Linkedin.com as a sales tool

Linkedin often gets a bad rap as a resource.  I've had two conversations recently about Linkedin which were 180 degrees apart.  One VP of Sales for a large national company has found out how to use it to find potential customers.  Another, the president of a rep agency, was concerned about the privacy since anyone could see your connections and who were looking at you.
Both are corrrect, but the privacy complaint is fixable.  Just like Facebook, you can go into your profile and settings and set the privacy settings so that the people who may be connected to you or who may be viewing you are invisible to the rest of the world.
So, if you want people to see you, leave the privacy settings at the default.  If you want privacy, change your profile settings to allow privacy.
The next decision to make is whether to go "Premium" or not.  Before making that decision, let's look at ways to use Linkedin as a sales tool.
First, if you're on Linkedin and your profile is up to date, then you've basically opened the door to allow people to contact you. (More on this in a future post.)
Since finding the decision maker is a critical component of a successful sales strategy,  Linkedin is the absolutely best tool for that.
Our next post will show how to use Linkedin as a way of finding the right person.

The Long Tail (continued)

The long tail theory was not developed with the sales person in mind.  But there is an important lesson to be learned by the salesperson. Inside every customer demand (hit), are a lot of latent requirements (niches) that a good salesperson understands.
You go into a auto dealership to buy a car (the hit).  A good car salesperson pitches the navigation system, the satellite radio, the moon roof (niches).  These are the high profit items for the dealership.  An air compressor salesperson pitches the air compressor to the interested customer (the hit) but also pitches the receiver tank, the dryer, and all the fittings and regulators (the niches).
The manager or owner of a store or sales agency or distributorship realizes that the long tail theory means that adding products to the salesperson’s offerings works to everyone’s benefit as long as the products will be purchased by the same person, or same company. The expense of the call has been covered with the “hit”, the money can be made with the “niches”—everything else that the salesperson can sell during the same call.
Amazon got people to go their website by selling books.  Now, while someone is buying a book, he can buy anything else he can think of—almost unlimited.  While someone is going to iTunes to buy an Adele album, he can buy another other piece of music he may think he wants even if no one else is interested—almost unlimited--because the additional of additional songs adds insignificant cost to Apple.
Their secret is now our secret.  Make the tail long and make the sale profitable.

The Long Tail

The concept of the Long Tail was developed by Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of The Wired magazine.  The two components of the tail are: "hits" and "niches". The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail.
What does that mean to the sales process?  I have discussed my ideas with Chris Anderson, and he agrees--a salesperson needs a "hit" to get into the door, but he needs "niches" to really make sales and money.  When you call on a customer, there is what Anderson calls "latent demand" and you don't know what it is unless you ask.
Start your sales call with the reason that you're there (your "hit"), but understand that the customer needs other things that you offer and unless he knows what these other things are, he may not know that he needs them.
Once Amazon developed their system, adding an infinite number of products became possible and every new product added revenue without adding significant cost.  The same with iTunes and Google.
We will discuss the long tail in the sales world next time.

Don't forget the little stuff

I was at a Van Heusen store recently and bought a pair of slacks, a couple of polo shirts, and some socks.  The cashier asked whether I needed a belt.  I asked him why he asked and he said:  "you seem to have everything that goes with an outfit but the belt and thought I'd ask."
So then I asked him where his salesmanship came from.  He said that his grandfather, a sales rep for a chemical company, used to take him on sales calls.  Sales was in his genes.
What do we learn from this?
A salesperson goes in to sell his main product, but all the stuff that goes with that product is forgotten.
There is a current theory in sales called "The long tail".  For example, once Apple developed iTunes, adding more songs to iTunes was relatively cheap.  The incremental cost of adding a piece of music that may sell very little was easily overcome with just a few sales.
The point here is, once the salesperson is making the call, once he's in the customer's office making the grand pitch, the cost of pitching additional products is infinitesimal.  The big expense is getting in front of the customer.  The Van Heusen cashier had me in front of him.  That was the biggest thing--the long tail is anything else he could convince me to buy while I was there.
When you go into a Men's Wearhouse and buy a suit--by the time you're fitted for the suit, an assistant has the shirt, tie, socks, etc. that will go with the suit all laid out.  That's The Long Tail theory of sales.

More on this later.