Using LinkedIn to Deliver a Solution

By Joel Elad from LinkedIn For Dummies, 2nd Edition

In some cases, you may not have everything you need to deliver an order after you have made a sale. As it can in early stages of the sales process, LinkedIn can assist you in this stage. Here are some of the ways LinkedIn can help you out:

Find partners to create the winning team. You’ve done the hard part: You got the contract. The customer trusts you to deliver on that contract, so it’s your job to build the winning team, and your company may not employ full-time all the people you need or you may have agreed to additional items to make the sale that require something where your business has to speed up development.

In such a case, you can use your LinkedIn connections to find people who have the missing skill sets you need. You can also perform an Advanced People Search or Service Providers search for a consultant or part-time employee who has the skills you need to build your products or consult on your service offering.
Get some direction from the LinkedIn community. You can create a question in LinkedIn Answers that polls your network and the greater LinkedIn community in the problem area you’ve been hired to solve. Get an idea of how other people would tackle this problem, and use the answers to identify potential partners or contacts you can use to deliver your solution.

For example, polling the community about a part of your service offering (a part that isn’t client-specific) may result in a LinkedIn member providing a new way of approaching the problem.
Search LinkedIn Answers for past responses that can help you. Odds are that the solution you were hired to deliver is not the very first time since the world began that someone had to solve that problem. Therefore, you should try your luck and search through past answers in LinkedIn Answers; you’re likely to get lots of ideas by seeing how other people handled similar situations.
Hire the skills you need. If you can’t find a part-time person or tap the skills you’re seeking from someone in your LinkedIn network, it’s time to post a job listing on LinkedIn Jobs.