Cleanup your LinkedIn Profile
Categories: Entrepreneur, Get Organized, LinkedIn, Prospecting, Sales Planning, Sales Strategy, Socom Sales Tips
Written By: SOCOM Sales
If you are a professional and trying to network with other people in your industry or get back in touch with past coworkers, LinkedIn is the tool you need.
CNN Money wrote about this earlier in the year talking about the growth of the site and how it is used by some of the 8 million plus users.
LinkedIn is all about business: recruiting, sales, investment. It’s not exactly a marketplace or a job site but rather a community of more than 8 million people who rely on one another to get things done.
LinkedIn as I have said in earlier posts is an account that everyone in a professional environment should have and more importantly, something everyone should want to look its best. Think of your LinkedIn profile like your personal Hoovers page where people that find you should be given quality data.
If you have an account, you should make it look clean. Guy Kawasaki made a post on his blog “How to Change the World ” on giving your profile an extreme makeover. This is almost a step by step way of making your profile standout to business associates as well as head hunters and prospects. You may also want to take a look at a post Guy made about the Ten ways to use LinkedIn.
Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.
Among the benefits of getting an executive bio of your experience and credentials, you also allow yourself to be searchable on sites like Google since LinkedIn has a high ranking.
As a professional, I use LinkedIn a lot and I have setup my personal SalesForce.com account to allow for LinkedIn searches right from my contacts list by modifying some basic code. You can see how to add LinkedIn to SalesForce here.
Typically unless you are working with one of the main executives of a company, you will not find any information about them on the corporate website. But with LinkedIn, you can do an easy search of the persons name and find out who they are, what they are doing currently, and also where else they have been. LinkedIn has become the professionals Yellow Pages.
As a sales person, if you are ever trying to figure out how to reach the right person in a target account, LinkedIn is a great tool to search through an entire company to find additional contacts to reach out to. Also on the flip side, if you are just targeting any current VP of marketing for some new service you are offering, you can do an advanced search for that specific title and get a fresh list of names that you can call on. this is something even large database companies like Hoovers has not figured out how to master.
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February 29th, 2008 at 3:40 am
[...] love LinkedIn. I have written a few other posts about it. The most read is Cleanup your LinkedIn Profile. The changes that have been made make LinkedIn a real business tool. Not that it wasn’t before [...]