The LinkedIn Checklist for Savvy Sales Professionals

You know you need to leverage LinkedIn for growing your business, but do you know where to start? Here is a quick LinkedIn checklist that we use as part of our LinkedIn Profile Makeover service to guide you through the steps you need to take to be successful.

LinkedIn Checklist

1. Define your objectives, goals and specific KPIs for what you want to achieve with LinkedIn. A big mistake many sales professionals make is randomly working LinkedIn with no means of measuring success.
2. Create a Client-Centric LinkedIn Profile that educates your buyers and gets them excited to take your call. Make the shift from resume to resource. This means changing your profile from being about you and your past experience, to being about how you help your clients, so that you’re seen as a thought leader and subject matter expert—and ultimately the vendor of choice. Hint: you can start this by leveraging your LinkedIn headline!
3. Connect with every professional you know.  Go through your Rolodex, business cards and emails to jog your memory. Leveraging your network to gain access to buyers is foundational to social selling. Make sure you’re connected with those that already know, like and trust you, to maximize your reach.
4. Map out your buyers by title, keywords and geographic region. Develop a search string to make finding them on LinkedIn simple. (If you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can skip the search string and use the advanced search filters to create a targeted search.)
5. Leverage Centers of Influence (COIs) by identifying who they know that you want to meet, and ask for introductions. Use the search strings and “Connections of” filter to create a list of who your connection knows that you want to meet. Invite your COIs to do the same and make some introductions to one another.
6. Do the same with past and existing clients that love you, and position yourself for strategic referrals.
7. Write templates that include thought leadership content, and use them to help facilitate introductions. You want to make it easy for your clients and networking buddies to make introductions.

   Here is my example:

   Hi XXXXXX,

   I’d like to introduce you to Viveka von Rosen, Chief Visibiliy Officer at Vengreso. I thought it might make sense for the two of you to connect and investigate how you might work together. Brynne helps enterprise sales teams build their pipeline, reduce the sales cycle and close more business through leveraging the power of LinkedIn.

   Brynne really understands how to monetize LinkedIn and has created programs that make a significant impact on the way professionals are growing their businesses. Brynne will be contacting you in the next couple of days. I hope you’ll take her call, as I believe it will be well worth your time.

   If you’d like to reach out to Brynne, her contact information is: viveka.vonrosen@vengreso.com | 123.456.7899

8. Curate and share relevant content consistently. Whether you use a freemium curation tool like Feedly.com and a scheduler like hootlet.com, or you use more sophisticated tools like Everyone Social or Gaggle Amp for this, ensuring that you feed your network is vital to staying top of mind and adding consistent value.
9. Engage with those engaging on content. This is an ideal opportunity to start conversations and provide additional insights. Keep in mind, sharing content and then ignoring the folks that like and comment is not neutral but detrimental.
10. Original content is vital to your professional credibility on LinkedIn. Whether you leverage LinkedIn native video or use LinkedIn Publications to write blog posts, sharing your point of view, insights and knowledge will quickly add value for your buyers.

Leveraging LinkedIn as a free service, LinkedIn Premium or Sales Navigator is foundational to success in today’s competitive environment, and doing it the right way is vital.

If you’re looking for more guidance around leveraging LinkedIn and social selling, check out our State of Digital Selling with LinkedIn Report.