I’ve already written about using LinkedIn for business and this article is great for people who are just starting out with LinkedIn. Now I want to talk about using LinkedIn as one of your essential tools to really lift your business, and help you make the most of your networking.

You can use LinkedIn as a business development tool in many different ways. Here are the three I want to concentrate on here:

• Developing your status as an expert and a lovely person
• Reach out with your brand
• More direct business development

Developing your status as an expert and a lovely person

I’m assuming that you have already given some thought to your profile, and that you’re keeping it up to date. Lovely photo, you look good there, by the way.

The next thing to do is to develop a good number of testimonials on your LinkedIn profile page. I just had a look at a handful of my LinkedIn contacts, and they averaged 3 recommendations, which is not enough to form a decision on. 3 recommendations looks a little half hearted. Potential clients will be looking at your LinkedIn profile, and trying to decide if you’re the person they should work with. So you need to make sure that other people are telling them that they should give you lots of money. LinkedIn is the perfect place to get people to write good things about you.

Remember that you want a good handful of recommendations, don’t be one of those people that have hundreds of recommendations as no one will ever read them, and it’s either going to look like complete overkill, or like you’ve spent your life asking people to recommend you. I have 20 on my page, which is more than enough to tell you that I’m one of the good guys.

Reach out with your brand

You want people in your network to remember you, understand what you do, and think well of you. That way, they will recommend you, buy from you and create opportunities. And LinkedIn can be a fantastic tool for reminding people of who you are, and getting a chance to get your brand in front of some new people.

If you’ve only really been using LinkedIn as an online cv, and a way of collecting some contacts, you’ll probably have missed some of the great new features they’ve been adding. Have a look around at some of the LinkedIn groups and work out which ones apply to you, and are relatively active. By joining up, you’ll be able to see what other people are up to, and learn what’s going on. It’s better to lurk a little first to get the hang of things, and then start joining in debates or helping out with referrals and advice.

More direct business development

One of the things I often recommend to clients is to put together a hit list of the people they want to work with – your target clients. I’ve just done this with a client who wants to sell to businesses based in Brighton who do business outside the city, for example. We’ve now got a spreadsheet of names to start contacting. Now, I wouldn’t advise using LinkedIn to contact these people – you need to be a lot more subtle than that in your hunt. However, LinkedIn is invaluable in finding the people you want, and getting lots of interesting information about them.

Maybe you know that you want to sell something to Giraffe Ltd. You know from their website that Mr Frog works there. So you look up Mr Frog on LinkedIn, and find out that he used to work for Hippo Ltd, and where your friend Ms Lioness still works. So not only do you know exactly what Mr Frog and Giraffe Ltd do, and that he is the right person to talk to, you can also ask Ms Lioness to either introduce you, or if this isn’t appropriate (maybe Ms Lioness doesn’t know him that well) she can give you some more really valuable information, such as does he like phone or email, or where does he hang out.

This approach only works well if you’re looking for high value business to business sales, but in this area LinkedIn can be a remarkable tool.

I wrote recently about the businesses I can’t help, so I thought it was only fair to write about whom I can help.  It’s tempting to write this as a sales pitch, but I’ll resist temptation and try to be more objective instead. My strap line is that I help small businesses who want to be bigger businesses.  I specialise in businesses with less than 30 employees because the smaller businesses are the sexy exciting ones. The businesses where I can make the most difference are the ones where the owner is committed to growth, and knows that he or she needs some help and support to get there.  Where the owner wants to get to be a bigger business, but doesn’t really know how to go about it. Imagine a two-person design partnership.  They’ve developed some demand, and have some good clients, but they are uncertain how to move from doing all the work themselves to being able to manage other people doing the work.  If you’ve read any of Michael Gerber’s Emyth books then you’ll know that there’s a key growth stage in stopping doing the work yourself, and getting others to do the work, while you become responsible for developing and running the business.  The temptation for our design company is to carry on doing all the work themselves, getting more and more worn out by servicing clients, or by not spending any time on marketing, they risk running out of new business.  Or both. In this situation I can:

• Identify what sort of work the lovely designers need to go after
• See what how they need to price their work to remain competitive, but have enough to be able to afford to pay other people to do the production and improve their profits
• Help them work out what marketing activities are going to work best for them
• Refocus them on marketing, so they can attract new clients
• Make sure they do the marketing, by being there and reminding them of what they promised to do

Of course, my lovely designers could do all of this themselves, but what do they get extra by paying me to help them? I’d say they get:

• The courage to charge more money
• Some fantastic new ideas about marketing, which they maybe wouldn’t have been able to come up with themselves, because I spend all my time seeing what works and stealing other people’s tactics
• Someone to be accountable to – so they can’t just slip back to their old habits, but are reminded that now we’re doing business in a different way.
• Someone who gives a damn.  This sounds obvious, but how often do you have someone who actually really cares about whether you succeed or fail, and have that person be someone who knows what they’re talking about.

Let’s take another scenario, this time of a bigger business.  Here’s a company which has been running for a while.  They have 12 staff, so they’ve got over the delegation issue, and they’re nicely profitable.  But, the director knows that she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life running this business – at the moment it’s still fun, but she wants to sell up in 3 years time.  And, she wants to have enough money to do something else after that, or to do nothing at all for a while.  In fact, she knows that she wants to sell for upwards of £1.5m. Why would she want to get the woman with the curly hair and glasses in? Our director (we’ll call her Alice) needs some help to achieve her target of a sale in 3 years with a price tag of £1.5m.  Where I can help is:

• Assessing how much turnover and profit she needs to bring in to make the business worth that million and a half, and make sure that the business is working in a way which will maximise the sale value.
• Working on a much bigger marketing strategy to build up the business
• Helping with the recruitment of a really hot sales director to bring in the big sales which are going to add up.
• Supporting Alice in all the little problems that come with growing a business, so she’s got someone to go through things with her.  Again, this is about giving a damn, and getting help from someone who has been through this themselves.

That should give you an idea of the sort of businesses I work with and how I make a difference.  If you would like to talk about how I can help, you know where I am.