LinkedIn to Grow your B2B Flooring Leads

Growing B2B leads is about making connections with people, one at a time. With the pandemic and many things turning (at least temporarily) to the virtual world, it’s important to learn how to network online.

An easy, free way to find potential leads with Linkedin without bots or automation is to study a business’s website in the flooring industry. Read their overview and then search their list of employees. This will allow you to target people according to a job title. Next, use filters for various job titles as many titles are worded differently. The filter will produce many results, which you can contact with an email.

Another approach is called Outbound Lead Generation. This cost-effective strategy involves optimizing your profile with a professional picture and headline. Then, create a list in LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator titled “Connection Request Sent”. Send this request without a message to people active on LinkedIn’s platform within the past 30 days. This ensures you are reaching out to viable contacts. Save the “Responded” list. After this, under “Follow Up List” use “saved searches” to create a targeted list. At this point, using industry filters such as “Flooring” and then title filters such as “Flooring Retailers” will generate results for you to contact before sending a message of authentic everyday language to all on this list. Sending out 50 connection requests a day can result in 400-600 new connections a month. Keep in mind that Sales Navigator is a paid-for service. You can try it out during a trial period for free to test run the system and see if it’s worth it for you.

Installing Google Chrome extensions from the Google Chrome web store is another way to generate B2B leads on LinkedIn. Linked Helper will generate free leads on LinkedIn, however, overall account activity of any kind is limited to 150 actions per 24 hours so limiting actions to these numbers is wise.

In addition, a free account on LinkedIn will allow you to use Boolean, a logic program used to find specific hyper-targeted leads. Utilizing quotation marks or not using quotation marks and utilizing the words “and” “or” and “not” in particular ways dramatically affects the search results. This system is valuable to producing precise searches for locating high-quality B2B leads on LinkedIn. Once a connection has been established, asking for a Zoom meeting, offering a free e-book, or sending them to a landing page using direct, concise language can help increase business leads. You can share with them your catalog of flooring and related products.

Connect with others in the flooring industry on LinkedIn

Since LinkedIn is the world’s largest database with more than 450 million people listed, engaging with people by commenting on their posts is a great way to establish interest and, ultimately, a business relationship. Commenting is also a way to determine if you want to move forward and connect on Linkedin with a prospective lead or not. If your decision is to build trust, then leaving positive comments and tagging them in relevant posts is a non-stressful, authentic mode of building B2B connections, one valuable person at a time.

Feel free to follow VendorPriceBook on LinkedIn! We are another tool to help you streamline communication between flooring vendor and supplier. Check us out at VendorPriceBook.com.

How Not having Streamlined Communication Can Wreak Havoc on a B2B Business

The B2B (Business-to-Business) world is steadily growing every year. In the past, B2B construction businesses relied heavily on in-person collaboration through trade shows and conferences. With the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, a shift towards digital collaboration pushed many B2B businesses out of their comfort zones. This gave the B2B world more incentive than ever to pivot to using digital platforms. Furthermore, the pandemic exposed problems that can occur when a business does not have streamlined communication within these digital platforms.

Imagine this scenario: a home supply store wants to buy flooring from a supplier. They will likely want to shop around and be able to instantly gain answers about pricing and inventory levels. While trade shows might have worked as a one-stop-shop in the past, the COVID-19 pandemic brought these to a halt. Now it’s on the home supply store to start researching flooring prices, and these are often kept in a paper price book, requiring another salesman’s time and effort on the other end of the transaction.

The Problem with Relying on Paper

Oftentimes, B2B buyers need answers fast and want to be able to quickly compare pricing between competitors. Forrester analyst Stephen Casey noted that B2B buyers who are put in immediate contact with a live salesperson (which is necessary when prices are kept in a paper/PDF price book) could be put off by that experience. Instead, buyers want to do their own element of shopping around and becoming informed on their own before being put on the spot. Creating digital elements to a company website that include company pricing and other frequently updated information can make B2B buyers feel more in control of the experience. Furthermore, it would save both companies time and resources in the long-run, since the supply company needs to staff someone to flip through the book and look up prices for each inquiry.

Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Chatbots are becoming increasingly useful for this very purpose. These are bots that can pop up once a buyer has been browsing a site for a certain number of minutes. By proactively offering pricing, these chatbots can give the buyer the answers the home supply store needs in a timely manner without having to communicate with a real person. Better yet, once the chatbot has been programmed to do this, it frees up more time for the workers on the supplier end, allowing them to be more efficient. These bots can also be updated to include the most up-to-date pricing.

Implementing Social Media

Social media can also help streamline communication and boost sales–but only when it is being used efficiently. In a study conducted last year out of Sweden’s University West, researchers examined how social media could be effectively implemented in B2B construction businesses. The primary use of social media should be to distribute product information. Beyond that, its usage seemed to help B2B businesses immensely when there was managerial involvement to promote consistency and follow-through. In the example of the home supply store and the flooring supplier, having a presence on social media to show off available products and encourage engagement could help the flooring supplier make more contacts. The home supply store could easily connect with the flooring supplier and receive pricing information, or the flooring supplier could even post this information proactively on social media.

Streamlined B2B communication is VITAL

Working Towards a Better Future for the B2B Industry

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been increased interest in how B2B businesses can better integrate digitally. Last year, a study out of Finland examined B2B construction companies in the eCommerce world. This study worked to identify what factors drove quality when it came to an emerging online presence for B2B businesses, and currently, there is even more research trying to look into what makes a B2B business an online success. As many aspects of the world have been forced to pivot to a digital space, B2B businesses must find ways to adapt as well. By streamlining communication to proactively offer more of the pricing and inventory online, B2B businesses can set themselves up for success in this new sphere.

VendorPriceBook is a web-based and online app that vendors and retailers in the flooring industry use to connect on-the-spot. Try out VendorPriceBook for free at vendorpricebook.com.