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Use LinkedIn To Grow Your Business
Jul 2, 2009 Book Reviews Comments
There is this nifty little book called ‘How to REALLY use LinkedIn’ by Jan Vermeiren that tells you all of the secrets to making money, and building up your network, with the social networking site/tool LinkedIn. And I must say that it works so well that I’ve spent the last 6 days catching up on the 600+ emails I received after doing what Jan said. And I just did the first thing – he’s got a series of steps to really dig in and do a whole marketing campaign.
Jan tells you what to say, how to say it, and, most importantly, how to manage the technology to get out large mailings to invite folks into your network. He’s got these nifty tips and work-arounds that allow users to do great stuff to find the right people to connect with, use their connections, and develop a whole marketing strategy using social networking. The book is simple to use, easy to read, and fun. And it really works. As a result of my now extended network (last week I had 146 connections, and now I have almost 1000 and it’s still growing), I got a potential investor, two speaking engagements, 6 possible new partners, several potential clients, and unfortunate correspondence from and old lover or two. Read More..
My friend Tony is such a lovely blend of New Yorker, Buddhist, and smart, funny guy. Did I say he’s really REALLY smart? He’s the person who coined the term VITO and wrote the series starting with 
“The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?” in “all the topics” that interest you. We do this by collecting the headlines of the latest stories from the best sites and blogs that cover a topic. We group these collections — “aggregations” — into individual web pages. Then we display the five most recent headlines of the information sources as well as their first paragraph. Alltop is an information filter to help you find your nuggets of gold.” 
When I began talking about ‘helping buyers buy’, or ‘decision facilitation’ in 1988, people thought I was a bit eccentric, to say the least. “I help buyers buy too,” I used to hear. “I find out what they need, position my solution in a way they understand that it will resolve their pain, and give them a good price.” And this has basically been the accepted norm throughout the history of sales. Except, of course, sales fails 90% of the time. So something is broken that we don’t really talk about.
As sellers, we forget that when buyers make a purchasing decision, they are bringing our solution into their environment. And, trust me on this, their environment is not sitting and waiting around for us to show up.
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