Article

Using LinkedIn for Sales Teams - Five Tips to Empower Sales

6 May 2021

Ricky Cookson

How to Build a LinkedIn Cadence Between Companies and Employees

Finding the right equation for engagement on a company LinkedIn page isn’t easy. While there are more than 30 million company pages on the platform, probably less than 1% of them are creating active engagement around their content.

So, where’s the bottleneck?

What’s their secret to building an active community around a company page? How are companies like Gong and Shield able to create an incredible following around their company on LinkedIn?

One of the answers is that they don’t make their employees share company posts. Instead, they flip the convention on its head and share the voice of their people instead.

During Day Two of Unmute, the focus shifted from workshopping individual LinkedIn strategies to empowering whole teams.

For our Empower sessions, Mackenzie Boli and some of Gong’s chief LinkedIn influencers explored how companies and their sales teams can swap the typical call-and-response for a LinkedIn strategy that converts.

Encourage Your Team to Share Their Thoughts

When you ask a typical Sales or Marketing team if they’ve ever been asked to share a company post on Linkedin, most hands go up.

When you ask them if they did, the results are less unanimous.

The typical cadence between companies and their employees on LinkedIn is asking people to share “stuff,” and most people not sharing it. Even if the team does share it, it doesn’t always get the intended results. You can ask, “did sharing that post drive traffic to your website? Did people register for your webinar? Did it have any beneficial result?” And those questions, again, are answered with a resounding “no.”

The reason? The team isn’t adding anything to the post. There’s not much sustenance when a share falls through the feed without an individual’s value-adding perspective.

Rather than sharing company content through individual pages, do the inverse: share employee content through the company page. People don’t connect with a company; they connect with the people at the company.

In light of that idea, we sat down with the trailblazers of Gong’s LinkedIn strategy and culture of posting on LinkedIn, Udi Ledergor, CMO at Gong, and Devin Reed, Gong’s Head of Content Strategy.

They shared their ups and downs of defining their own approach to posting on LinkedIn. They also revealed how companies can navigate the passive engagement so prevalent with company pages.

Five Tips for Using LinkedIn for Sales Teams

1) Let Your Sales Team Opt-In

Posting on LinkedIn shouldn’t be an ultimatum for your team. Float the option out there and let them decide whether they want to use the platform or not.

If they show genuine interest, get them into training and encourage them to start posting with authenticity. As Udi and Devin put it, encourage your people to come to LinkedIn as their true selves and give them control over their content.

For the people who don’t show interest, try to help them understand what’s in it for them. Whether that means explaining the revenue potential of using LinkedIn for sales teams, the ways LinkedIn can further your career, or elevating their professional reputation. The list goes on. Getting your team excited about posting and the outcomes will inspire them to get involved.

2) Lead by Example

No matter how interested or vested in the outcomes your team is, consistently posting will be a challenge if leadership isn’t doing it.

How is a team supposed to heed their manager’s LinkedIn initiatives if they aren’t actively leading by example? It’s not easy. Instead, start posting yourself and show them that they won’t be condemned for not posting, but they’ll certainly be celebrated for the content they do produce.

The key is to encourage good social behavior as well as exhibit it.

3) Empower Your People to Post on LinkedIn

Confidence is one of the biggest hurdles to using LinkedIn for sales teams. They’re in a position where they want to post, they want to share their experiences and knowledge, but they’re paralyzed by “does anyone care what I have to say?”

They’re probably staring at the post they just wrote, thinking, “is this going to get likes or comments?” Maybe they haven’t gotten there yet, and are wondering, “what do I post about?”

Everyone on your team has ideas and expertise they can post, whether in Sales, IT, Marketing, Customer Service, HR, etc. The opportunity to provide value is open to the entire company.

4) Make Using LinkedIn for Sales Teams Easy

Let’s be honest: there’s absolutely a learning curve to posting on LinkedIn.

It’s one thing to want to be incredibly active and post three to five days a week, but putting it into action is a whole different game. That’s why you should make it as easy as possible for people to start posting. If you’re heading up the initiative, create a couple of templates, offer some writing prompts, host a weekly brainstorming session — anything to help your team post and get into a rhythm.

5) Make it Fun

There are so many ways you can make posting on LinkedIn fun for your team. You can host a contest, hold incentive programs, organize a lottery around who posts the most, or maybe there’s a prize at the end of the week for the most engagement.

Not only will the competitive nature inspire people to post more, but it’ll evoke a sort of camaraderie among teammates. Teammates will have more incentive to read one another’s posts and engage with each other.

Building a Better Sales Team with LinkedIn

Getting your sales team on board with a LinkedIn posting strategy shouldn’t revolve around sharing and liking company posts. As Mackenzie and the Gongsters showed, it doesn’t give you a leg up or provide the type of promotion that comes with sincere posting.

The strategy that gains traction with buyers is one that enables them to engage with your people. One that celebrates when employees share their experiences, their knowledge, their thoughts, and ideas.