Professionals often turn to LinkedIn to find expertise in a particular area. The LinkedIn search features provide an excellent opportunity for your sales team’s profiles to appear in relevant, intent-based searches.
Marketers seem to get this, but many sales professional profiles I’ve viewed aren’t optimized for search. This is a great, easy opportunity for you (marketing) to coach your sales team on how to optimize their profiles.
It took me about 5 minutes to optimize my profile and as a result, my profile views and appearances in search have more than doubled. More importantly, I’m finding that the percentage of viewers that fit my target audience profile has increased substantially. Most importantly, I’ve won business as a result of this tactic.
Here’s what I did (and how you can coach your sales team to do the same):
Here’s How I Optimized My LinkedIn Profile for Search
I’m in the B2B Marketing Agency space. Among other services, we specialize in Demand Generation, Lead Nurturing and Marketing Automation.
I consolidated my super long professional title (Vice President, Sales & Customer Success at Spear Marketing Group) and changed it to: VP, Sales | B2B Marketing Agency | Demand Generation | Lead Nurturing | Marketing Automation.
That’s it. My profile views and appearances in search have more than doubled and they continue to rise.
I also edited my LinkedIn website links to include keywords. You get 3 website links on your LinkedIn profile and you can edit the link description. Search engines look for contextual inbound links from authority sites (like LinkedIn) when measuring whether your website should show up in relevant search results.
After the sales team’s profiles are optimized, you might provide sales with a sample introduction email, introducing how your company helps customers along with a link to offer content that might be valuable to the prospect. Sales can then use this intro email to follow up with viewers of their profile that fit their target audience. It’s likely that the viewer was searching for related expertise and/or related services.
Be sure to check out the resources below for great “social selling” advice and tactics for leveraging LinkedIn:
- For more tips and advice on leveraging LinkedIn to improve sales, check out InsideView’s Ultimate Guide to Social Selling for LinkedIn [SlideShare]
- Jason Miller (@JasonMillerCA) over at Marketo recently posted a use case, Utilizing LinkedIn to Improve SEO and Organic Visibility which describes how Marketo (in clever fashion) got 100+ Marketo employees to optimize their LinkedIn profiles
