Are you always on the look-out for new leads? Do you wish there was a way that your hot new leads could find you, instead of you having to mine through mountains of data to find them yourself – a painstaking process that can be both time-consuming and disheartening? There is! LinkedIn is already known as 'social media for business' with professionals in many fields sharing their experiences and skills, finding new jobs and setting up new businesses, but LinkedIn offers so much more than passive social media. The site also offers LinkedIn Training, a premium service which can provide you with the skills you need to complete your job profile – and help you generate a lot of hot leads besides! Here is how it works.
When you first log in to LinkedIn Training you can choose the skills you want to learn, or brush up on. Even if you have certification in the topic already, going through a LinkedIn Training course is still worthwhile as it adds a verification symbol next to your stated skills. This will reassure prospective leads that you know your stuff to industry approved standards – something that they cannot always be certain of when people self-certify as to their experience and knowledge.
When a prospective lead is actively searching for someone like you, they will usually prefer to work with someone who is actively engaged with self-improvement and who stay on top of the latest advances and developments in the field. LinkedIn Training certifications are a quick and easy way of keeping your skills fresh so you can talk knowledgeably about the newest innovations in your field.
Perhaps the biggest advantage that LinkedIn Training can offer you is that once you have worked your way through the various courses in your field, with perhaps branching out to other skills that you feel necessary, hot leads will come your way because – in the holy grail of business networking – they are actively searching for someone with your skillset and know that LinkedIn standards are high, and that anyone with verified LinkedIn Training credentials will have the skills they claim to have.
Networking is hard, with almost everyone out to sell their own services without wanting to invest their time or money in helping others get along in their business. This is quite understandable, and yet it is counterproductive. If a small group of emerging businesses work together to support each other, they will have a much greater reach than each of them could manage alone. To use an analogy, it is similar to when a manager wrote all the names of his employees on balloons, and told them all to find their own name, setting a timer for ten minutes. When the time was up, no one had found their balloon. He reset the timer and told them to help one another find their names: this time all the balloons were distributed within five minutes!
Business networking is very similar: if a client asks about a service you do not offer, it is excellent service to be able to give them a name or two from your LinkedIn Training network. LinkedIn Training will recommend connections based on courses you have looked at, so you can build up a solid network of potential partners fairly easily. Not only does this help your fellow business, it gives the client a good feeling about you – and will encourage them to recommend you in turn. Your fellow business, too, will recommend you and just like that, you have two new sources of hot leads, just from mentioning a name! That's a good return on your minor investment of time.