LinkedIn for social selling

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) has dominated the professional social network space and retained this position in spite of a strong challenge from google+ to lure people away with professional circles that has failed to ignite appetite. The value of LinkedIn is widely under utilised with people maintaining a lose network that they pay little attention to with the occasional endorsement to a past colleague. But is there more opportunity?  Could individuals and indeed firms use this further?  B2B selling is all about relationships and connecting to the right people where LinkedIn can up the value of any interaction. So should firms pay more attention to the Linkedin profiles of their key sales staff? Absolutely. Using tools within LinkedIn to connect your organisations networks means that all those disparate connections can be joined and used for insights.  Finding the husband of the marketing person you are trying to contact is an ex-colleague of your boss is a relationship to get you through the door so your bosses profile could be key to developing that lead, it could be damaged by a profile picture of them in fancy dress.  This process of social selling yields much more success than conventional cold calling that delivers returns of less than 5%. We have been working in this way for many years but have we really been understanding this as social selling and improving the levers that influence this?  Not yet but we are learning and developing this further, as are linkedin who are developing this business model to increase revenue and increase the number of users beyond the current 277 million.