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34 The PCB Magazine • December 2016 4 Reasons Why Every Sales Rep's Toolkit Should Include LinkedIn FEATURE COLUMN: GETTING CONNECTED WITH SOCIAL MEDIA by Bruce Johnston PRACTICAL SOCIAL MEDIA MATTERS If you can answer "true" to the following statements, you are in good shape. Otherwise, you should be using LinkedIn—effectively. 1. I know who all my prospects are—and I mean all of them. 2. I know all the key people at those pros- pect accounts. 3. I am absolutely on top of all the person- nel changes that can affect our business at those prospect companies. 4. I get through on at least 15% of my cold calls and e-mails the first time. If you answered "false" to any of these (and let's be honest: everyone should be answering no to question four), keep reading. 1. I know who all my prospects are— and I mean all of them. Anyone who says they don't have any pros- pects apparently hasn't used LinkedIn. I was talking to an executive from a PCB manufactur- er based where in Toronto, where I live. I asked him how many companies in T oronto purchased PCBs. He thought about it for a minute and said 80, maybe 100. I said, how about 170? How do you know that, he asked? Easy. I put together a search on LinkedIn. It took five minutes. When I first started doing this LinkedIn thing about six years ago, there were 30,000 people in North America with the term PCB in their LinkedIn profile. Now there are more than 130,000. I built a database of more than 5,000 North American companies that purchase PCBs and I once esti -