Lesson 14 - Update Your LinkedIn Profile

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Your LinkedIn profile is your digital storefront. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to optimize your profile to make a strong impression on prospects. We’ll cover best practices for writing a compelling headline, summary, and experience sections. Your assignment will involve updating your LinkedIn profile to reflect your personal brand and value as a sales professional.

Transcript

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Nicholas, welcome back to the daily quota. I'm your host, Nicholas Hill, and in today's lesson, you're going to update your LinkedIn profile now. Like it or not, LinkedIn is the number one professional network in the world. It is crucial for setting yourself up as a professional, a thought leader, giving yourself trust, credibility and expertise, connecting with others, including your customers, prospects right now, your current coworkers, and also potential future employers. So you want to make sure that your LinkedIn profile is crisp and up to date. In this lesson, you're going to update it step by step. Let's actually walk you through all of the different sections of your LinkedIn profile and give you some tips for how to update each one. First is going to be your profile picture. Now, Long gone are the days where you have to have a professional headshot with a suit and tie, depending on the industry you're in. It might be it might still be relevant to do that, but ultimately, you just want to make sure that your profile picture is of a high quality, that it clearly shows your face and that you're dressed professionally for the role that you're in. So think about the industry you're in. Think about your clients, your customers, your prospects, what they would typically wear or expect to see, make sure your profile side quality, that it's simple, that it's not distracting. You don't want a lot of stuff going on in the background. You want to be facing the camera. Just basic stuff. You know, it's not, it's not anything crazy that you need to do with your profile photo. I think mine is a very simple picture of me outdoors, wearing a polo, looking directly at the camera, and that's about it. So update your profile picture so that they know who they're talking to when they look you up. Number two, your headline. Your headline is one of the first things that people see, so don't just list your job description right. List a compelling headline, something that explains what you do and the value that you bring to the table. So instead of saying, you know, I'm an account executive at Sprout Social, I might say something like helping businesses enhance their social media strategies, right? So if, if I'm reaching out to a prospect, they say, Who's this person I'm going to see if I need to add them on LinkedIn, they immediately see my picture, headshot, a headline. I'm helping businesses enhance social media strategies. Okay, that's someone that I might be interested in partnering with, and it makes your it gives your people a reason to connect with you. Once you have your headline in place, you want to fill out your about section, and this is where I would actually spend the most time your about section is going to give you, I think, 2500 characters at the time that I'm recording this, but you have a lot of room to play in your about section. What I would recommend doing is filling out a brief introduction, an overview of your professional journey, your key skills and differentiators, how you add value to your clients, and then ultimately a call to action to connect with you. So if we're thinking about opening with a brief introduction, I might say something like, you know, in this example, we're going to continue down the kind of Sprout Social example. But I might say throughout my career, I've held various roles in sales and account management, consistently exceeding sales targets, earning top performer awards. My journey has taken me from small startups to leading tech companies, where I've honed my skills in consultative, selling and strategic account management. So when you think about what that introduction does, it talks a little bit about who I am, what makes me unique, right? My experience the specific sales people that I've worked with, businesses that I've worked with, and then it shows that I'm good at what I do, earning top performer reviews, exceeding sales targets, etc. From there you might do some key kind of skills and expertise, right? So you might be talking about my expertise include social media strategies, account management, customer relationship management, data driven decision making. You might talk about tool proficiency, things like, you know, being an expert in Salesforce or HubSpot, deep understanding of social media analytics platforms. And then you want to talk about how you add value to your clients or organization. So you might say something like by helping clients to optimize their social media experience, social media presence, sorry, drive higher engagement, drive higher conversion rates, by understanding each client's unique needs and challenges, I tailor solutions that deliver measurable results, enhancing brand loyalty and market reach. And then at the end, you want some sort of a call to action. So you want to encourage readers to connect with you. So you might say, I'm always open to connecting with like minded professionals exploring new opportunities. Feel free to reach out to discuss how we can collaborate. Rate to achieve your business goals. So this is, again, just some of the notes that I've taken, and I'll leave these below the video as well. But brief introduction overview of your professional journey. You might want to think about your key skills and expertise, how you add value, encouraging readers to connect with you, etc, and remember your character limit is about 2500 it's also valuable for you to use relevant keywords so that you can show up in search results and appear in people's algorithms. So using relevant keywords to your industry, that's why it's so important to know, the lingo, the certifications, all the different things that you need to know there. The next section in LinkedIn is going to be your experience, and your experience should be a detail of your roles and responsibilities in each of the positions that you've held. The key here is to focus on impact. Don't just list out. Here's what I did at each company, like, why did it matter? Why did it why? How did it drive results for them? You know, be sure to use bullet points for clarity. Include metrics, quantify your success where possible. A lot of people treat LinkedIn like, like a resume, like a series of professional criteria. So you want to make sure that you're putting that in. And some people do use LinkedIn for future employers to look at as well. So that could be something to take a look at. One area that's definitely under utilized is the skills and endorsement section, and I would encourage you to add all of the relevant skills that reflect your expertise. Aim for a mix of both technical and soft skills, depending on your role. You want to request endorsements. That's the big one. Request endorsements from your clients, your colleagues, your customers, your prospects, to validate your skills. Endorsements add third party credibility. It's like a proof point for yourself, right? So you want to add those endorsements. If you don't have anyone that can endorse a skill, don't put that skill on there. It's going to look like you're making it up. So put skills on that you can validate through other people. And then you want to add some recommendations, and I would add at least three to five strong recommendations that speak to your skills and your professionalism. So reach out to your former coworkers, your former managers, clients, prospects, anyone really, it doesn't have to be a former manager, and ask them, Can you give me a recommendation? I would love a LinkedIn recommendation for honors and awards, definitely highlight your best work, articles you've written, presentations, case studies, significant projects. This can draw attention. It can showcase your expertise. And then for interests and causes, feel free to fill that out. I mean, I think it's really great to personally connect with people on passions and things that you care about. And in fact, it can make or break the difference between someone adding you or not adding you. If, if you're reaching out to a prospect and they're on the fence about adding you, but then they see that you're passionate about the same cause, that can be the thing that that tips them so something to take a look at once your profile is complete. Ask yourself, how active Do you want to be on LinkedIn? Because there are people who want to be influencers on LinkedIn, and if you want to do that, my recommendation would be to set up a weekly calendar reminder to remind yourself to post at least one thing on LinkedIn each week that is relevant to your role, function, industry, etc, that will help to get you into the algorithms. The consistency is what matters. Here. You want to be posting consistently, because then you'll become this kind of trusted persona, this thought leader in the space. People will start engaging with you and make sure that you're engaging back right, that you're commenting, that you're adding emojis, whatever, whatever makes sense. There all that said. You don't have to do that. That's a lot of work. And I know plenty of incredibly successful salespeople that have never, ever posted on LinkedIn, not once. So it's completely up to you. If you want to do that, your manager might ask you to your your organization might have that as part of your culture, but not required. All right, now it's your turn for your assignment. You are going to update your LinkedIn profile based on the instructions that we've given here. So update your profile picture, your headline, your about section, your experience. Ask for recommendations and endorsements. I know that can be anxiety inducing, but do it, all they can do is say, you know, no, I'm not comfortable with that. And then, great, you learned that they're not a good person to trust when it comes to getting a reference or endorsing you, and that's good to know too. Add Content. To your featured section, and then optionally, you can commit to engaging once a week and setting up that calendar invite your study guide is going to walk you through all of this, and that's it for today's lesson. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time you.