Helping your contacts find you at the right time
[Ed. note: This is a guest post by Rob Gorrie, Founder of Adcentricity, on how LinkedIn provides him the right connections to like minded business professionals and how it has also brought him different opportunities since he joined. please note: check back in later tomorrow for video from last week's LinkedIn Tech Talk]LinkedIn has been an invaluable resource for me and my colleagues at Adcentricity. Whether I’m connecting with potential investors, or helping my sales team with leads, the connection LinkedIn provides to business-minded people is a veritable goldmine.
Some of my most profitable connections have come from contacts via LinkedIn. For example, I have actually had potential tier one and two investors reach out to me to discuss a potential investment in my company, Adcentricity. From a sales perspective, I have received a number of senior executives in the agency business contact me to learn more about the Adcentricity model, while also fielding a number of requests from networks that would like to partner with us because they see the value we can provide to their business.
LinkedIn is also an invaluable resource to our internal sales team. Our sales guys use my profile to browse through the high-level contacts I know as lead sources. A friendly introduction from me through LinkedIn beats a cold call any day of the week.
In short, LinkedIn is different from other online social networking tools. Every contact is there for like-minded reasons: to connect and build valuable, lasting relationships. With a network as wide as LinkedIn, every contact you need is right at your fingertips.
Tags: adcentrity-linkedin, business-development-linkedin, lead-generation-linkedin, rob-gorrie, sales-linkedin
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Amanda Cey June 11th, 2009
I find this to be very true and Linked In has been extremely valuable to my business and sales process at ABCey Events here in San Francisco. I can easily locate the proper contact at a given company and utilize my network of connections to reach out. As Rob Gorrie mentions, a friendly introduction beats a cold call any day! It has most definetly strengthened and extended my existing network better than any other social networking site.
Mark Anderson June 13th, 2009
In the pharmaceutical industry we’ve also found LinkedIn to be helpful during mergers and acquisitions. We can quickly find our current employees that previously worked for potential targets and likewise find employees of our target company that previously worked for our company. Then when the deal is finalized we have a list of people able to assess company cultural differences and facilitate various transitions.
Deepak July 2nd, 2009
Dear Rob,
I agree with you. However geographical distribution of Linkedin users is different in different countries. For example if i am looking for a business contact in China, i may get different results.
Linkedin is more US Centric. What is your opinion?
Rob Colbourn October 27th, 2009
As a new user of Linkedin, it is really interesting to see how people are using it – particularly Mark’s use – very clever.
Getting that established network of people is the challenge I am working towards at the moment – how do people recommend this is done? Does an out of the blue linkedin invite to a past customer/supplier usually work, or is it better to leverage the few initial contacts I have and work by way of introductions?