My friend, Keith Lampe, works for OPENOnline in Columbus Ohio.  He’s part of the team who is responsible building relationships with potential customers. (Disclosure: OPENOnline was a client of Social Business Strategies at one time.)

When I met Keith a little over a year ago, he hadn’t yet signed up for LinkedIn.  Since that time, he’s been using LinkedIn as a powerful tool to develop business for his company.  I had the chance to catch up with Keith yesterday and get an update on how he has evolved his daily routine to leverage this tool.

Serendipity in Social Networking
I once had a boss named Ken Galloway who taught me a lot about business and the art of selling.  One day, around the holiday season, I walked into Ken’s office to find him crunching away on his PC.

When I asked him what he was doing, he replied, “scrubbing my database clean from all the people I can’t remember anymore.”  Ken later told me that he went through this process at the end of every year so that he could chop out the people who he had met in business, but over time had become meaningless names in his Outlook database.  It was evident that in doing this, Ken may have been missing valuable opportunities for potentially significant relationships.

Fast forward a few years to the rise of social networks like LinkedIn, and the dawn of internet-based data portability.  Keith’s story highlights something I think is very important:  we business folk can benefit from reconnecting with our past relationships and reigniting conversations.  Social web tools create an environment where users update their own information (as it changes), giving us the power to stay connected over time even when people move on to their next opportunity.  With the economy in recovery and massive shakeups over the past two years, masses of humans have found themselves on the move.

In Kieth’s case, an old high school buddy went on to become the President of a call center  And that business happened to be the right type of target client for his company, OPENOnline.  A social web presence on LinkedIn gave Keith visibility to all the information needed to take the appropriate action to, first, rekindle that relationship online and then arrange a time to talk business offline.

That’s pretty damn cool, if you ask me.

Can you apply Keith’s approach to using LinkedIn?  Are there people in your past that you should catch up with?  Can you possibly search for them on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter and restart the conversation?

What say you?

About two years ago when I made the choice to really focus on LinkedIn as a main tool, my average conversion rate from leads to closed deals jumped from about 9 percent, using traditional methods like cold calling, email, letters and networking events.  I’ve seen an average upwards of 27 percent in less than six months, using tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

The increase wasn’t a result of having better services, products or even pricing.  What I learned is that by using social web tools, I was actually spending my time and effort on what really produced results, and not on some of the mundane old-school tasks mentioned above.  I’d like to teach you some of what I learned over a few years of experimenting and practice.

Prospecting Through Company Profiles on LinkedIn
One of the very BEST features that LinkedIn provides to business development and sales professionals can be found in the free company profiles.  These profiles are still technically in BETA.  My hunch is that they will come out of the BETA phase as soon as LinkedIn decides how they would like to charge for an upgraded feature set associated with representing companies on the network.

But today, they’re still free for all businesses to create and maintain.  There’s been some recent problems with smaller and mid-sized businesses sometimes having the same company profile name but, all in all, the information provided on these profiles rivals more well-known business sites like Google Finance or even Hoovers.

Here are a few tips and tricks you can begin using while prospecting for new clients, business partners or even digging up research on your existing clients.

Find Contacts by Searching Companies
I’m always surprised by how many people aren’t aware how individual profiles are populated on a company page.  When you search for a company and pull up the profile, always remember that the people you see on the page are ordered in degrees of relationships away from you.  The page will be divided into sections, based on criteria like current employees, former employees, new hires and so on.

First, I like to look for people I’m connected to who no longer work at the companies.  If I find someone I know well enough, I’ll pick up the phone and call them to ask why they left.  Hearing these testimonials can give you at least some sense of the company culture.  If the organization treats their employees well, chances are they treat partners and vendors in the same fashion.  It’s always worth asking, and can help you weed out prospects that just don’t fit your client profile.

Always look for the easiest path on road to the organization.  Is there someone you know through a direct connection who is on the inside?  If so, work to rekindle the relationship with your contact first.  Take some time investing social capital in them, and when the time is right and you’ve had the chance to be helpful, ask if they might introduce you to your target decision maker.  The majority of people you help will feel a need to reciprocate the good karma and help you.

I try to pay attention to the schools where the company employees are coming from.  This can be powerful – especially if you are a recent grad, or if you’ve come out of a more prestigious institution.  Do you happen to share an alma mater with anyone?  If you do, can you leverage Chris Brogan & Julien Smith’s concept of “One of Us?”

If you don’t have any direct connections into that particular organization, don’t sweat it.  The biggest benefit that LinkedIn offers business developers and sales folks is making the social graph visible and transparent right on the page.  On company pages, you have the ability to see who in your network connects you to people inside the company.

Always remember to do your homework with those contacts.  Here’s a trick I learned -  connect with your bridge connection first.  You can do this over LinkedIn by sending a message, but often times I will simply pick up the phone and call my contact.

Find out just how well that connection knows your target decision maker and if they are the best person for the introduction.  If not, ask if they can introduce you to someone who would be better at making the connection.  Chances are that most people will have connections to multiple coworkers in their company or division.  Be patient and work to locate and start a relationship with the insider who will give you the best shot at converting an introduction.

I promise you, if you make the commitment to using LinkedIn as a dominant tool in your prospecting and business development efforts, it will make an impact on your success ratios.

What say you?  Have you given this a try already?  How did it work?  Are you willing to trust me, shut off the lists and cold calling machine, and take a leap of faith?

Related show

• Nate Riggs:
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• Date:
  Thu, May 20th
  
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  Ohio University Schey Sales Centre Symposium
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