Chris Spurvey, Vice President - KPMG shares his LinkedIn success story

1. My Life On LinkedIn Since 2006 A Case Study for Sales and Personal Branding

3. I signed up for LinkedIn on November 22, 2006. cc: clasesdeperiodismo - https://www.flickr.com/photos/24614969@N04

4. I saw the platform as an opportunity to post my resume online. cc: buyalex - https://www.flickr.com/photos/27883181@N05

5. I mainly responded to connection requests from other people and spent very little time on the site itself. cc: kenteegardin - https://www.flickr.com/photos/26373139@N08

6. In early 2007, I had jumped into the sales profession, joining an IT consulting boutique. cc: Caucas' - https://www.flickr.com/photos/20993292@N08

7. My job was to diversify the company by growing its network of consultants and landing new clients. cc: kenteegardin - https://www.flickr.com/photos/26373139@N08

8. Very quickly, I realized how LinkedIn could help me do both. cc: theanthonyryan - https://www.flickr.com/photos/71073129@N06

9. I spent the next four or five years adding every person who I connected with on a professional basis as a connection on LinkedIn. Before meeting someone new, I looked him or her up on LinkedIn so that we could relate that much better. cc: GroggyFroggy - https://www.flickr.com/photos/59255972@N00

10. My big breakthrough happened in 2009. cc: Thragor - https://www.flickr.com/photos/76961277@N08

11. That small IT consulting company landed a large, multi-year contract, and we needed people with specialized skill sets. cc: reynermedia - https://www.flickr.com/photos/89228431@N06

12. I leveraged LinkedIn and found subject-matter experts around the world. I contacted them, began dialogues, and transitioned the relationships to phone calls and eventually visits to Newfoundland. cc: LK-GA - https://www.flickr.com/photos/24052304@N04

13. In 2012 we decided it was time to grow the company geographically. cc: Free Grunge Textures - www.freestock.ca - https://www.flickr.com/photos/80497449@N04

14. I scheduled multiple business-development trips to other provinces. cc: ***Bud*** - https://www.flickr.com/photos/87519500@N00

15. I spent hours on LinkedIn, looking up key individuals in the provinces I planned to visit. I sent inMail messages to those I wanted to meet. cc: Joe Shlabotnik - https://www.flickr.com/photos/40646519@N00

16. LinkedIn has facilitated hundreds if not thousands of coffee chats for me. Some have led to business. Virtually all have led to new connections. cc: Richard Clark (Digimist) - https://www.flickr.com/photos/30898814@N03

17. In 2013 the company was acquired by KPMG Canada. I lead business-development efforts for the Microsoft practice. cc: Esparta - https://www.flickr.com/photos/66208256@N00

18. Interestingly enough, the Microsoft practice originated with that boutique firm about a year prior to its acquisition, when two Microsoft MVPs used LinkedIn to contact me and form a relationship. cc: striatic - https://www.flickr.com/photos/34427466731@N01

19. In mid-2014 I decided to pursue my lifelong dream of writing a book. cc: Klardrommar - https://www.flickr.com/photos/24283519@N03

20. I wanted to share with entrepreneurs and new sales professionals the message that, with the right mind-set, they can embrace selling and become very effective at it. cc: flazingo_photos - https://www.flickr.com/photos/124247024@N07

21. It’s Time to Sell: Cultivating the Sales Mind-Set, self-published in December 2015, has sold many thousands more copies than I ever expected.

22. How? cc: Leo Reynolds - https://www.flickr.com/photos/49968232@N00

23. A few months after I began writing the book, I began to research how to promote a book. I came to realize that without a platform doing so would be very difficult. cc: Roberto_Ventre - https://www.flickr.com/photos/65743191@N00

24. I took notice of a few people I knew who were publishing articles on LinkedIn’s new publishing platform. I decided to jump on board. cc: Sean MacEntee - https://www.flickr.com/photos/18090920@N07

25. To date I have published just shy of one hundred articles and attracted a whole new network of thought leaders and influencers. cc: DavidSpinks - https://www.flickr.com/photos/28669457@N04

26. I also have leveraged the SlideShare platform as another avenue for communicating my message. cc: sylvain kalache - https://www.flickr.com/photos/13261792@N03

27. My platform has expanded to include the It’s Time to Sell podcast. All thirty guests who have been on the podcast are connections that I made via LinkedIn. cc: Colleen AF Venable - https://www.flickr.com/photos/49503171926@N01

28. Around the same time that I began publishing on LinkedIn, I embraced another new LinkedIn tool: Sales Navigator. cc: Glyn Lowe Photoworks. - https://www.flickr.com/photos/65354164@N02

29. I use Sales Navigator to stay up to date on key accounts, clients, and leads. cc: chrisinplymouth - https://www.flickr.com/photos/21450297@N06

30. My use of Sales Navigator, in particular, leads to the reason that I am excited about Microsoft’s potential acquisition of LinkedIn.

31. Under its Dynamics brand, Microsoft has a powerful suite of enterprise applications. CRM is one of them. cc: Michael Kappel - https://www.flickr.com/photos/78779574@N00

32. I see huge potential in the combination of Sales Navigator and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. cc: M0les - https://www.flickr.com/photos/50523523@N00

33. How Microsoft and LinkedIn integrate those products will be interesting to see. cc: kevin dooley - https://www.flickr.com/photos/12836528@N00

34. Could this be the next chapter in my life on LinkedIn? cc: clasesdeperiodismo - https://www.flickr.com/photos/24614969@N04

35. Time will tell. cc: .scribe - https://www.flickr.com/photos/60479251@N00