not going in that back and forth of leaving 10 different messages but the person can automatically sign up in your calendar.

Emails do work, they do. But there's just so much clutter. There's a tool that I'm going to recommend for people. If you find that you're getting way too much email and you can't keep things straight, check out a program called SaneBox. It's S, a, n, e, B, o, x and what it does is it filters your email into an inbox, sane later, which it identifies emails that are important but less important, and then sane news so all of your newsletters automatically go into that. If something is in the wrong box, you just drag it and the program completely remembers that for the future. You can send a message, you can put it into sane tomorrow so it will resend the message to you or sane next week or at a specific date. It's really, really fantastic for keeping yourself organized. 

Then if you're overwhelmed with the number of newsletters that you're receiving, check out a free program called unroll.me. So un roll, r, o, l, l.me and you can unsubscribe from your newsletters and pick and choose which ones you want to unsubscribe from all at once and you could also bulk message. So that a bunch of ones that are less important but what you still want will go into one email. It's pretty cool.


Bill Banham: Now let's talk about how sales pros can use LinkedIn to support their efforts to come across as being authentic and being an industry expert. We've really established I think today, that LinkedIn is absolutely essential to most selling practices.

Shanna Landolt: Sure.


Bill Banham: But we were also talking in the context of some of the tools you mentioned before. Top tips to come across as being that thought leader, being authentic, being the person that people want to go through.

Shanna Landolt: Sure. [crosstalk 00:06:32]. First of all, social media is meant to be personal. When you're writing your LinkedIn profile, do it in first person, not in third person. Don't have really thick paragraphs, instead use headings and what I do is I put those headings in bold. Not in bold, sorry you can't do that, put them in caps. Then put two or three sentences under each heading. Have your profile be a combination of personal and professional. So professional, you can refer to the products, the clients that you work with, but then you can also include a little subject like things I'm passionate about and put some things that really create you as an individual. 

You want to remember what you're doing on LinkedIn is your expressing your personal brand and not posting your resume. This is your one page website, personally for you to express your personal brand and you are more than just the company that you work for. The company that you work for, you probably won't be working for them in three to five years. Or maybe even next year, people change jobs all the time. Just make sure that your profile has a combination of as a human being what matters to you and what you do professionally.


Bill Banham: Are there services out there that can help executives with optimizing and managing their personal brand on LinkedIn.

Shanna Landolt: This is where I'm going to give you a shameless plug, they can reach out to me at my website. People can also go and look on websites like upwork. What you really need to make sure of, though, is that the person understands business. That they're able to grasp what's important about your business and they actually understand how the LinkedIn relevant algorithm works and which areas of LinkedIn matter from an SEO or search engine optimization perspective. If the LinkedIn writer is more of a resume writer, than they are a LinkedIn expert. Then you won't accomplish what you want.


Bill Banham: Okay so from the sounds of the conversations, there are certainly some things I could improve on my profile so imagine you and I are having a chat. What would be the two or three intelligent questions that I should ask of you to make sure that you know your stuff.

Shanna Landolt: Ask which areas of LinkedIn matter most when it comes to search engine optimization. You can ask if the person who's writing your profile understands how to write your profile so that you move up higher in a Google search. When I work with, I work with a number of companies, and I get their sales professionals LinkedIn profiles to turn up on page one and two of a Google search for a company.


Bill Banham: We're coming towards the end of this particular show but we've just got a couple more questions before we wrap things up. Can you offer some other paid services available from LinkedIn? For example, can you advertise through LinkedIn? If so, how targeted can you get and does it have a good aura? Why?

Shanna Landolt: It really depends on what it is that you're advertising. I mean, I think some of the best advertising on LinkedIn is less for companies advertising their services but mostly companies advertising why work at my company. That can get really targeted. When you're looking at paid advertising, though, online, LinkedIn is a lot more expensive than other options. Check out other things like Facebook and Google add words for the most part. Now, can you get targeted? Yes, you can get very targeted but I don't know about you, Bill, but I don't even look at those ads that are on the side of LinkedIn anymore. [crosstalk 00:10:27].


Bill Banham: I used too. Yeah.

Shanna Landolt: I used too, I used too. But I don't now. I'm on LinkedIn everyday. It has been like more than a year that I've even clicked on one of those ads whereas on other platforms like YouTube or Google or Facebook, I click on those ads all the time. They're so compelling. The difference is I think you really, the ad space is so small, it doesn't incorporate video. I can't incorporate multiple images. I'm not a fan of advertising on LinkedIn but there are certain markets where, of course, it makes sense. You just got to look at are you getting clients from it?


Bill Banham: And there you go. That's the bottom line metric. Okay. So we are almost at the end, I'm afraid. I do enjoy our chats, Shanna. We should do this more often.

Shanna Landolt: Me too, Bill.


Bill Banham: Before we do wrap up, though, how can our listeners learn more about you?

Shanna Landolt: People can go to my website.

Bill Banham: Well, Shanna thank you very much for being the guest on Sales Pro Chat today.

Shanna Landolt: Oh, absolutely, and one more thing for your listeners is if they go to my website and they go to the LinkedIn profile page, they can download a free cheat sheet that will show them what's important on their LinkedIn profile. So for all the Do-it-yourselfers, you can go there, download that for free. You just put in your email address and then you can look at your LinkedIn profile, compare it to my notes on what makes a really good LinkedIn profile and start getting some of those in.

Bill Banham: Extra value, listeners! That just leaves me to say, thank you very much for listening to the June Sales Pro Chat. Until next time, happy selling.