LinkedIn and Sales Intelligence: Two Great Sales Enablement Resources That Can’t Be Overlooked

Sales enablement tools are your greatest assets when trying to accelerate your sales cycles and target your strategic accounts. Their purpose is to maximize a sales organization’s potential in order to better communicate value and differentiate their services in a clear and consistent manner. Sales enablement includes resource planning, training, sales force automation, lead generation and planning. Great sales enablement tools help you gain insight into which accounts you should target, their problems and initiatives, and what people you should connect with to start building relationships.

One of the most important sales enablement tools is sales intelligence; you must have accurate and up-to-date sales intelligence on your prospects. Sales intelligence tools will help you answer the who, what, where, why, and when questions in your planning process. If you have that information at your disposal, all you need to do is figure out the “how.” The “how” should be focused on relationship building. Using your sales enablement and sales intelligence tools you can start developing relationships with the key stake holders and decision-makers at the accounts you’re going after.

Relationship building is essential to earning trust and credibility with your prospects in order to convert them to customers. According to Lee Levitt’s IDC Sales Enablement presentation, only 16% of vendors do a good job with “solution selling.” Close to 60% of buyers stated that the vendor needs to better understand their needs and objectives to improve the value of the relationship with the potential vendor. One terrific tool that enables you to start the relationship building process, coupled with sales intelligence resources, is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn will help you determine what your customers are currently working on, what their interests are, group memberships, previous employers, education, their blog or web site, books they’re reading, and more. All the information can be leveraged to help you start the conversation and position yourself as being in tune to their needs. This will not only help you build the relationship better and faster, it will increase your productivity. Being prepared when you start the conversation will help you sell more effectively and will help instill trust and credibility in the buyer. They’ll value your knowledge of their company and them personally, and be more willing to provide you with answers to your questions. Treat the buyer the way you would want to be treated. Don’t hard sell or pretend to know what you’re talking about. Ask intelligent, informed questions that will keep the buyer engaged and wanting to know more.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118