What is social selling the inbound way?

Inbound leads from social selling. Sounds exciting right? Let's look at how to get inbound leads from social selling and how you can do it. 

Inbound social selling is the strategy of providing so much value and trust into your network that your connections message you asking for your help.

Inbound leads are the crème de la crème of leads. They are the easiest to convert. They are the best leads you can get. They are AAA leads.

So, how do we use social selling on LinkedIn to get inbound leads?

Focused value

First off, to lead those juicy inbound leads, you need to be focused on a very narrow segment of your addressable market. It's much easier to get leads if you solve a very defined problem and your profile and presence communicates that. This means having a tightly defined offering, I have a video about selling your expertise on LinkedIn you can watch which unpacks this more

Always be growing

Once you've tightly defined your audience, you need to grow your network consistently with those people. Make it a mission to connect to people daily. you are filling you profile full of potential clients who are likely to need your help. At any given time, only a small percentage of your addressable market will be ready, willing and able to buy from you, having more of the right people in your network means you have the ability to be known, liked and trusted by more of the people who can buy from you.

Getting a couple of inbound leads from social selling every now and then is great, but to build a flow, you need a network full of prospects.

Content to educate

All of your content that you post should be helping your audience to know you, like you and trust you. That's a mix of helpful content, promotion and sharing snippets that help people know your story and who you are as a person. Content is one of the primary education opportunities you have on LinkedIn, so you should be consistently posting, 3-5 times per week. No excuses. 

If you want inbound leads from social selling, you have to make posting your top priority. 

Whilst I'm here, you also need to post about your offer too, if you don't promote what you are selling, you won't educate those connections on how you help them. On average, a prospect will need to see and hear about your offer SEVEN times before they actively consider buying it. 

It can be all too easy to post the content which gets engagement and neglect the offer posts. Think about it, you post a selfie and share a story and get 5,000 impressions, but when you post about your offer, you get 500. It feels disappointing right?

Let me tell you, if that you, you need to change your mindset, think about it, for a minute. 500 people just learned about your offer. We judge it by the number of impressions, but often neglect the impression we are making from telling people about our services.

It's essential that at least one post in 5 is explaining how your offer helps your audience.

Deepen relationships

Waiting for inbound leads to come from your content can be unpredictable. Let's face it, algorithms don't always swing our way and even when they do, we have to keep one eye on the future because it can quickly change and leave us with tumbleweeds. 

To algorithm-proof our inbound social selling strategy, we need to take our network deeper, we need to give them an experience of working with us, learning from us that is direct. Every week, I host free training sessions online for my network, I give freely and take my network deeper than just a post. I do this because I know, people have to buy into me if they want to buy from me. Every week, I get more than 200 leads from this approach. I get the consistency because I'm not solely relying on my content to do all the work.

There are lots of different ways to deepen your connection to your audience, my preference is to add more value, I find it much easier to convert people if they have had a 45-60 minute free training session from me. The great thing is LinkedIn's own native features help me do it.

That's my way to sell the inbound way.

Want to know more? Connect with me on LinkedIn