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.