Sales Success on LinkedIn is 1 year old. To celebrate its first birthday we will be having cake (obviously) and sharing some real gems from the book.

Each day there will be the chapter heading along with a quick top tip to take away from that chapter.

So in 10 days’ time you’ll have 10 LinkedIn top tips to help you achieve even  more sales success on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Tip Number 1 – Why do you use LinkedIn?

So, why do you use LinkedIn? You need to have an absolutely crystal clear strategy on your purpose on LinkedIn, you need to have a very deep “why”. Are you using it for jobs, recruitment, to find new suppliers or find new customers? Whatever your strategies, whatever your “why” is on LinkedIn, used as a basis for everything you do and stick to it.

LinkedIn Tip Number 2 – Creating a brilliant profile

Think about it, the number one thing that anybody is going to look at is your profile on LinkedIn.

Does it represent brand you as well as it should do?

A brilliant photograph, a business photograph, a great description of what you do and how you help customers and all of the detail that shows me that you are a credible business person on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn tip number 3 – Building your online network

So, what’s your connection strategy on LinkedIn?

Who should you connect with? Think about customers, think about suppliers, think about colleagues that you’ve got. If you’re stuck, get your mobile phone out right now, look at those list of contacts. If they’re not already on your network on LinkedIn get those invites out, connect with people and grow your network on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn tip number 4 – Securing recommendations

Do you have at least one customer who loves what you do?

I bet you do, and if you do can you please, please, please make sure that they write a recommendation for you on LinkedIn.

Pick up the phone and ask them, then send the request – please write me a recommendation. People will buy from people and the enhanced level of trust that comes from a recommendation will help you grow your business.

LinkedIn Tip Number 5 – Finding your ideal customers

You want to find ideal customers on LinkedIn, dead easy. Use the search and advanced search functionality.

Use job titles, go out search for them use geographies, look at your existing customers and their job titles.  All you need to do then is use those job titles again, search for  them on LinkedIn.

There’s 400 million people on LinkedIn, you’ll find a whole batch of customers, using that technique.

LinkedIn Tip Number 6 – Using groups on LinkedIn

Groups on LinkedIn for me fall into two categories.

Number one is the brain building that helps you understand your network and number two is the customer building.

Find the groups that help to give you the insight to what you do in your industry, and also use the groups where your customers hang out.

If your customers hang out in specific groups, go and get in there and share some information, educate them, engage with them in a conversation and you will be selling to them before you know it.

LinkedIn Tip Number 7 – Searching to find the right connections

So you want to search to find the right connections, how do you do that? Dead easy get into the search box and search for a specific term.

Use the advanced search and search for key words. If you’re looking for a new supplier, if you’re looking for a new contact, if you’re looking for a specialist bit of information, you will find all of those people using search and advanced search on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn Tip number 8 – Building your company page on LinkedIn

LinkedIn gives you lots of extra space to promote what you do. But use your company page, it’s valuable real estate on the internet.

Make sure your company page reflects what you do as a business, reflect what’s on your existing website and across the rest of social media platforms.Your customers are looking for congruence of message, the message needs to be the same from one platform to the next.

Go out and create a great company page.

LinkedIn Tip Number 9 – Getting organised and getting on

Get on with it. Have you done it yet?

That’s the brilliant thing about LinkedIn, you can’t mess things up, you can’t get things wrong. Just go out there and start applying some of the techniques. Use the tools, use everything that you’ve learnt about LinkedIn, but roll your sleeves up and get stuck in.

The quicker that you do it the more of an impact you’ll make, the more connections you’ll make and the more business you’ll be generating.

LinkedIn Tip Number 10 – Putting it into practice

Putting it in to practice. Dead easy. Give me 20 minutes.

If you can give me 20 minutes a day that’s brilliant.

Focus on the areas that you aren’t so great on and fill all those bits on LinkedIn and get those messages out there.

If you can only give me 20 minutes a week, 5 minutes a day, invest that time, get stuck into LinkedIn and start putting everything we’ve talked about into practice and get those results immediately.