LinkedIn Updates for September 2015 - Ep. 072

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman get back on Blab.im to discuss some of the recent changes to LinkedIn. They discuss the new inbox update that is being rolled out. Martin has already received the update and Greg is still waiting. But Greg is seeing a slightly new layout and menu bar and Martin is not.  They discuss their findings when Martin sent an animated GIF to Greg via the new messaging inbox but Greg wasn’t able to see the GIF.

They also discuss how LinkedIn’s recent business decisions are less than desirable. This includes how LinkedIn is slowly closing out the developer community and trying to expand it’s market reach. That leads Greg to address the the rise of “market-type social networks” and how they will pick at LinkedIn like how speciality retailers have picked apart Wal-Mart’s business.

Audio Run-time: 26:48

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

Social Selling Blab with Julio Viskovich of rfactr - Ep. 071

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman blab with Julio Viskovich of rfactr about social selling and how critical is it for sales people to have approved content curated for them by Marketing.

This episode of the Linking into Sales Social Selling podcast was recorded using the live video chat platform, Blab.im. Blab is a fast rising video chatting platform that competes with Google Hangouts on Air. Martin and Greg did a test run the night before and found it very engaging.

The discussion includes some questions from the audience including how to define social selling, the importance of social selling training and the metrics you should be monitoring to determine the effectiveness of your social selling program.

Audio Run-time: 54:17

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

Social Selling Enterprise Adoption 2015 Update - Ep. 070

Greg Hyer, Martin Brossman and Elyse Archer speak with Peoplelinx CMO, Michael Idinopulos, about their social selling tool and their 2015 social selling survey regarding enterprise adoption.

Elyse Archer is a new addition to the podcast. She is a sales coach and a digital marketer. Greg and Martin feel that her experience would be a great addition to Linking into Sales. Look for her to join Greg and Martin on future shows.

The Peoplelinx platform recommends the right actions for a sales person to take when it comes to the relationship with the prospect or customer. Peoplelinx is not a replacement for the sales professional. Rather, they enable the sales person with data that leads to a positive outcome. There is a proprietary predictive AI under the hood that does a bit of behavioral learning based on previous engagement results.

In the 2015 State of Social Selling Survey:

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]73% of B2B Sales professionals think that social has value for selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]31% say it’s part of their sales process. [/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]26% understand how to do social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]More in their 30’s and 40’s are having difficulty with social selling than millennials and boomers.[/list_item][/list]

 

Is there an issue within Sales Management encouraging social selling activities? Possibly.  It appears that the main challenge is that sales management doesn’t know enough about social selling to train or measure performance.

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]Only 22% of B2B employers encourage social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]11% of B2B sales professionals get employer paid training in social selling.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]6% of employers measure social selling activities[/list_item][/list]

 

Does social selling training actually help the organization? We think the results are pretty clear. Those that get training outperform those that don’t.

[list][list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]38% of B2B Sales teams that don’t received social selling training say they had recent business influenced by social.[/list_item]

[list_item icon=” icon-caret-right”]74%of B2B Sales teams that did received social selling training say they had recent business influenced by social[/list_item][/list]

 

Please visit Peoplelinx to get the full State of Social Selling 2015 report.

Audio Run-time: 25:35

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

Social Listening with Mik Lernout of Sales Prodigy - Ep. 069

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman talk with Mik Lernout of Sales Prodigy about social listening for social selling. Sales Prodigy is mobile app available for iOS and Android. The app notifies you when someone you are following on Twitter tweets an update that includes a keyword or hashtag you are following. In addition, the app will scan articles shared in tweets to see if the keywords or hashtags are mentioned.

Mik Lernout is originally from Belgium and has lived in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for the past few years. He came to Vancouver to work for a startup in a tech role and found himself on the road with sales people. During this time he developed a deep appreciation for the people and the profession. This experience led him to create an application that helps sales people with social listening on social networks like Twitter and Instagram.

During the recording, Mik announced that Sales Prodigy would be releasing an integration with Hootsuite, the social media management platform. This integration will create a feed of those tweets you see in the Sales Prodigy app in your Hootsuite account. Look for the app to be released before the end of August 2015.

Greg and Martin understand how important social listening is for social selling. This episode should help you understand the value you can pull out of Twitter with an app like Sales Prodigy. It’s a great app for both inside sales teams and outside sales pros.

Audio Run-time: 49:17

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

How Do I Export My LinkedIn Connections Email Addresses

Below is the transcript from the video “How to Export your Contacts and Email Addresses from LinkedIn.”

“Hello my name is Greg Hyer, cohost the Linking in Sales Social Selling Podcast. Today is Monday, July 27th 2015 and today I’m going to show you how to export your LinkedIn connections.

“Last week LinkedIn actually pulled the ability for you to export your connections. And through reaction from the community both on Twitter and via an email barrage into customer support, LinkedIn has actually reversed their decision and has turned on the ability for you to export your connections.

“Now, it is important to keep in mind that LinkedIn is a platform that you don’t own and you should know how to take and export your contacts, your first degree connections from LinkedIn in the event that they decide to pull the plug on this in the future. Which it’s pretty likely that they will because they are looking for faster ways to make information available to users but also they want to limit the amount of misuse of LinkedIn.

“Anyways, besides that LinkedIn has a very incredible strategy. It is still one of the best b2b marketing platforms and selling platforms that are out there. So I strongly recommend to continue to use it but at least understand how to export your connection. So that’s where we’re going to do today.

“Right now you’re looking at my profile page. If you click on profile you will actually be able to see your profile page as well. So, let’s go over to the menu bar and click on “Connections.” And from here you’ll see a list of all of your recent connections that you’ve had if your Facebook and Twitter accounts and Gmail accounts are all connected into your LinkedIn account. Then you will also see your most recent interactions here first.

“So, what we’re gonna do is go over to the “Settings” gear button, which is on the right hand side, and click on that button there. And you will see a list of all the API connections that are coming in and out of your LinkedIn account. For example, you have your LinkedIn connections, your Gmail account, your Google contacts, Google Calendar Yahoo accounts going all the way down to other applications and such. Okay? So look over the right hand column. Click on, underneath “Advanced Settings,” click on “Export LinkedIn Connections.” Alright. You’ll be taken into an option to export depending on a file format that you want.

“Your options are going to be Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo Mail, Mac OS Address Book and the vCard file format. The first three, the two Outlook formats and Yahoo Mail are all CSV file formats. Those will open up in Excel. The vCard format is very easy to import into Mac address book on your Mac OS as well the file will open up in Excel. If you’re importing into Outlook I suggest using the Microsoft Outlook format.

“What it does and what each of these formats do is actually put the correct headers at the top up the spreadsheet so that way when imports it can properly map the fields correctly in your address book. If you’re using Gmail or Google Apps, the mail application there or Google Contacts, I recommend using Microsoft Outlook CSV file format because it will matchup those fields automatically too.

“Alright. So, go ahead and click on Microsoft Outlook and hit export now. I when I first did this when I was running through this before recording this video, it did come up with a captcha screen which wanted you to verify that you are not a robot. It had a little image and it said to type in the numbers that you see here. Just enter in that information and go. That’s a security feature to help prevent the bots from going into somebody’s account and downloading that information automatically.

“What you just saw here is my file was downloaded and if I open it up in Excel, which I am not going to do here for the demo, because it shows people’s email addresses it will actually give you five pieces of information from the LinkedIn contact record those five are first name, last name, email address, company name and their job title. Things like their location, our country there in, what industry that there in or anything like that does not come out of your LinkedIn account. That is very unfortunate but that’s why there are third-party tools like Nimble.com for you to take and capture that information when you’re viewing the person’s profile.

“So, what you do for example is taking a CSV file imported into Nimble. Just goto Nimble.com. It’s about fifteen dollars a month. Go into Nimble and import your connections and then go back out to your LinkedIn account and as you’re interacting with with folks as reaching out to folks, you can synchronize information using the Google Chrome extension. Which you can see, I have here on my Google Chrome toolbar. I’m not signed into it right now but take a look at that. It’s a very, very cool tool. I think you get a quick trial of the software before signing up.

“You can also take and import, like I said, import into Microsoft Outlook. I believe Outlook has a Social Connector where it can pull in some additional information there for you too. I recommend taking a look at information because as someone who is in social selling having that additional information is always very handy when having a conversation was somebody new somebody trying to develop a professional relationship with.

“Once again, my name is Greg Hyer, co-host of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast. Please subscribe to us on iTunes and YouTube and Stitcher, Tunein and Player.FM. We also welcome all of your emails and questions and things that you like to see, anything here on the podcast. Head out to LinkingIntoSales.com and fill out the Contact Us form and we’ll get that information right back to you.

“Thank you very much and have a great day.”

LinkedIn Removes, then Reenables Connection Exporting - Ep. 068

In this episode of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast, Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman discuss the latest gaff by LinkedIn and what this means for users. LinkedIn quietly removed the ability for users to export their connections, including email addresses. Instead, users were told they would have to put in a request to get their data and wait up to 72 hours for an export. There was instant backlash and the next day, LinkedIn reenabled the feature. You can read more about this on VentureBeat.com:  “LinkedIn quietly removes tool to export contacts, makes users wait up to 72 hours for their data archive.

Greg walks you through how to export your connections. You can see his full tutorial on YouTube: “How to Export your Contacts and Email Addresses from LinkedIn.”

Martin talks about his favorite app, Pocket. Pocket is a bookmarking tool that makes it very easy to save links to online content and access it from your phone, tablet or another computer. He mentions a new feature that Pocket introduced, narration. Now, Pocket will read you the article that you’ve saved, making it easier to consume content on the road. You can learn more about Pocket and it’s Google Chrome extension at http://www.getpocket.com

Audio Run-time: 15:17

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

Social Selling and Hashtags - Ep. 067

Greg Hyer and Martin Brossman discuss using hashtags on social platforms and at conferences to help with your social selling activities.

Hashtags are used on social platforms to make it easier to find a discussion. They are utilized at conferences, for Twitter chats, to categorize shared content or as side comments. They are a great tool for social sellers to use to identify discussions and to brand themselves as an expert resource in their field.

Here are some links mentioned in the discussion:

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake #Hashtag skit on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

“Newsjacking” by David Meerman Scott

“How to Use Hashtags” by Martin Brossman

Join the conversation about this episode on Twitter using #LinkingSales67

Greg and Martin are making progress on the development on an online Social Selling Training program and expect to launch it this fall. Please stay tuned for future updates.

Run-time: 27:07

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.

The Rog Bates Interview - How to use Comedy in Sales - Ep. 066

In this episode of the Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast, Martin Brossman talks with Rog Bates, who teaches standup comedy, how salespeople can use comedy to break the ice and create new business relationships. Don’t miss this show because there’s a ton of great info you can use right away!

Run-time: 42:02

The Linking into Sales Social Selling Podcast is a professional development podcast geared towards sales and marketing professionals that use social media tools and networks to support the sales process and help them become more proficient in social selling.