An Updated Deep Dive Into The Four LinkedIn™ Sales Strategies 

Today, I wanted to update a newsletter I wrote last year introducing what I consider the four LinkedIn™ sales strategies. 

I originally came up with the idea that there were two basic sales strategies for using LinkedIn over ten years ago. The obvious strategy was Hunting, where you treated LinkedIn™ primarily as a database and went hunting for prospective customers one at a time. But as LinkedIn™ became more social – as posting and commenting, likes and shares became more useful features – using content as a means to increase awareness, credibility and even generate sales leads became a viable strategy. I called this Farming. 

Around three years ago, I figured there was a refined version of Hunting, where you took advantage of  people you already knew. I called this Mining. 

And finally, over the past few years, LinkedIn™ has been steadily rewarding comments more and more to the point where there are people who primarily use a commenting strategy to generate reach, credibility and leads. I call this strategy Fishing.  

I first talked about these four methods on my website two years ago, and in this email newsletter last year. But even something I talked about only twelve months ago has changed completely in that time due to one thing: LinkedIn™  started using a unified artificial intelligence based algorithm. 

LinkedIn™ used to have several dozen algorithms that decided everything we saw on LinkedIn™. There were algorithms for what turned up in our homepage feeds, what notifications we received and which we didn’t, what ads we were shown, and how often. Now all these algos have been unified into one, which nominally, is good. But…it has changed the way LinkedIn™ works, which means it has changed how these four strategies work. 

With this in mind, I think it is time to re-examine the four sales strategies, and see which one or ones will work best in this new environment.

Today, I thought I would offer an introduction to each of these, which will give you a general idea how they work and what is involved with each one. See where you fit in. See where you could maybe have a better fit. In the following weeks I will go into each strategy in much more detail.   

Hunting

Hunting is what we envision when we think of what a traditional salesperson does:

• identify prospects
• contact them

LinkedIn™ works extremely well for the first of these – using the Search utility on LinkedIn™  is a great way to find and narrow down prospects, find people within prospect companies and to research them. 

And LinkedIn™ can also help in the qualification process, due to the wealth of information that can be found on LinkedIn™ profiles. 

After that, LinkedIn™’s utility becomes a bit… spotty. 

In some cases – maybe ten percent or a bit more – LinkedIn™ is an excellent tool for contacting prospects. But it must be used selectively for this, as LinkedIn™ is a pretty poor tool for most prospects. Where is the value in sending a message or invite to connect to someone who won’t log in again until sometime in the Fall?

The unspoken problem with Hunting is that just about everybody hates it. Rejection. Abuse. Being labeled a spammer, or worse. You need to develop a pretty tough shell to be a Hunter and most people don’t keep at it long enough to develop that shell.

With the advent of the internet, and then social networks like LinkedIn™, alternative methods to Hunting arose. 

Farming

Farming is what I call using LinkedIn™  as a place to publish content, and there are lots of different types of content available – posts, articles, newsletters, events, and videos. 

When you use a farming approach, you are counting on one or both of the following to happen: 

• Prospects discover your content and contact you
• Prospects engage with your content, giving you an opportunity to promote possible relationships

I call it Farming for two reasons: you don’t know which seeds will grow into something you can harvest, and you also have to be patient. 

Now let me say that Farming has been one of the pillars of my LinkedIn™ use. It works. So if you want to Farm, great, but like myself, you have to have a system and the metrics in place so you know if it is working or not. I have used Farming to great advantage over the past ten years, but aside from good content, I put together a system. Without the system, I would have had no benchmarks and no real way of measuring what worked and what didn’t. 

The problem with Farming is that it is…messy. It is hard to quantify. How many posts do you have to publish to generate a real lead?  How many comments or other engagements do you need on a post to generate a real lead? And these days, the uncertainty over how LinkedIn’s™ treats our content in turn makes using Farming even more uncertain. 

Farming used to require just patience, but changes LinkedIn has made has thrown its relative usefulness as a sole or primary strategy into question. 

Fishing

Fishing is what I have come to call a now popular LinkedIn™ strategy that revolves around Commenting. 

Commenting has gained prominence in the past year or two as it has become apparent that LinkedIn™  rewards Comments on posts with more distribution of that post. In particular this makes post authors more appreciative (well, it should anyway) of people who comment on their posts. 

The idea is that you find a prospect and approach them indirectly by commenting on their posts. The theory is that this builds your credibility before you approach the prospect directly. 

An extension of this method is to comment on other people’s posts that might appeal to your prospect base. 

Having extensively tested the Fishing methodology, I have found it isn’t as reliable as the other methods. 

The biggest problem I had was in finding enough quality and “comment worthy” posts to make this effective. Unless your target demographic is anybody on LinkedIn™, in which case any post will do, you may have problems relying too heavily on this strategy.

Mining 

Mining is what I call it when you seek to maximize what you can get from the people you already are associated with on LinkedIn™. We all have networks on LinkedIn™ that are composed of connections, followers and subscribers. 

If you have a thousand connections, there are going to be dozens (at least) of prospective customers in there, and an even larger number who can introduce you to people in their networks who could be customers for you. If you are like most LinkedIn™ users, you have not been doing much to promote your relationships with them, let alone promote your products and services. 

Mining is simply the process of methodically raising your profile and cultivating your relationships with the people in your LinkedIn™ network. In some cases, you are just reminding them that you are a resource. In others, you may be seeking to get an update on their current situation to see if anything has changed. And you are always searching for connections of theirs to whom you would like an introduction or referral. 

There are a lot of ways to Mine and it can be insanely lucrative.

These are just sketches of what these different strategies are about. In the coming weeks I will cover each of these in depth, including:

• characteristics of each one
• how the changed LinkedIn™ algorithms have affected each one 
• LinkedIn™ skills you will need
• tactics you might want to consider
• tactics you definitely want to avoid
• figuring out which of these
• or which combination of these would best fit your own situation
• and finally a checklist for each of the four. 

Stay tuned.