On this Sales Gravy podcast episode, Jeb Blount and Daniel Disney discuss the real secrets to becoming a LinkedIn selling machine. You'll learn the keys to to filling your pipeline with qualified opportunities, building your personal brand, improving your closing ratios, and increasing your income. Why You Should Use LinkedIn’s Marketing Power LinkedIn is one of the greatest tools ever created for sales professionals. It ranks right up there with the car, telephone, and the internet. Leveraging LinkedIn gives you the ability to connect with and learn more about prospects and customers than at any other time in history. Sales professionals who master LinkedIn quickly rise to the top of the ranking report. LinkedIn offers a huge opportunity for salespeople, but it isn’t easy and not everyone was born with the skills to use it. Salespeople need to learn and practice using LinkedIn. It isn’t something that you can jump into headfirst and be successful. As salespeople, you tend to automatically sell, but with LinkedIn, you have to take a step back from your regular habits. It is all about the long game and building relationships, not quick sales. You Have To Find The Balance Between Your Professional Persona And The Personal You Another problem that most salespeople have when using LinkedIn is that they have a hard time finding a balance. We are so used to using social media in our personal lives that when we have to use LinkedIn professionally, it feels strange and can become a balancing act between being our professional self and staying social. When you get it, however, it is a very powerful tool. LinkedIn is about nuance and building familiarity to create awareness for your product, and it is also a direct message tool. People Have Different Preferences For Receiving Messages That Resonate One thing to remember is that people have different preferences when it comes to engaging. Some like the phone, some like email, while some don’t have the time to talk and others have full email boxes. LinkedIn is a different way to reach someone to start a conversation, so in some respects, it can be a pirate’s way in – but only if you use it effectively.  The key is reaching the prospect with the right message at the right time, and that often takes sequencing your communication so that it is cumulative and encompassing. When you think about the numerous ways that we now communicate, you can’t just use one channel, be it email, telephone, instant messaging, or snail mail. You have to be the master of all of them and master using LinkedIn’s marketing power. If you only choose one silo, then statistically you are going to miss prospects. And if you do, you miss building familiarity through a channel and the cumulative effect. Success lies not in one over the other; it is about using all the tools and being persistent in an authentic way. Persistence Is The Key To Building A Certain Amount Of Reciprocity Persistence is a mental skill for people, and it demonstrates that you care about them and believe that you have the solution to help them. Also, when you are persistent on a genuine level of obligations, you develop a certain amount of reciprocity. When someone does something nice for you, and you are in the right place at the right time, you are likely to gain their business. You have to blend and sequence all the channels that you have to reach your prospect, which involves cumulative messaging. People have so many different ways of communicating that you need to hit them from every angle you have at your disposal. Using LinkedIn’s marketing power comprehensively can help you achieve that! Consistency Adds Cumulative Layers Of Messaging The key to LinkedIn is consistency. If you walk into a conference room and you stand in the corner and don’t say a word, you aren’t going to make any connections. If you walk in, however, and you strike up conversations with people,