How to Use LinkedIn for Business Development in Professional Services
I log into LinkedIn nearly every day. I see all sorts of frameworks and posts and perspectives and videos to watch. It's all related to my subject matter expertise, and the people I follow are also people I could be doing business with. In fact, LinkedIn accounts for about 45% of the leads I generated in 2023 for my business. Recently on an episode of Breaking BizDev, my co-host Mark and I broke down how to use LinkedIn for business development.
The Marketing-Sales Continuum
On the show, we use a tool we call “The Marketing and Sales Continuum” to organize our thoughts about different business development activities and practices, and whether they’re more ‘marketing’ or ‘sales’ activities. Below is an illustration of that continuum.
For this episode, Mark Wainwright and I separately thought of different activities on LinkedIn that could land in each one of these five different points, and we went back and forth placing each activity on the continuum and added our perspective. It was a fun conversation.
How Your Marketing Team Can Use LinkedIn for Business Development
First, let’s start with marketing activities on LinkedIn that are focused on marketing goals. This would be at the left end of our spectrum. Here are two examples of marketing activities supported by marketing roles.
Refresh your company page and individual expert profiles
Your LinkedIn profiles should signal to buyers who you help, how you help them, and the services you provide. There are two main kinds of real estate to keep an eye on:
Your Company Page — Go through and take a look at your about section, headline, header image, recent posts. Do you clearly identify who you help? Is it clear how you help them? How many clicks does it take for users to get to your website? If LinkedIn is part of your social media strategy, then your company page should make it easy for buyers to find what they’re looking for.
Individual Expert Profiles — Review the individual profiles of your doer-sellers. LinkedIn is constantly adding new features to help individuals use their profile as a resume. This can be used to strengthen the credibility and expertise of your doer-sellers. Take a look at your page headline and about section. Also, do they feature any recent projects? There are places individuals can highlight their work to make it stand out — something that would greatly benefit professional service providers like architects and engineers.
Use your company page to distribute thought leadership
In my experience, I’ve seen many firms post about a new blog to LinkedIn once, but that's it. And then after that, it's crickets. That post doesn’t get circulated again. On top of that, LinkedIn doesn’t like traffic leaving the platform so it suppresses the reach of “article” post types.
However, LinkedIn does encourage admins to post from the company page. It is a viable way to reach your audience and share thought leadership and sales enablement content. Knowing this, professional services marketers need to shift their mindset from trying to convert LinkedIn into web traffic and think of LinkedIn as a nurture channel in and of itself. Instead of posting a short caption and a blog link, create a post with some high-level takeaways and encourage users to read more (link in the comments).
Firms also have an opportunity to increase posting frequency. If you have invested in content in the past, you might have a goldmine of thought leadership sitting on a shelf collecting dust. You have an opportunity to refresh that content and re-distribute it on LinkedIn through your company page. For rapid growth, post once a day. For longer, sustained growth you’ll need to post at least 2-3 times each week.
To keep this up over a long period of time, you might consider investing in a podcast, which can fuel multiple LinkedIn posts each week. The Breaking BizDev company page on LinkedIn is an example of this.
How Doer-Sellers Can Use LinkedIn for Business Development
Doer-sellers—engineers, consultants, architects—need to explore and use tools on LinkedIn to engage and interact with prospective clients. While it may not take up the entirety of their responsibility, it could be a significant part of their role. Here are a few ways doer-sellers can use LinkedIn for business development:
Posts from individual expert accounts
Some firms call this employee advocacy, where employees post to social media about topics, trends, or challenges buyers face. With a well-crafted profile, these employees could attract impressions from potential buyers which elevates the brand visibility of the firm.
From a content perspective, this works well when the content is marketing-driven. For example, An employee could go into a blog post, copy and paste a paragraph onto LinkedIn, chop it up and break it up so there's white space between sentences, add their own spin to it, and publish.
Don't even link to anything in the post. LinkedIn's algorithm wants to keep traffic on this on the page. Instead, publish the copy as a text-based post and encourage your network to comment on it to start a conversation. Then, if someone leaves an insightful comment that adds to the conversation, go back to your marketing team and request that it be added into the original blog post as part of a refresh.
“Follow” first, then engage before sending a connection request
When you are seeking to take that potential relationship to the next level, most people automatically think you need to send a connection request.
Instead, my co-host Mark recommends an intermediate step: following. On this episode of Breaking BizDev, he explained, “A connection is a request that must be either approved or denied. I recommend that people ‘follow’ people who are of interest. A follow does not need to be approved.”
Mark continued, “You can simply start following someone and you'll start to see their posts, their content, their information in your feed. You can start to understand what they're interested in, what they post about, what's going on with them personally, and what's going on with their organization. And obviously the next step beyond that is if you have a strong sense that you can develop some type of a relationship, you can connect with them and then communicate with them directly through LinkedIn.”
Connect with other members of the buyer group.
Reaching out and connecting with other people that may have other tactical roles in the buying committee can be a great way to build visibility within a target account.
For example, let's say you're working with an individual and there is a buying group at the prospective clients organization. When you connect with different members of that group, they immediately start seeing a number of your previous posts on their LinkedIn feed. Their knowledge level and awareness of who you are dramatically goes up. Suddenly, five or six new people within your target account have exposure to you.
Marketing and Sales Need to Work Together
Sales activities should absolutely be supported by the marketing team through content. It could be existing content, it could be custom content developed for a specific account as part of a multi-channel nurture campaign with a series of touches that bridge the gap between awareness and engagement: follows, connection requests, comments, likes, direct messages, skills endorsements, profile views. All of these touches can be used to maintain visibility and stay top of mind.
Marketing can also support sales by maintaining an organized library of content that can be used to enable conversations. This could be blog content, it could also be specific LinkedIn posts. It could also be a list of influencers. For example, marketing could see a bunch of ideal buyers commenting on a specific post. Marketing could then share that post with a doer-seller or business developer so they can add their perspective as a comment.
Pitfalls to Avoid
In sales-driven industries like professional services, there can be miscommunications, poorly defined expectations, and bad handoffs between key teams and players. Here are some pitfalls to avoid when using LinkedIn for business development:
Lazy Employee Engagement
When employees simply re-post your company's content, especially if it’s just a link to your blog, it won’t move the needle. Or, from time to time, your employees post about something they're “thrilled” about, it doesn't really support the marketing team because it’s self-serving and not focused on what the buyer cares about: how to solve their professional challenges.
Misalignment Between Marketing and Sales
There is a bit of a gray area between marketing and sales. Sometimes, it can get a bit messy. Think of this as the “threes” part of our Marketing-Sales Continuum. These are activities on LinkedIn that sales and/or marketing could both be doing. And because both could be doing it, sometimes activities like lead generation fall through the cracks.
Starting conversations in comment sections
Posting about offers to meet for free consultations
Prospecting research
Marketing is responsible for lead generating, but sales is responsible for picking up the conversation. They're the ones who are going to own the relationship.
Get Better at Using LinkedIn for Business Development
If you’re looking for help generating new business on LinkedIn, let’s start a conversation. I can point you to resources, consultants, or even help you myself if it’s a good fit.
