If you are in business development, and looking to leverage LinkedIn for Social Selling, than a call-to-action(CTA) of Contact me for more information isn’t going to cut it.

1. First, you have to figure out what outcome you are looking to get from your LinkedIn efforts. My standard CTA is almost always a phone call with people who are interested in improving their LinkedIn profile and social selling skills. A CTA could be getting people to download your eBook or sign up for your newsletter or maybe simply connect with you on LinkedIn. But without a doubt you need to be clear on what you are looking to drive. For the sake of the rest of this post, I will focus on securing phone calls as the CTA.
2. Next, you have to word your “ask” in a way that benefits your audience. Mine is: If you are in need of leveraging LinkedIn for prospecting, professional branding and/or networking I invite you have a conversation. Whether or not we decide to do business together, I am confident that our call will be full of insights and actionable steps that can help you grow your business. Here is a link to my calendar http://scheduleacallwithbrynne.com/ please pick a time that works best for you.
3. Add your CTA to your LinkedIn profile at the end of an insightful summary that has them thinking differently about their own company, situation or industry. The key is you have to earn the right to ask for the call, so if you haven’t offered significant value your CTA will not be effective.
4. Add your CTA in a welcome message. Every time you connect with someone send them your message with your “ask”. Not everyone will bite, but the ones that you resonate with will be intrigued and take action.
5. Running Your First Call the Right Way – This is where it can fall apart quickly, so pay very close attention. This call is about them, it is about delivering on your promise of offering insights, it is NOT a sales call…yet. Here is how your call should go:

• “I am looking forward to our call today, we have set aside 15 minutes and before I jump into my agenda, I’d like to ask what you are hoping you take away from our conversation?”
• If they have an answer – follow their need
• If they say, “nope, you asked for the call and I was curious, you”…  answer “Great, my goal today is that at the end of our call you hang up feeling that this was time well spent. Per my request I wanted to share some insights on how you and your team could use LinkedIn and Social Selling more productively, for me to get that right for you, could I ask you a few questions first?”
• Your questions need to lead to answers that you can offer insights on the spot. My questions are often things like, “Are your sales reps getting enough Client Referrals?” When the answer is always no, I mention briefly – “Ah, here is a good quick tip, have your sales reps look up their client’s connections prior to a meeting, identify 4 or 5 they’d like to meet and bring the list with them. At the right time, they can say “CLIENT, I noticed on LinkedIn you are connected to a few folks I am trying to get in touch with, can I run these names by you?  If you can get 2 or 3 of these in insights in, you will have no problem earning the right to sell. This inevitably turns into a some targeted introductions. If your sales reps did this on a consistent basis, would that have a significant impact on your team’s business development efforts?”
• You need to ask permission to sell to them. Close the call with “NAME, we covered (recap) and it sounds like these tactics can have an immediate impact on the number of qualified appointments your sales team will have. I have a few more ideas I’d like to share with you, strategies we have implemented with our clients that may also be quite beneficial to you. We are just about out of time now, but do you have a few more minutes or would you like to schedule a second call to review?”

The bottom line is, it will be rare that a simple CTA of “contact me for more information” is going to convert to phone calls. Adding value and offering future value is vital to converting more targeted buyers that want to talk with you.