The way businesses interact with one another has taken a drastic turn in the last few years. Think about all aspects of running a large enterprise, from interviewing a potential candidate, hosting an all-employee meeting, or even reordering office stationery. What did this look like 5 years ago or even 2 years ago. We are all tired of hearing about the ways COVID has impacted our lives but it's important to recognize that there is no such thing as "business as usual" anymore.
As a professional, I started my B2B career, similar to many others in the tech industry as an inside sales representative. My day consisted of a familiar routine.. I started my day off by prepping for all of my upcoming customer meetings that I was lucky enough to secure in the books, I had some internal meetings to attend in a conference room, and I had time blocked off to tackle my cold list of leads to "dial for dollars".
Once I did connect with potential customers, the thrill was being able to meet new people, grow my network, and help them solve real business challenges. After months of "dialing for dollars" I wanted to investigate better ways to grow my network and connect with people beyond an unsolicited phone call. This is where I began to craft some of the core skills to grow my digital network.
Core Digital Networking Skill # 1 - Craft your Professional Brand Identity
One thing I pride myself on during those early days of cold calling was my ability to leverage social media to build credibility. Call it imposter syndrome, but I was a young sales representative selling technology solutions that were a bit over my head. My job, however, was to uncover problems and match solutions to those problems and to gain the trust of my audience.
To help build trust, I converted my LinkedIn profile from an online resume to that of a thought leader. I leveraged all the resources I could from my company and branded everything I could on my profile, from my headshot, cover photo, and tagline you name it. I then updated my summary to reflect the 30-second elevator pitch I sent to my customers. Now that I looked the part, I needed help driving my audience to my profile page.
Core Digital Networking Skill # 2 - Grow your Professional Network
As my online profile took shape and I continued dialing for dollars, I made it a habit to tell a prospect that I would send them a LinkedIn connection after the call. The beautiful thing about this habit is slowly I saw my connections on LinkedIn grow from the 100s to the 1000s very quickly. (Yes, I was doing a heck of a lot of cold calls).
What was interesting is that as I started to connect with potential customers at an organization, I had a much easier time getting accepted connection requests from actual decision-makers at the company.
With a growing audience of people a part of my digital network, I realized I had a massive opportunity to share information at scale and reinforce my expertise with my professional network.
Core Digital Networking Skill # 3 - Establish Thought Leadership
As I began to establish myself as a thought leader, I started to carve time out to read once a week. I would put myself in my customer's shoes and search for solutions to common challenges our customers had. This turned up a lot of 3rd party analyst articles and studies that helped reinforce my elevator pitch. I would then share these articles on LinkedIn as a post with my unique thoughts added and a couple of relevant industry hashtags.
This may seem like a lot, but honestly, it wasn't that time-consuming. I carved out 2 hours a week to do this and typically did it after lunch when I needed a break from my daily grind before I dove into afternoon cold calls. Once I got the hang of it, it wasn't hard. I found our marketing department also did this on our website, so I repurposed these articles for my LinkedIn to drive traffic to my profile.
Core Digital Networking Skill # 4 – Generate Insights
Now that I found my groove in passively creating an audience and establishing thought leadership, I began to generate lots of digital activity. This activity ranged from people liking and commenting on my posts to visiting my profile and engaging with my featured content. Now that I had gained some attention and credibility, it was time to leverage all of this hard work.
As I started to tackle my leads, I used a combination of insights generated on LinkedIn as well as some of my internal company tools to prepare an outbound pursuit at a particular customer account. I’ll give you a real life example that happened to me. This is a true story:
I had Company B on my target account list and had a couple of names of potential contacts. Before I began an engagement, I did all the digging I could to build a digital account business plan. This consisted of:
Researching their company website to understand their long-term objectives
Reading company 10k to understand potential pain points
Reviewing the account information on the company CRM tool to understand previous engagements we may have had (I have even called colleagues who used to cover the account for insights)
Building a rough org chart using LinkedIn to determine who my decision-maker was.
Connecting with key stakeholders on LinkedIn
Once I had fully prepared my data and insights, I was ready to begin a proactive engagement with this Company B, but little did I know that all the breadcrumbs I left behind led a key stakeholder to send me a message.
Core Digital Networking Skill # 5 – Digital Engagement
While I did my research on the key stakeholders, I unknowingly notified the CIO of Company B that I was looking at their profile. If you are unfamiliar, LinkedIn has a feature that allows you to browse profiles in private or public. I never set my mode to private while doing this research so this CIO saw my headshot pop up as someone who was viewing their profile. This led him to click on my profile, and they began to read some of the posts on my profile. Shorty after, this CIO sent me a simple note:
“Hi Steven, I viewed the virtual tour on your profile and thought it was intriguing. Do you by chance host in-person tours? I would love to learn more”
This was it! This was all I needed to begin the engagement. From that message, I arranged a tour and lunch for the CIO of Company B and a couple of his colleagues. This is not something the typical inside sales representative did at the company, so it was a big deal, and I was allowed to run the presentation solo. Not only did I win the deal, but we gained a lifelong customer who has brought in over $1 million in revenue and rising.
Yes, I know you might be saying this was a super lucky encounter; however, if I had not done all of the critical skills for digital networking, I would not have had this amazing opportunity. As I continued to work on my digital networking skills, I learned some more about engagement:
Engage with people who comment on your posts. This showcases you are a real person and reinforces your thought leadership persona
Be quick to redirect customers to email. Customers have jobs too, and they aren’t spending all day on LinkedIn. If you establish interest, quickly schedule a call or ask for an email to send follow-up information.
When connecting, try to add a personal note rather than a cold connection. This will help increase your acceptance rate.
Last but arguably, one of the most important pieces is to engage in LinkedIn groups. You can get very targeted with engaging an audience in your industry or persona by finding a relevant LinkedIn group to post and engage in.
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All of these skills are not the end-all-be-all for digital networking but are some tried and true ways to improve your digital network. I used these skills in my years as a sales rep and later on as a sales manager to grow my network and drive results.
If you want to dive deeper into the skills talked about above, we will be releasing a unique course dedicated to each skill above. At DNA, we are building a community where people can come together to grow their network, advance their careers and generate real business outcomes. Stay tuned for our first course in establishing your professional brand coming in early 2023!
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