B2B sales strategies and trends

Your LinkedIn Profile: How Often Should It Be Updated?

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An up-to-date LinkedIn profile that tells a compelling story about the value you provide can be the foundation that supports all your social selling efforts. And while some professionals may only make updates after major milestones such as a job change or a promotion, it’s critical for sales professionals to be more proactive with their LinkedIn profile.

In this post, you’ll discover how to maintain a LinkedIn profile that showcases you at your best, and gets sales prospects to easily recognize the value of working with you.

The basics

Your education, experience, and contact information should always be kept current. Your profile picture does not need to be updated frequently as long as it provides an accurate representation of you at your professional best.

Another essential is to make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors on your profile. This may seem like obvious advice, but it’s easy to glance over simple mistakes that may paint you as someone who lacks attention to detail when working with prospects and customers.

Headline and summary: Your personal elevator pitch

Try scheduling a monthly or bi-monthly reminder to re-evaluate your headline and summary as even small changes can impact your lead generation efforts. A well-crafted, attention-grabbing headline can mean the difference between a prospect checking out the rest of your profile or clicking away. Since it is one of the first parts of your profile your prospects will see, it needs to get them interested in seeing more.

Your summary is the place where you can put your value on full display. A common mistake is to gear your summary toward recruiters instead of your prospects. While saying that you exceeded your sales quotas for the past three years is impressive, you don’t want your prospects to think you are only interested in selling to them. Use this space to differentiate yourself from other sales professionals and showcase the unique skills that speak to your ideal buyer.

Recommendations are also important for having a complete profile, but the quality of your recommendations is much more important than the quantity. When asking for recommendations, try sending a personalized message to the people who can truly attest to your abilities.

Thought leadership

Ninety-two percent of B2B buyers are willing to engage with reps who are known industry thought leaders, and there’s no better place to showcase thought leadership than on LinkedIn. Here are a few options for sharing insights that can help you establish immediate credibility among potential buyers.

Status updates/shares – Sharing and thoughtfully commenting on the thought leadership content of others is an effective way to demonstrate your expertise. Take some time every day to watch for compelling status update opportunities, and share this content as often as you see something that will provide value to your entire network, or the individuals you are looking to engage.

LinkedIn’s publishing platform – The LinkedIn publishing platform presents a great opportunity for sales professionals to establish credibility. Since your goal is to publish content that helps you meet sales objectives, answering common prospect questions in your content can be incredibly effective. These posts will also appear on your LinkedIn profile, and can serve as a valuable resource to prospects who are scoping you out.

Multimedia content –Through personalizing your company’s sales presentations and sharing case studies of past and current clients, your sales prospects will have clear examples of how you have helped others solve their business problems. Your marketing department could be a valuable source of this content, and don’t be afraid to ask marketing to look it over to ensure it aligns with your company’s messaging strategy. This is another area where it can pay to set a reminder to look for new opportunities to bolster your profile with engaging content.

When optimized, your LinkedIn profile can allow prospects to immediately realize the value you provide, which can help to remove the barriers that exist at the outset of each new buyer-seller relationship. Do you have five minutes available right now? If so, evaluate your LinkedIn profile from the viewpoint of a prospect and let the optimization begin.

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