Clients will often ask us, “What’s the ROI of getting a LinkedIn profile makeover?”
Now, in many cases, the profile makeover itself will not drive revenue opportunities (although there are exceptions. Building a strong LinkedIn profile that communicates business value to prospects is only the first step to socially selling your way to more clients and revenue on LinkedIn – it’s the next step actions that will move prospects closer to working with you.
However, those next step actions will be ineffective if prospects do not quickly see your differentiated value. How you communicate your business value and your competitive advantage on your LinkedIn profile will determine if a prospect actually connects with, if they accept your Inmail, if they join your LinkedIn community and more importantly if they engage in a sales conversation with you.
By changing his profile from a resume to a complete sales and marketing tool, Ian Aguilar (Schneider’s Director of New Business Development):
* Took his social selling index from 30 to 85!
* Increased connection conversions by 400%
* Number of unsolicited connection requests from key industry decision makers and influencers increased by 500%
* Using his Linkedin profile in his email signature increased his outbound-email reply rate from 30% to 60%+
Let’s take a look at his profile and why Ian’s profile is enabling him to create and leverage more relationships that can turn into revenue opportunities:
First, we communicated a differentiated business value right from the start. As you will notice in the picture below, we discuss the size of the supply chains that Ian is targeting and that he provides clients with continual ROI improvement. Through our discovery session with Ian, we found that most companies can only provide ROI improvements the 1st year as they are only focused on monitoring how products are getting shipped from point to point B instead of focusing on the complete supply chain.
The summary shares Ian’s story and how he understands the risks that’s involved with not having the right supply chain management vendor (the impact of loss exceeds $50B annually for the industry as a whole!) He discusses how he believes it’s because supply chain vendors and their clients don’t have the supply chain management visibility they need for continual account performance and improvement – and he talks about the visibility he had at UPS was mostly “transportation visibility”, meaning monitoring from point A to point B. He talks about how there was zero optimization at UPS and how you cannot have continual ROI improvement without optimization. So he’s challenging the industry and his peers and showing the differentiated value that he and Schneider can provide.
From there, he talks about the results that can be achieved when you have complete visibility. Read the summary in the image below to see what I mean about Ian challenging his peers, differentiating himself and communicating his unique business value:
As a Content Marketing Institute study shows – case studies can be the most effective content marketing tactic, we filled Ian’s profile with case studies. For example, check out Ian’s project section (which also have active links to complete case studies):
Ian’s experience section is not a resume. As a New Business Development Director, his profile needs to attract new sales opportunities, not potential employers. So, I don’t understand why sales leaders have resumes in the experience section rather than use this section to talk to different audiences.
In the experience section for Ian, we show why he can help organizations achieve savings across their supply chain and that he can provide clients deeper supply chain cost cuts by going beyond the tactical aspect (comprises only 15% to 20% of the supply chain cost) that most firms focus on. Ian focuses on focus on the strategic aspects where 60% to 70% of supply chain costs lie, the tactical aspects and the operational aspects where an additional 5% to 15% of the costs lie. Notice how we continue to demonstrate Ian’s competitive advantage in the position shown below:
In the experience section he also goes into more detail on how he’s offering “real visibility” to achieve continual account performance and how he helps centralize supply chain management processes to reduce costs by nearly 35%.
Now, when you look at the profile copy, do you see why supply chain management VPs and decision makers are accepting Ian’s connection and inviting him to connect? Can you see why prospects getting outbound emails with Ian’s LinkedIn profile in the signature are checking out his profile and actually responding to his messages now?
Ian’s profile has become the foundation for his LinkedIn marketing and social selling efforts. It has become the foundation for his challenger sales process that Schneider will be using on LinkedIn. And, as a result 0f the successes that Ian has seen already, Schneider will be moving forward with our LinkedIn Profile Makeover Training for Sales Teams, our LinkedIn strategy program, our content strategy program and our managed LinkedIn program.
