We Are Now In The Time Of The Stealth Customer 

When I was a lad, the music industry worked like this: bands toured in order to promote their records. They made money on the records. They made nothing touring, or almost nothing touring. Forty years later, that industry model has been turned on its head. Artists make almost nothing on record sales or streaming, but they can make money touring. Oh, and the real money isn’t in touring, it’s in selling merchandise while on tour!

B2B sales has had a similar change over the past thirty years. Thirty years ago, if a customer wanted to know what was going on in the industry, they read trade magazines, if they were lucky they went to tradeshows, but most of their information came from the steady stream of sales reps visiting their office. 

The internet changed that completely. These days, customers can research the products and services they  are interested in, whittle down the candidates to a select few, and then – and only then – contact the finalists to talk to a sales rep. 

I’m a case in point: last summer I bought a new big screen TV. Thirty years ago I would have known the big brand names, but other than that it was off to the audio-video store where I would see what was available, what the prices were, talk to salespeople, maybe go to a few more stores and make a decision. This past summer, I did a ton of research online. I knew what was available, I knew the specs, the prices, I could see a ton of expert reviews and crowd sourced reviews. I even knew who had a special sale going on. Then I went to the store, asked my last couple questions and bought my TV. 

One of the benefits to customers of being able to do all that research up front is that they don’t have to talk to salespeople much anymore at all. But if prospective customers aren’t going to talk to our salespeople early in the selection process, what can we do? 

Easy. Make sure we have so much good, valuable information out there that our prospective customers make the wise decision to include us in the final decision making round. You need quality content, but especially with the changes LinkedIn has made, you have to do everything you can to make sure your prospects have an opportunity to see it. 

Here are 6 ways you can use LinkedIn to do that: 

• Regularly post content that helps answer your customer’s questions. This establishes your credibility, and even if it’s reduced these days, reach is still reach.
• Use media on LinkedIn that lends itself to being “profile sticky” such as newsletters. If someone visits your profile, you want them reading your content there. Especially make use of the “Featured” section of your profile.
• Do the same on your company page if you have one. While LinkedIn will do an abysmal job of putting this content in front of LinkedIn members, the content will stay there on your company page where people can come across it. 
• Encourage engagement with your posts. Engagement does two things for you: your posts get distributed more widely, plus comments add credibility. 
• Comment on the other people’s LinkedIn posts. Not just of your prospective customers, but also of active LinkedIn users who have a big footprint. Commenting on the posts of someone with 30,000 followers to see what may come of it is a very inexpensive experiment. 
• Keep up with your connections. Raising your visibility with the people who are in a position to introduce you or recommend you to a prospect is good business. 

Customers hold the power these days, but that doesn’t mean there is nothing we can do. If you can be in the final four for twenty opportunities, I like the odds of you winning five of them. So do what you can to be among those five. These six ideas will help.