LinkedInformed Podcast. The LinkedIn Show

Welcome to episode 126, this week was a special week for me as I had the opportunity to attend a two day InStruct course at LinkedIn’s office in London.

In this episode I want to address two topics;

  1. The experience of spending time with LinkedIn
  2. An update on Sales Navigator

InStruct is a training programme designed to assist those responsible for implementing and managing the adoption of Sales Navigator in their organisation. It is in effect a ‘train the trainer’ course but is really aimed at corporate in-house trainers rather than an independent external trainer such as myself.

Sales Navigator is a premium upgrade version of LinkedIn designed for sales professionals with a focus on a social selling methodology.

LinkedIn London

In the 8 years I have been a LinkedIn trainer my relationship with LinkedIn has had it’s ups and downs.

In the early days of the London office I met some great people who I developed trusting and productive relationships with.

Things seemed to change around 2011 when the company went through an IPO and people like me seemed to be ostracised, I still had contact with LinkedIn but always felt a sense of distrust, defensiveness and blatant secrecy from them.

So you can imagine that I was feeling an interesting mix of excitement and trepidation as I signed in as a visitor this week.

First impressions were equally mixed, the reception area was very cool with funky iPads required to sign in that sent a message to the person you were visiting, on the negative side though part of the signing in process involved signing an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) which immediately had me wondering if nothing had really changed beneath the surface!

And then I met Miguel and Donna.

The amazing Miguel and Donna at the traditional London phonebox in LinkedIn London’s reception.

I can’t speak highly enough about Miguel and Donna. They both have a deep understanding of social selling and a genuine passion for LinkedIn, they also made me feel extremely welcome and valued.

Within an hour all my reservations about secrecy and distrust were dissipated.

These guys are great ambassadors for LinkedIn because they are honest, open, funny and  knowledgable.

Cultures do not change overnight and I’m sure there are plenty of things that LinkedIn can still improve but if these two are an example of the ‘New LinkedIn’ then we have a lot to look forward to (so long as Microsoft don’t decide to change things!).

The offices are some of the nicest I have seen (and I have seen many), each floor has a different theme but all based around London/England.

We spent time is a Musical themed room, a Fish and chip shop room, a Sweet shop room and my favourite of all, the classically English ‘afternoon tea’ room.

On the second day I had to deliver a 30 minute presentation on Sales Navigator that was assessed, a score below 70% would result in failing the course so I spent some time the night before practising!

Fortunately I managed to pass with flying colours - Can you image the embarrassment if I failed?!

So now I just have to complete a post course assignment and I will be a LinkedIn-approved Sales Navigator Trainer!

Whilst that will be nice, the most important goal for me was to establish a more productive relationship with LinkedIn and thanks to the attitude of Miguel and Donna, I’m confident that has been achieved.

Sales Navigator

This is an update to my original review of Sales Navigator (SN) in episode 83.

The main difference I see now is that they have improved on the most important element of this social selling tool - focus!
LinkedIn can be a very distracting place and sales people often have a tendency to get easily distracted so LinkedIn have worked hard to ensure that a Sales Navigator user can stay on the SN platform all the time without having to keep flicking back to Linkedin.

This is critical and I’m impressed that LinkedIn have improved it in this way.

The home page in SN has no distractions, just a stream of updates, comments and news articles from and about saved leads (people) and Accounts (companies).

You can create status updates of your own (including images) from the SN interface and comment and like your leads and accounts updates. The only thing you can’t do is create a published post, which is probably the next thing they will address.

I also gained a better understanding of the unique TeamLink function.

TeamLink helps you find the strongest path to someone you’d like to meet by
showing you the best routes to an introduction. Those routes can be through
your direct connections or via others on the sales team, even if you
aren’t directly connected.

For instance if a colleague in your sales team used to work at ABC plc and during that time your target (prospect) also worked there then SN will show your college as a TeamLink introduction opportunity. They (prospect & colleague) do not have to be connected, just ex colleagues.

Again this is only likely to be required in large sales teams but in effect you are growing your range of possible introductions exponentially.

Unfortunately they still have a separate inbox for SN, the argument also being focus but I have a problem with this.

What happens if an individual sends you a message on LinkedIn enquiring about your services?

This message will land in the messaging area of mainstream LinkedIn.com and if you are spending all your time in SN then you might miss something critical. They do provide a link in SN to messages but it does not indicate you have an unread message as it does for replies to your messages sent from the SN Inbox.

My sense is that this is far too convoluted to work and a more simply unified inbox is required.

They have also added tags and notes to profiles in SN and the likelihood is that these will become a lot more useful (maybe searchable) although at the moment they are for information only.

I still take issue with their pricing though, It is pretty clear that LinkedIn are focussing on Enterprise clients and the pricing reflects this, especially now that they have removed the Navigator Basic account that I currently have.

Conclusion

If a company with a substantial sales team (over 50) is serious about social selling then I believe Sales Navigator is a no brainer. The tool os designed to help you win more customers through greater engagement and introductions.

For smaller businesses the verdict is less clear. If they still had the Basic level product and pricing I would be more tempted to recommend it but at £650 per year for each user, it’s a much closer call.

Social selling is relevant and important to all B2B businesses, large and small but LinkedIn are just not (yet) focussed on SME’s.

So I’m on the fence but it’s definitely worth taking a months free trial.

As for Recruitment, if you believe your job is about finding people and advertising jobs then Recruiter or Recruiter Lite are your most suitable upgrades. If however you believe that relationships are key to successful recruitment (as I do) then I actually think SN is more tailored to your needs. It also has a fantastic search function plus a reasonable InMail allowance but most importantly it focuses on what is more important - people and engaging with them.

If I had my old job back and was running a 30 consultant recruitment business, I would be investing in Sales Navigator licences.

 

Direct download: LinkedInformed_126.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:54am UTC

Welcome to episode 125, I’m back from an amazing holiday in Italy and the English Cotswolds so plenty to catch up on this week……

Whilst away my Linkedin messages built up and it occurred to me that LinkedIn could really do with  an ‘out of office’ auto reply feature similar to that which you get with emails. LinkedIn is unique in that being work related, people are less likely to login whilst they are on holiday.

LinkedIn are renown for copying features from other social media sites but on this one I would like to see them innovate.

What do you think?

Autopilot

Due to a string of problems I have stopped using Autopilot for LinkedIn and can no longer recommend it. I still believe in the idea of auto viewing though and I am looking into a couple of alternatives.

I will keep you informed.

The data scraping bots issue

LinkedIn sues 100 individuals for scraping user data from the site

LinkedIn suffers huge bot attack that steals members’ personal data

 

LinkedIn are saying very little about this but the lawsuit they have filed suggests they are trying to discover the names of people who have created false accounts and used sophisticated bots to circumnavigate LinkedIn’s security to obtain information that is being sold on. I suspect this might be email addresses or possibly full profiles for out of network members.

It could be that some extensions or 3rd party products are involved (although none have been mentioned anywhere), I noticed that the email finder extension Prophet have revamped their terms of use - coincidence?

 

LinkedIn Quietly Publish 2nd Qtr results

These results were released with little fuss and no earnings call, I assume because of the proposed Microsoft takeover. After all investors really don’t care how well they are doing now that a price has been agreed!

I still care though as the quarterly results are one of the best ways of finding out what is going on at Linkedin.

Highlights

  • Members grow to 450m
  • Unique visitors plateau at 106m
  • Revenue $933 (31% yoy growth)
  • Revenue split was 64% Talent solutions, 19% marketing, 16% premium (Mostly Sales Navigator)
  • No word on member growth in China but given the slow down of overall member growth I assume it’s not that impressive.
  • 59% of LinkedIn traffic is via mobile

Links;

 

The financials spreadsheet

2nd quarter announcement

The Welcome Return of the Hashtag

A few years ago LinkedIn had a wonderful feature called LinkedIn Signal. It was a very popular tool that allowed you to search for status updates via keywords and is still greatly missed.

The good news is that we can now search status updates again via hashtag searches.

This is important for two reasons;

  1. You can use hashtag searches for research purposes to find people that are posting content about subjects that are important to you. This is a great way to find information and new contacts to expand your network.
  2. Your updates have a greater chance of being found if you remember to use a hashtag.

It’s not as good as Signal was but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

The only downside is that the hashtag only becomes active (a tappable link that creates a search) on the mobile app.

This may just be a feature they are testing so it might disappear or it might be rolled out to desktop soon as well….let’s hope so!

In the meantime I would advise adding hashtags (just a couple) to every status update you post.

LinkedIn Influencer Videos

A big fuss was made about this while I was away…personally I think it’s rubbish!

So someone from LinkedIn sends out a question to a select list of Influencers who (via a specific new app) post a short 30 second reply….whoopdeedoo!

Don’t get me wrong, this could be a positive move if LinkedIn A) roll it out to all members and B) allow people to post what they want (rather than answer a stupid questions such as the shown one below)

What’s the first thing you do every morning to prepare for the day?

 

Direct download: LinkedInformed_125.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:30am UTC

Welcome to episode 124, this week I’m relaxing in Italy on vacation so I thought I would pre-record this episode of questions that I have been asked recently.

Below are the 5 questions I covered in this episode, you will need to listen to the audio for the answers.

Question 1


I recently decided to get rid of some dead wood connections, people that I'll never speak to that I either don't remember connecting with, or when I first joined and didn't really know what I was doing. I managed to get rid of 2000 people, mostly overseas, and now my news feed is looking better, and more relevant. I have noticed one significant change though, when I had around 5,000 connections, I'd get maybe one person sending me connections requests every week, they could be anything from people I actually recruit for, or SEO specialists wanted to sell to me. Now however, since dropping a couple of thousand people, I'm getting about 8 per day, which seems very strange. Do you know if the less connections you have, the more you appear in searches, or that people can find you easier? I've never heard anything like that but that's all I can think of Any clues would be greatly appreciated.

Question 2

Hi Mark, as an active job seeker I am curious to know what Recruiters think of LinkedIn endorsements?

Question 3

Hello Mark, I have a question I hope you can answer.
I am wanting to add links to several web pages with Lead boxes.
I have tried to do this under my summary but the thumbnail image is the same for all three. How can I change the image that LinkedIn selects?
Thank you.

Question 4

Hi Mark, I have a question about invitations.
Where can you see a list of people who you have sent an invitation to connect?
Thanks

Question 5

Hi Mark,
I want to change my status to read ‘open to opportunities’ but I can’t recall where this is done.
Can you help?


That’s it for this week. If you have any questions please feel free to send me a voicemail (link on the right edge of this page) or email me at mark@linkedinformed.com.
In case you are curious, the website I used for the voices in this episode is http://www.fromtexttospeech.com/

Direct download: LinkedInformed_124.mp3
Category:general -- posted at: 8:30am UTC

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