1. Are you ?
Thoughts and experience of building a sales network
August 2008

2. Why do I like to be LinkedIn?
 My direct connections – 622
 2° of Separation – 77,300+
 3° of Separation – 3,691,500+
 When I search, I can see names, designations, job description, many
times the entire resume of 3,769,400+ people. This is just 15% of
people on LinkedIn…imagine the potential
 My connections are in 60 industries and 79 locations
 Profile of my connections…CEOs – 15; VPs – 55; Director of
Engineering – 8; and so on
 It feels great to be 2 degrees away from Prince of Wales, Barak
Obama and John McCain!
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3. Did you know?
 The average number of LinkedIn connections for people who work
at Google is forty-seven
 The average number for Harvard Business School grads is fifty-eight
 All 500 of the Fortune 500 are represented in LinkedIn. In fact, 499 of
them are represented by director-level and above employees
 Bay area has the densest concentration of users
 97% of LinkedIn users join based on invitations from existing
members
 San Francisco-based executive headhunter Ron Bates has the most
LinkedIn connections with 33,540 direct contacts
 The average LinkedIn user is 39 and makes $139,000 a year
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4. 6 LinkedIn Sales Techniques
1) Build target executive lists
2) Finding out what the person is working on
3) Gather information about companies
4) Browse tons of competitive information
5) Target in non-obvious ways …want a golf partner at a major
account?
6) Leverage ‘People you may know’ feature
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5. The Network Effect
 What does connection hierarchy mean? Six Degrees of Separation -
it is all statistics
 Focus on the absolute size of your network
 Why does size matter?
 The larger your network – the more people you can see
 The larger your network – the more people that can see you
 The larger your network – the more people you can search or
touch
 Two philosophies of network building
 Trusted networks – smaller but more referenceable
 Connected networks – larger but non referenceable
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6. What we often overlook
 Don’t just restrict your circle to your company – reach out to friends
in school/colleague, ex-colleagues, your neighbor, customers, the
guy/gal you had coffee with…
 Use LinkedIn search effectively. You can have structured,
unstructured or a combination search
 Every time someone accepts your invitation, go checkout his/her list
of contacts…you will be surprised how many people you know
 Get into relevant groups. Advantage – you can see all group
members even though you are not connected and they feature in
your search results
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7. Happy Hunting!
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