LinkedIn for Sales and Social Selling: It All Comes Down to Your LinkedIn Profile

Welcome to another edition of social business unplugged, practical advice on how to leverage social media for your business. Now, the host of social business unplugged, author of the forthcoming book maximize your social published by Wiley and founder of windmill networking. Neal Schaffer. Greetings, everybody and welcome to a another edition of social business unplugged. This is Neal Schaffer coming at you with a much better feeling knee. You know, I had surgery on my knee about two weeks ago, and my doctor said this week that I am free to start walking, riding stationary bicycles. And yes, two weeks from now I will be back exercising again. So doesn't matter how old you are, the human body is amazing, and how quickly we can recover from even things like knee surgery. But let's get on to our topic of today. Today I want to talk about based on recent customer meetings I've had on LinkedIn for sales. So I often get pinged by companies, sales professionals, what have you, how do we better leverage LinkedIn for sales. And if you're listening to this podcast, and you are interested in this topic, based on my experience, okay, you're going to be in one of three camps. The first camp is you're a super user. And you probably know how to use LinkedIn better than almost anyone in your organization. If you are, you're probably an early adopter, you're obviously he's smart, and successful doing what you're doing. And I want to give you a hand of applause if I could. But if I did that, I'd have to take the other hand off the microphone. The second demographic is you're already somewhat of a LinkedIn user, I think a lot of social media professionals listen to this podcast, maybe you use Facebook or Twitter more than LinkedIn. And you've never maybe seen the ROI of LinkedIn, maybe creating a profile, you've dabbled with some things. But from a b2b sales perspective, you haven't figured out how best to align it with everything else you're doing to help you find new clients or better engage with your current clients. And then on the far spectrum, we have probably the people that I would love to listen to this podcast. But these are people that may not even subscribe to podcasts, these are people that may not even have a LinkedIn profile, maybe they just have a Facebook profile, they stay as far away from LinkedIn as possible, or they have a LinkedIn profile, because they thought that they should have one, because they needed it when they change jobs, or they're looking to change jobs. In the world of social media, almost everybody I meet has a LinkedIn profile. But when you get outside of that world, and you go into a lot of different industries, let's look at the LinkedIn demographics, right? 250 million people haven't taken a look at the recent numbers. But I believe the number of Americans that are a member of the site is like 40%. So you have 100 million out of 300 plus million people in the United States. And if you look at the actual employed or professional population, I'm gonna say maybe every other maybe one in every three American professionals has a LinkedIn profile. So it's not everybody. And therefore, when you think of using LinkedIn as a sales tool, you have to understand that you're not going to get access to everybody, right? It is one more tool in your toolbox. How did you get leads up until now? How did you close business up until now, if it's still effective, keep doing it. If it's not as effective as it used to be, think about what social media can do for you. And if you're already on LinkedIn and see the value, and you just want to see how to apply that value towards b2b sales. Obviously, you'll want to be taking notes on this very short eight minute podcast I normally do. Obviously, I wrote an entire book on maximizing LinkedIn for sales and social media marketing back in 2011. And although the user interface and some of the functionality has changed, I still think that 90% of that content is as appropriate now as it was then. So that's obviously your first stop. There's only so much I can tell you in eight minutes. But the point I wanted to bring up today is if you want to use LinkedIn as a serious tool to help you get business now, whether it's for b2b sales, if you think of yourself as a salesperson, or maybe you're in the marketing department, or you think yourself as a marketer, and you want to get more inbound marketing leads from LinkedIn, or you want to do better that whatever you do on LinkedIn, you're more successful on LinkedIn to generate new business. It really comes down to your profile. Oh, Neil, come on. We know that. Well, maybe you don't know that. Because whenever I present on LinkedIn, I show a picture of my homepage, women networking.com. And then I show a picture of my LinkedIn profile. Now how many of you if you're going to create a website with sit down for days if not weeks, figuring out to design what's going to be the calls to action? What menu items, what content you're going to put in there, what have you, your LinkedIn profile is the exact same thing. It is your homepage on LinkedIn, because anything you do on LinkedIn, whether you're posting a status update, whether you're asking For an introduction, you're sending an InMail, you're in a group, you're looking at LinkedIn news, or you're posting a comment on a LinkedIn company update, it all comes down to your name, we're whatever you do on LinkedIn, whatever engagement you do is think back to your profile. And we know now LinkedIn has already released this information. The number one activity of what people do on LinkedIn is looking at other people's profiles. Now some of that is because they're looking to hire people, right? Or they're looking to build a pipeline of talents. Others are looking for service providers, others are checking you out. Maybe they found you in search, or they found you because you were engaging. And they want to see if what they see online matches up with how you describe yourself. So that's why it's critical that you put the same amount of time and effort into your LinkedIn profile, beginning with, do you have a professional photo on your profile? Okay, if you've been listening to this podcast, I talk a lot about social media marketing about Google authorship, about having a photo and Google search results we see gets a higher click through rate. And it's the same thing with LinkedIn search results, right? Having a photo not having a photo, the click through rate is going to be higher, because people want to connect with other people, they want to see a face. And there's also a lot of fake profiles on LinkedIn, get a professional photo taken, go to target, go to Sears, have a friend do it doesn't have to cost more than $50. Wear a suit. LinkedIn has a business network, never forget that show your real name. There's a lot of small business owners who get cheesy out there right? With their name, you know, Neil, LinkedIn expert Shaffer, or in their profile headline they put, hey, asked me how I saved this company $100,000 in expenses, I tell you, LinkedIn is where the influencers are. LinkedIn is where the business decision makers are, I recommend you don't get cheesy, because I don't think those people look down favorably on cheesy things that don't want to be sold to in a professional headline. So you want to put down a professional headline that is well branded, that will get the right targeted people wanting to click through wanting to say, hey, I want to know more about this person, I want to get to know this person, don't try to make a sale, through your professional headline. In fact, don't try to make the sale through your profile at all, show how you can help people, show your expertise, show what differentiates you from the rest of the people show how your company helps others, leverage your company brand, for your personal brand. So that when target customers see you, they want to contact you because they want to find out more about your brand. It's critical, you have new ways of exposing your brand, your personal brand through your LinkedIn profile visually now, right? If you've had photos taken of you speaking at a conference, if you've won an award, if you have published a white paper or an article, or perhaps maybe your company has, and you contributed a quote to it, you can now link to that right. And you can now expose this great content that will definitely differentiate you from the rest, especially when we talk about b2b sales. You know, they're not calling on you anymore, asking for information. Your prospective customers are online, finding the information themselves, making their own decisions based on peer recommendations, and what they find online, you need to help seed that online content and influence their perspective. And one way of doing that is even if it's not your own content, if it's your company's content, and you've contributed to it, add that, add that to your profile, expose it to the world, let people see it, it's only going to help your personal brand. And in your profile summary. Don't just say nothing, you know, here's the thing, I'm going to end this podcast. And you know, I like to keep these short and sweet. I'm gonna end this podcast with look, a LinkedIn profile is not a resume. It is an inbound marketing tool. So the thought about a resume is maybe I don't want to put down what I did 10 years ago, I'll just keep the most recent, I'll just keep it really short. The more you put in your LinkedIn profile, in terms of content, in terms of keywords, in terms of companies that you've worked at, in terms of interests, and what have you, and even skills, I'll stop there, I won't go on to endorsements. The more you put in there, the more data points you are creating with others and LinkedIn, the easier it is for others that want to find you to find you. And believe it or not, when you do that, it's going to be easier for you to find and connect with others as well, because more and more people are going to pop up. When you look for people. You're going to find people that you lost touch with. But because you added that company, you never know where they are in life right now, right? You never know where that person you partied with in college, or high school is I tell the story. I was a foreign exchange student at Beijing Normal University. There were maybe 20 American foreign exchange students there in Beijing, China in 1988 89. Were in Beijing. There was only one store where you could buy American candy and that was called the friendship store and That's where I went once a week to get my Skittles. And that was one of the most memorable moments of living in Beijing. Obviously, China is very different now. But of those 20 people, three of those 20 classmates found me not to classmates.com, not through Facebook, but through LinkedIn. And these are all professional people who now we may be able to do business together in the future, who knows, or they may be able to introduce me to others that I can do business with in the future that become discoverable when I do a search on LinkedIn for people. And these connections that we all have with each other that we don't know about become discoverable. So a lot of people talk about the power of LinkedIn, hopefully, by illustrating these little data points will inspire you, after you hear this podcast, go spend an hour on your LinkedIn profile, fill it out completely, really think about it get connected, you're going to be all the better for it. And like I said, from a sales perspective, whatever you do, it's all going to come back to your profile. Now this is from a client meeting, I'm flying out for their national sales conference, to present to their sales team on LinkedIn. And I will tell you, at the end of what I present on LinkedIn, I also talk about Facebook for b2b sales. And you know why? Because if only 40 to 50% are on LinkedIn, whereas everybody else will. They're on Facebook, right? And everybody uses Facebook for private reasons. But guess what, a lot more salespeople are getting a lot more successful using Facebook for b2b sales. I'm gonna end the podcast on that. Sorry to leave you hanging on an edge. It's great stuff for future podcasts. So keep the comments coming. Appreciate every single rating and give me an iTunes to help expose my content to more people that hopefully I can help. And I look forward to talking to you again at the next podcast. Thanks, everybody. Make it a great week ahead. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to another edition of social business unplugged. We appreciate your subscribing to our podcast. Please help us spread the word by sharing it on social media or adding your rating and comments in iTunes. If you would like to appear on the podcast, or have content that you would like covered, please contact Neal Schaffer Neal at windmill networking.com. Also please subscribe to the windmill networking blog on social media strategy at windmill networking.com Thanks again and make it a great day.