Ralf VonSosen is the Head of Marketing for LinkedIn Sales Solutions. Sales Solutions was launched at the beginning of this year to serve corporate sales department wanting to leverage LinkedIn for social selling.
The first product offered is Sales Navigator, a Premium subscription with enhanced features for prospecting. Previous to joining LinkedIn in July, Ralf was VP of Marketing for sales intelligence provider InsideView. He also held senior marketing positions with SAP, Seibel, and ecommerce companies.
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In the full audio interview, Ralf talks about trends in social selling and how LinkedIn is responding. Highlights include:
1. A year ago, social selling was overwhelming as salespeople struggled to participate on an ever-growing number of social platforms. Companies are now starting to train salespeople in order to standardize on Best Practices and platforms.
2. Ralf says his criteria for accepting a Connection invitation is that the person should be “someone I can trust to have a meaningful impact on my business.”
3. Social Selling offers new ways that Marketing and Sales and collaborate, specifically in the areas of listening and engaging in dialogue with customers.
4. He predicts that future social selling tools will consolidate sources and extrapolate the increasing amounts of data into even better sales intelligence. He cited a possible example of displaying an organization chart.
For more information on LinkedIn’s Sales Solutions visit http://marketing.linkedin.com/sales/
Who would you like to hear on future interviews? Social Selling tool vendors? Thought leading authors and speakers? Case studies from real-world practitioners? Let me know.
