5. ENRICH YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE

Step 5 is about your personal LinkedIn profile and your LinkedIn company page.

Before you start posting anything on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook and before reaching out to potential customers, you should first revise and enrich your own personal profile and then your company’s page on LinkedIn.

You see, most people fill their LinkedIn profiles with what they do for their employer.

Stop that.

Instead, you should describe what you do for your customers.

That’s not so easy, and many fall back on generic platitudes such as “we are helping our customers improve their bottom line” or “we enable digital transformation”.

That’s too fluffy.

Everybody can claim that, and many also do. Instead, be factual, offer relevant metrics and impact on key performance indicators, and use some of the industry jargon that your customers can recognise.

When you start using LinkedIn to build your network, then your job title should not look like a red warning light. Most of your potential customers are not in purchase mode, and even when they are then the last person in the universe that they want to connect or talk to on LinkedIn, or elsewhere for that matter, is a salesperson.

Sales is something you do for your company, not for your customers.

As you change your title to something more meaningful to the customer, you should also change your behaviour and stop pitching to anything with a pulse. Stop yelling and start listening.

You should invest time and energy in understanding how LinkedIn works and the best resource that I have come across lately is Melonie Dodaro’s book LinkedIn Unlocked.

So here comes a little promotion: Buy and read Melonie Dodaro’s book.