- [Neil] Hi everyone, it's Neil Patel,
and today is another day of LinkedIn unlocked,
where I break down how to generate more followers,
turn those business connections into leads and customers.
And today we're going to be breaking down
the third lesson of the week, which is B2B versus B2C.
You can, in theory, use LinkedIn for a little bit of both.
Now, if you haven't caught up with the previous lessons,
you can go to neilpatel.com/training,
click on LinkedIn Unlocked
and that's where you'll find the previous two lessons.
Now, before we get started, you have to ask yourself,
are you in the B2B space or B2C space?
And how to market each
because that'll help you generate more sales.
And we'll discuss, as I mentioned today, B2B versus B2C,
and how you can use LinkedIn for both of them.
So selling B2C includes lower price points,
shorter sales cycles, fewer decision makers,
selling direct to the consumer.
95% of your sales would typically happen on your site
or platform or in sales
and you usually don't have too much interaction with people.
Selling on B2B is a little bit different.
It's wholesale, distributions, large chain retailers,
selling to organizations, much longer sales cycle,
higher price points,
and typically 80 plus percent of the time,
you're going to be having to go through salespeople.
Since we've already covered marketing in the B2C space
in the last few modules,
this time around, we're going to be focusing on B2B.
Now, granted, it works for B2C,
but it's more effective in B2B
and in general, it's just a really public social network
that everyone should be using.
So let's take a look at the typical B2B model.
Well, in business to business,
you know, they could buy on your website,
which is a fraction of the people.
But in most cases, you're going to get a lead
that turns into a discovery call.
If the discovery call is qualified,
it then goes into strategic plan or a presentation.
And then from there,
it usually goes into a decision meeting.
There's a lot of steps in between these five boxes,
but that's usually how it ends up playing out
and your sales cycle could be six months, could be one year,
it could be two months or three months or even two weeks,
but you'll find that there's a lot of different steps
within these boxes,
and the longer the sales cycle, the more followups,
the more calls you'll have.
So with your call preparation, you need a goal for you.
Your goal is to receive lead or confirm appointment.
You want to match the prospect to ideal buyer profile.
Is a lead, a qualified lead?
What's your website, what's your budget?
How many employees do they have?
How big is that organization?
Do they need a product or service that you're offering?
You want to understand their business
cause that'll help you determine
if they're a good fit or not.
Then the goal for the prospect.
They need to know what's in it for them,
what benefits them by working with you.
Then you have your homework.
In essence, your reps need to cancel bad or fake leads
cause you're going to get them.
I don't care what industry you are,
you always get bad or fake leads.
And you want to make sure you're going through all the leads
to make sure they're high quality
and you're focusing your time
on the people that are super qualified
that you shouldn't be closing.
So the discovery call.
What's your goal for the discovery call?
Well, it should be that you want to get to know them
on a personal level.
You want to understand what products they're interested in,
and what issues and problems they have
and how you can help solve them.
The goal for the prospect is to understand their own problem
because if they don't understand their own problem,
then you're going to have a bad first call
cause they're not going to really know
how you can help them.
And usually, companies don't have issues with that,
but you want to just really emphasize what problem they have
and just double check with them
and make sure you have the correct one
because if it's wrong, then throughout the next steps,
you're going to be wasting your time.
You want to be making sure
that you teach them about the solutions you have to offer
and how it can help with their problems.
And then the homework assignment
is usually at the end of that discovery call.
You want to give them a questionnaire to them
that they fill out so you can better help them.
And you want to start developing the next steps,
which would be a call within seven days
or a week or two to review everything that you've learned
for the strategic plan.
And with the strategic plan,
your goal should be to demonstrate the business case
and the cost for the products
and the services that you're selling.
You want to show them step by step,
how you can work together to eliminate objections.
You want to create a sense of urgency by wowing them
and showing them how if they don't move forward,
they're losing time, they're losing money,
they have to end up doing wastes of cycles.
So in that way, they don't just need your solution,
but they need your solution today.
Because if there's no sense of urgency,
they can just move forward in a year or two from now.
And when they think they can do it in a year from now,
chances are they'll forget about it within that year
and never call you back.
Goal for them is to know what is the best and next steps.
They need to gain an understanding
of what is the spend going to be
and what is the exact results I get from spending that.
As for a homework assignment,
you want to recap the presentation
by emailing them what was discussed, a recording,
any action items.
If you record the presentation,
let them know in advance before you record
that you are actually recording it.
And if there is any way for them
to just purchase right then and there without contracts,
you can just send them a payment link.
For a lot of people,
it ends up being, you send them a contract.
So for my business, once we're done with our strategic plan,
we send up a contract right then and there,
so that way they have time to review it,
which then leads into a decision meeting.
And you want to identify
and resolve any main objections that they have left.
You should have identified and answered any objections
or a lot of the main ones on the strategic plan,
but still what you'll find is,
sometimes people will still have the same objections
over and over again.
That means you're not doing a good job
explaining the solution.
And if that's the case,
try different way to explain the solution.
You also want to ask for their commitment
and identify the next step if they're ready.
Goal for the prospect
is to understand the plan and the expected deliverables,
what they're exactly going to get, how it's going to work,
any the implementation or time, or costs.
And homework assignments would just be onboarding, starting.
The start date, figuring out when it's going to happen,
and of course, the welcome email or kickoff calls.
Well, now that you know how to close B2B leads,
the real question is, where do you find them?
LinkedIn is often an overlooked sales tool
when it comes to B2B marketing.
People just think it's a place where you can go
and push content,
but no, it's an amazing place for lead generation as well
and it's great for sales reps.
They have over 690 million users.
Almost all B2B prospects can be found on LinkedIn.
I want you to check out the Sales Navigator from LinkedIn
and it's a great way to help you find your target audience.
You can look up things like key words,
position that the person's in, like their title,
like a VP of marketing or CEO, or CMO, or COO,
the industry they're in, their interests, their groups.
This will all give you data and you can use this data
to tie it into your CRM
and then start shooting them off emails and messages like,
"Hey, name.
I'm looking to expand my network of marketing professionals.
Would you be open to connecting?"
It sounds simple, but a lot of people will accept that.
Try that out, copy me.
You don't have to come up with anything new.
Just use whatever's already working for me.
In sales, everything is relationship-based.
Leads take a while to close.
Whether it's 90 days or 120 days, don't be shortsighted.
Focus on the long run, help people out.
And if you want to stay and connect with them
and you want to be top of mind,
your profile is super important,
from your headshots that we already discussed
to writing well thought out descriptions,
to bringing down your skills, your endorsements,
your education.
All of that is super important
and if you don't do this right,
it's going to be harder to close these deals.
So if you haven't done this,
go check out the last lesson where I broke all of this down
and you can find it at neilpatel.com/training.
Just click on LinkedIn Unlocked
and it'll help you prepare for next week,
which we're going to go over setting up ad campaigns,
building your organic reach,
so that way you get more followers organically.
Setting up a step by step approach
to reaching out to influencers and connecting with them.
And of course, case studies,
so you get and a good understanding of who to follow,
what you can learn from them
and how you can replicate their results.
Last minute action items for you.
Go to neilpatel.com/training, click on LinkedIn Unlocked.
This is week one, the last video lesson in there
and underneath the video, you'll find two action items.
I want you to download and track your leads
with the B2B Deal Tracker
and I want you to download your B2B script
and modify it based on your products or services.
Thank you for listening in.
I look forward to helping you crush it on LinkedIn.
Next week, we'll have three more lessons for you.
Thank you for watching.