You may believe that social selling won't work for your company or industry, but if you take advantage of the 4 pillars to leveraging LinkedIn for business development, you'll be surprised at how it can help you expand your reach. Brynne Tillman is the CEO and "LinkedIn Whisperer" of Social Sales Link and the author of The LinkedInSales Playbook and she has spent more than a decade coaching people to unlock the power of the platform. LinkedIn profile LinkedIn has its own social selling index so if you visit getmyssiscore.com you get your personal score, out of 100, that will rate your social selling acumen. Your LinkedIn profile is where that lies. Sellers make the mistake of using their LinkedIn profile as a resume when, in fact, it should be a resource. Corporate Visions reports that 74 percent of buyers choose the sales rep that provided value and insight early in the buyer journey. Your profile is their first impression of us, so do it right. Value Prospects don't care about your mission, your passion, or your years in business when they first visit your profile. That may matter down the road, but initially, they care about value. They care about how relevant you are. Write your summary almost like a blog post. What kind of value can you bring from the first time they read about you? Identify the challenges that your buyers are facing. Provide three to five insights that will make an immediate impact. Strive to make a "vendor agnostic" impact, meaning that you share insights they can use even if they never buy from you. Sellers often create this as a pitch and we tell them how to buy from us. What we should do instead is attract them to us. We want them to ask themselves how they can work with us. This level of value will increase your credibility and move you much more quickly through the sales cycle. Challenges If you sell office furniture, determine who your buyer is and what her biggest challenge is right now. Maybe many companies are expanding and the big challenge is the inability to trade in old furniture to get new stuff. Determine what helps you stand out and then educate your buyer. Teach your customer how to buy office furniture in a way that leans toward you as the solution, but provide insights that can help them make better decisions for the company as a whole. Take advantage of the 4 pillars to leveraging LinkedIn for business development in order to move your prospects toward doing business with you. Pillar 1: Establish your professional brand Your professional brand is your profile. By positioning your profile to provide insight and value to your buyers, you are gaining credibility and creating curiosity. You're getting them excited to take your phone call. If they can learn something just by visiting your profile, they imagine that a conversation with you will be even more valuable. Position yourself as the subject matter expert and thought leader. Pillar 2: Find the right people How are you leveraging LinkedIn to find your buyers and your influencers? If it's true that there are 6.8 people who are involved in every large buying decision, how are we identifying all the right people within an organization? Instead of limiting our efforts to just the champion, who else do we want to touch? How are we finding these people and engaging them? The prospecting piece and the relationship building piece are the same. It's a combination of providing great value and leveraging our network to get introductions to our targeted prospects and buyers. Develop search strings which are literally the title of your buyers in whatever geographic location or industry you choose. Pillar 3: Engage with insights How are we sharing content, commenting, and engaging with content? How are we using hashtags to find the right content? Are we feeding our network with really valuable information that moves them closer to our solution? It's more than just liking or sharing. LinkedIn wants to see you engaging and sharing and commenting. A