Recap: LinkedIn for Business Event with Jason Jue, CMO, Vocus
I serve as the chair for the Technology Marketing Alliance, a members-only, local technology group for senior marketers in the region. Every quarter we bring in amazing speakers to share best practices with our members, and we’ve heard from the likes of David Meerman Scott, Pragmatic Marketing, Alan Kelly, Joe Pulizzi, and more.
Last week’s event didn’t disappoint, as we invited Jason Jue, CMO for Vocus to share his experience as a power user of LinkedIn for not only growing his own professional network, but also for driving leads and sales opportunities in his current company, Vocus, and previous company, Rackspace.
Some key takeaways:
Accuracy of data: An obvious point, but not always appreciated: LinkedIn is the bestrepository for accessing accurate names, titles, roles and contact information for prospects. If you leverage the information in LinkedIn and manage your connections and the connections of those in your company, you have a powerful tool to drive leads.
Invest your time: Smart sales people know how to monitor their prospects and reach out when the time is right. The best sales reps in his companies are spending up to 70% of their time in LinkedIn. Jason noted that he didn’t update his profile on LinkedIn right away when he changed companies. But the minute he did, he found he got an influx of telemarketing calls.
Drive testimonials: He suggests leveraging the “recommendations” section as a way to showcase customer testimonials without having to go through a possibly painful process of getting approvals through legal. Suggest to customers to write a recommendation for the company, which will follow that person wherever they may go.
Use LinkedIn to Qualify: we talked a lot about “scoring” and qualifying leads: one member explained how they triangulate within LinkedIn and other company members to determine who the decision maker truly is. If he got an inbound lead from IT, for example, the technical decision maker, he was able to figure out who the business decision maker was and reach out to engage at the same time.
Alignment with sales and marketing: Jason believes its marketing’s job to help identify prospects, triangulate who the key people are within those prospects, score them, and ensure that sales people are trained on how to leverage this powerful tool. By working together, they can better identify, tag and score accounts to make the most of targeting enterprise businesses.
Participation in groups: He was able to offer incentives, links to good content, etc., through appropriate LinkedIn Groups for his business, assuming they weren’t too salesy. It has to be authentic and offer value, but it’s still a great way to connect.
Research and listening tool: Jason talked about the huge advantage for marketers to use LinkedIn as a listening source and as a place to conduct research on what trends are important, what “words” are people using to describe their problem. He believes it’s overlooked as a premier listening tool. He believes it may actually be too late to start a group of your own, but still, great information can come from joining other groups.
Be creative: Jason talked about how he used a avatar of sorts, to connect his team together so it would increase the access of the marketing and sales teams to potential prospects. All employees connect into FanatiGuy, and then it is easier to see who’s connected to whom when doing sales qualification or lead prospecting.
Lead conversion through advertising: Jason, alongside a couple of members, talked about the success rates of advertising against certain keywords in profiles and company names. For example, if your target customer is a CISO-level person, anyone with that title in their profile could be served the ad, directing them to an appropriate landing page that you’ve designed. It can be regionally-based, and as specific as you want it. The members who had invested in this B2B advertising method talked about higher cost of acquisition, but experienced significantly higher conversion.
In the end, he noted that while it is suited well for larger companies given the reach the internal employees can have and leverage, it does also place smaller companies on a level playing field since they can have access to all the same information. It’s mostly about mining it correctly, being diligent about participating and engaging, and getting ahead of the curve.
Thanks Jason for your contribution!
–Elizabeth Shea, CEO SpeakerBox