Tip #2 The Digital Referral — 5 Ways to Generate Business on LinkedIn:

Tip #2 The Digital Referral — 5 Ways to Generate Business on LinkedIn:

Hi there, it’s Chris Hamilton here with Sales Tip A Day, www.salestipaday.com. Today I’m going into tip number 2 of the 5 ways to generate business on LinkedIn and this is called the Digital Referral. It’s a course that I actually teach but here is a scaled down version of this that should be able to help you out. First of all, it’s not who you know, it’s who you know and who they are connected to on LinkedIn that is going to create the greatest opportunities for you. What do I mean? In this case I went on to LinkedIn and I searched on VP sales or vice president sales on my first level connections and I came up, in Calgary, where I live, and I came up with 10 people that had that title.

Now, when I had second level connections in, it basically went from 10 to 206 which is a 20 fold increase. Think about this for a second, is that I can go after these 10 people that I know of I’m selling into vice presidents of sales but if I’m selling into a wider audience, the best way to do is to leverage referrals into that second level to get access to almost 20 times more potential opportunities. How do you do this? Well, in this case when you click on or when you look at someone’s profile on the search results on LinkedIn, just below their names it shows you if you have any shared connections with their second level contact. If their second level contact is someone who is connected to somebody that you know but they are not directly connected to you. In this case the first three results that I think is the best way to get in the door into this person.

Now, if you don’t know any of these people, then what you can do is down below that you can click and see all the shared results you have if you have more than three and it brings it up into a page on LinkedIn where you can scroll through and find different people and see if there is a better way that you might be able to get in or someone who you know a lot better that will make that introduction for you. Now, once you do that, you find that person, what you do is you reach out to them and when you reach out to them what you do is I send it in an email. I don’t send through LinkedIn and I ask for help. The first line I have when I’m sending it out to someone that I know that’s introduce me to that second level connection, I put in, can you help me out? Then I put, hello, whatever their name is, hope all is well. I was hoping you could help me out. I’m taking a new solution to different companies right now, I was hoping you could help me out by making an introduction to this person at this company.

My solution helps companies like this by doing whatever this benefit is. Do you know this person well enough to introduce me? When I say person you just put their name in there, obviously, if so here is an intro you can use. What I have done is I have created an introduction email that this person can take, copy, paste, and send out to their connection. The reason I do that is because that creates a path of least resistance. They don’t have to think about what they are going to write. What they are going to do, anything like that. You have done it right down for them and said, “Here is what it is, please use this, and feel free to send this out to this person.” Your opportunities are going to be greater because you don’t have to have someone figuring out what to say for you and how to do that for you.

Why do you want to do this? First of all, LinkedIn says that 76% of B to B buyers prefer to work with people that have come through a recommendation. Now, the Word of Mouth Marketing Association says only 11% of sales people have a formalized referral process. In the same report they say that 65% of sales are either done through referrals or word of mouth. Think about this for a sec, 89% of sales people are going after 65% of sales. Tell you where I’d want to be actually working and that’s got to be through referrals. Now referrals also close at two times the normal rate. An average sale typically closes at 25%. A referred sale typically will close at 50%, so you are doing double the rate. Now, referred sale also spend more money with you and they close in up to a quarter of the time, and the reason they close at a fraction of the time is the fact that you are leveraging someone’s already built in trust with an individual to shorten the cell cycle to get in the door.

Then the other thing too is you can book two to four times more meetings with better qualified buyers if you are reaching out and getting those referrals. Now, if you start tying all this together, so, if you are the 11% of sales people going after 65% of sales that’s closing at double the rate, in a quarter the time, literally what you are doing is you are putting a leverage factor in place of about 120 times greater than if you are a sales person who is not going after referrals. Even if you are five times, ten times, greater that’s a huge opportunity for you as well. I will give you my results. Typically what happens is when I reach out to people and ask for an introduction, I get about 30% that are going to introduce me into that person that I have asked to get an introduction into.

Now, of those 30% I usually get about a 15% engagement and that means it’s a 15% overall success rate, so, literally I get 30 on 100. I get 50% of those into an engagement which means 15 which is a 15% overall success rate. Now, cold calling, a study based on Baylor University and also IBM says cold calling is successful between 0.3% to about 2% of the time or flip it around is 98% of the time on greater is completely ineffective. If you are actually picking up the phone and cold calling and not doing something like I have just talked about here, then you are absolutely crazy. I will tell you why, the approach that I use is up to 50 times greater than cold calling.

I have got a 50 times greater success rate than if you are picking up the phone and cold calling. If you want to find out more about this, I run a regularly scheduled courses on LinkedIn and how to leverage this digital referral process. There is a lot more to it than just this and if you want to find out more, reach out to me chris@salestipaday.com or else reach out on my phone in North America at 403–630–1243 and I’ll be more than happy to talk to you and guide you and point you in the right direction.

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