The state of being widespread or constantly encountered.
Omnipresence should be your and your team’s motivation when even considering leveraging LinkedIn to grow your sales and brand reach from LinkedIn.
There is a plethora of noise from sellers also trying to reach your prospects and therefore, lots of distractions and shiny objects meeting the eyes of your buyers every single day.
It’s hard to break through, people!
And don’t get me wrong, I love leveraging traditional prospecting methods — there’s no doubt they still rock. However, they lack two vital components that are necessary to having omnipresence in the minds and eyes of your target accounts: enough reach and monster consistency. Your chances of closing more business increase significantly if you’re first to reach your prospects and stay in front of them until time, opportunity, need, and money — all the right things — align to make the magic happen.
LinkedIn is the perfect platform for this!
In order to possess omnipresence on LinkedIn, you must first eliminate the things hindering your company from these activities:
- Stop focusing too much on your company page; it’s important, but not the end-all-be-all. You are limited by reach with your company page, even if you drop the whole dang marketing budget to boost it. It has major limitations on the components you need to generate high-dollar sales conversations from LinkedIn.
- Stop using crappy messaging automation! Omnipresence means attention; if you automate your conversations, your prospects WILL ignore you.
- Quit spamming your newsfeed with irrelevant or non-optimized content. Posting that random blog you find on someone else’s site kills your omnipresent opportunity, and oftentimes, winds up leading into competitors’ funnels. LinkedIn is unique to other social sites, so content production and sharing activities should be treated as such.
- Do not rely solely on your sales and business development teams to reach prospects on LinkedIn. You need more brand ambassadors with authority involved to make this work.
Success in any area relies on identifying and eliminating what you’re doing wrong. This allows you to have the right foundations in place to do right. You can’t build a great house with a crap foundation!
How to develop LinkedIn omnipresence
Recognize first, that all great things take time. Like any successful sales and marketing initiatives, long-term and reliable always wins. Developing total omnipresence on LinkedIn is no different. This is a long-term play for you and your organization.
If you follow my instructions and stay consistent, you will not only obtain the long-term benefits, you will also notice an immediate impact on your sales opportunities from LinkedIn.
Consider it like the snowball effect. You pack it up and roll it down the hill — it will continue to build upon itself.
1st Omnipresence done right is a team sport. Besides just your salespeople, anyone else of authority in your organization should allocate a set amount of time to using LinkedIn. Especially your CEO. Building omnipresence requires key members of your team to develop their personal brands as much as anyone else associated with strictly business development. The more you can get involved the better, because it allows for more humanized touchpoints with your prospects when you put the other pieces in place.
Messaging creates meaning: Make sure all brand ambassadors you leverage reflect similar messaging and branding in key areas of their LinkedIn profiles. Look in prime real estate areas like your headlines and banners. This way, when your prospects see them, they’re not only impressed with the same messaging each time, but also see the core value in the messaging.
Think: Who do you help specifically? How do you connect with the pains and problems they have? And what’s the result of engaging with you to solve those problems? There are 10 key points on your profile to highlight each of these areas.
2nd Invest and upgrade your brand ambassadors profiles to Sales Navigator accounts. It’s 100% worth the investment. Reason? Instead of spending out the wazoo for paid ads — each person with Sales Navigator can pinpoint the direct influencers and decision makers within your target accounts for less than $80/month per person. Also, each person has direct access to each other’s connections, including your already existing clients, who are connected to more potential clients.
Powerful place to start: If you’re using your CEO as a lead brand ambassador, for example, they would connect with the high-level prospects within your target accounts. Others in your company can follow suit and connect with those prospects after the CEO, leveraging his authority and already existing connection to increase the likelihood of acceptance.
Pro tip: In addition to new prospects, try this with potential clients currently in the sales cycle or those who have yet to buy from you.
3rd Don’t just rely on connection requests as touchpoints. There’s a more artful and less spammy method to get your prospects reaching out to you, instead of doing all the work yourself. Or, minimally, enable you to obtain a massive awareness of you, your team, and your brand. Leverage all the touchpoints LinkedIn provides for you — activities like profile viewing, following, and content engagement. This allows you to expand your touchpoints significantly, especially if you’re leveraging more than one person to “touch” the same prospects in the same accounts numerous times. Another reason why Sales Navigator is crucial — with a normal LinkedIn account you’re limited by the number of people you can reach each day.
4th Content is fuel for the follower-ship and creates context for the value your company offers, problems you solve, and reasons to choose you over competitors. As your internal employees add more connections/followers make sure they are consistently distributing your own company’s custom content (stop sharing other people’s resources, you are the experts!). There are some easy, powerful ways to make this work with minimal resources and budget.
Start with written articles/LinkedIn publications just like this one. From that single piece of “pillar content” you can create hundreds of additional pieces including reading the article into a microphone and turning it into a podcast; discussing that information in front of the camera for a video; taking snippets of paragraphs for Twitter updates; and even creating graphics with quotes that stem directly from the article.
One from many for maximum results.
Then, share, share, share, promote, promote, promote!
Stay with it and see the social selling snowball in full effect.
Omnipresence is not rocket science but does require your full commitment. With the abundance of social media noise out there in your market — there’s no reason you shouldn’t be committed to making this work.
The way we see it, if you can truly help your clients and the people you serve better than anyone else, it’s your responsibility to make sure they know that. This is the quickest way to make that happen.
Stop passively using LinkedIn as a digital resume, content dump, and tool that sounds nice on paper but isn’t producing the business results you know it can.
It’s time for all in or nothing. And that means omnipresence — but you must have the right pieces in place. Which means: No. 1 — taking the action to make it happen and No. 2 — being consistent with that action.
