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 Channel Futures

Sales & Marketing


How to Identify Top Sales Reps By Their LinkedIn Profiles

  • Written by Jessica Davis 1
  • April 5, 2013
Can you identify a great sales rep just by looking at the person's LinkedIn profile?

linkedinCan you identify a great sales rep just by looking at the person's LinkedIn profile? Some new research shows that top sales people tend to fit a certain profile in how they use this career and business social networking platform. Do your sales reps fit the profile?  What about your potential hires?  Here's a deeper look into key tip offs to knowing you've found a great sales rep.

First, some background. The research was conducted by author Steve A. Martin, who blogged about his results at the Harvard Business Review blogs. He interviewed 54 technology sales reps to gain insight into how they used LinkedIn in the course of their work. Twenty-five percent of those he spoke with fit into the category of Enthusiasts. These are the top performers.

The following are some key facts about members of this group, according to Martin:

  • They use their LinkedIn accounts throughout the day
  • Believe LinkedIn is an important tool to generate product interest and promote their companies
  • They are more likely to be outside sales people responsible for acquiring new accounts.
  • They average about 700 LinkedIn contacts
  • About half of them have paid for Premium LinkedIn memberships out of their own pockets.
  • 40 percent have generated revenue from LinkedIn
  • 55 percent use LinkedIn to research the competition
  • 70 percent use LinkedIn to keep existing customers informed about their company
  • only 15 percent have used LinkedIn to make initial unsolicited contact with prospects.

Casual users of LinkedIn were the largest group at about 40 percent of the total. They use the platform to research and learn about prospective clients, and they have about 250 contacts on average. Twenty percent of these users have generated revenue from LinkedIn use; 10 percent have used LinkedIn to research the competition and 18 percent use the platform to keep existing customers informed about their company.

Personal users made up 15 percent of the participants and tended to use LinkedIn mostly for job-related networking, and rarely used it for work-related purposes. They averaged around 300 contacts.

And about 25 percent of salespeople were classified as non-participants. They either didn't have a LinkedIn account or their profile contained very little personal information. They tended to have fewer than 20 contacts. They tended to be older than Enthusiasts, and they tended to have worked for the same company for many years.

Clearly, Enthusiasts are the stand outs here. Do your sales reps fit this profile? When you evaluate sales candidates, do you evaluate their LinkedIn profile?

 

Tags: Cloud Service Providers Digital Service Providers MSPs VARs/SIs Leadership Sales & Marketing

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7 comments

  1. Avatar hwainwright April 5, 2013 @ 3:16 pm
    Reply

    always wondered about the LI affect.

  2. Avatar Gordon Tan April 6, 2013 @ 2:54 am
    Reply

    Interesting post Jess.

    I've found that top sales people also tend to have more testimonials and participate in more group discussions. Groups are a great way to drive engagement and build authority within a particular sector. They also seem to have higher skills voted by others which I thought was interesting.

    Overall I know of a number of MSP business owners pulling inbound leads through LinkedIn using the same metheods. It is very much an untapped resource

  3. Avatar David Hay April 9, 2013 @ 12:47 pm
    Reply

    I completely agree, and interesting to find out that the study showed only 15% used it to make initial unsolicited contact.

    From my experience, and from what I hear from others, unsolicited contact on LinkedIn tends to be from recruitment consultants trawling, and some times it appears they haven't even managed to do that effectively!

    I think LinkedIn is a very under utilised sales tool, which can be incredibly helpful by giving you the insight you need to be able to approach a company that you want to do business with.

    • Avatar joepan May 2, 2013 @ 9:42 pm
      Reply

      David: Yup. Generally
      David: Yup. Generally speaking, I check LinkedIn before all scheduled interviews, appointments and meetings with executives. -jp

  4. Avatar Rob M April 10, 2013 @ 11:41 pm
    Reply

    I'm always amazed when I ask someone if they use LinkedIn and I get this deer in the headlights look, awkward pause then a tentative “yes”- just to be polite. There are 86,400 seconds in the day and LinkedIn gets more than a 180k new members a day or about 2 a second. This is not a fad. LI knows more about IBMs employees then IBM does and that is powerful.

    • Avatar joepan May 2, 2013 @ 9:40 pm
      Reply

      Rob: I tend to agree.
      Rob: I tend to agree. LinkedIn is the single most valuable social media service I’ve ever used. -jp

  5. Avatar Jen Mahon January 21, 2014 @ 1:52 pm
    Reply

    Another sign of a great
    Another sign of a great salesperson on LinkedIn is when their profile doesn’t read like a resume – but instead is buyer-centric. I just recently wrote a blog about this if you’re interested! http://sqz.co/g4G5XmP

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