LinkedIn Profile Setup Guide For Sales Professionals

Introduction

The goal of outbound ultimately is to book that first meeting and we do that by getting our prospects interested in finding out more about our offerings.

But that’s difficult if prospects never respond to our messages, right? We try getting through to them via emails and connection requests but we keep getting ghosted. And that’s gonna keep happening if prospects think they’re in for a pitch within 5 minutes of accepting our request. Is there anything we do about this?

Well, yes

it all comes down to building trust and the first step is building a customer-facing LinkedIn profile which is what this post is about.

Hi, I’m Viktor, a full-cycle Account Executive turned Sales Manager with 10 years of B2B Sales experience and on this blog I cover topics from prospecting to closing and everything in between.

Now meet Károly. Károly’s a Partnership Manager at Volteum, an e-mobilty startup in Europe and in this video we’ll turn Károly’s profile into one that helps build trust with prospects so he can book more meetings. Let’s do this!

Guidelines for building a customer-facing profile

The basic notion is that “people buy from people they trust and people trust and people trust people like them”. On top of this we can use Robert Cialdini’s 7 principles to influence people, out of which in this context we can control social proof, authority, and liking.

1. We’ll start off by making Károly likeable through a good first impression.

2. We’ll then build his authority by showing he knows the pains and challenges his prospects face day to day and how to solve them.

3. And finally we’ll do what we can to show that prospects can trust in his ability to deliver on his promise through social proof.

This is a step by step walkthrough and at the end of this video we’ll recap the changes we made. If that’s all you’re interested in feel free to skip ahead to that section. Let’s jump into the walkthrough!

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(click the video for the walkthrough)

Recap of changes

So let’s recap what changes we made to Károly’s profile!

Make yourself look likeable

First step was to make him likeable. We already had a professional photo and cover image to work with and he had a custom profile URL and that’s all good. One thing Károly can still do is add a tagline to his cover image that tells visitors at an eye’s glance what the promise of the company is.

We updated his headline to make his prospects curious and click on his profile to find out more. It’s also immediately clear what he does and what the company does too.

Then we updated his about section and had him open up. The more he does this the higher the chances that prospects find something in common and see him as someone they might enjoy connecting with. Then he made the transition into what he does for work and started educating visitors on the challenges their product solves and ended with a call to action in case anyone was interested to find out more.

Position yourself as an authority figure

The second step was to build authority and create interest. We did that by updating 3 things:

1. first we turned on creator mode to show off what topics they can expect to see from Károly if they connect with him. If they’re open to finding out more about Volteum, prospects now have the option to book a demo straight from his profile.

2. Then we added a featured section to his profile to show off topics that might be interesting to prospects. Károly’s now a repository of useful information. Worth a follow, right?

3. And then we updated the company about section to again show that he knows the challenges and pains of his prospects and how to solve them - ending again with a call to action to book a demo.

Leverage social proof to build trust

The last piece was to build trust in Károly’s ability to deliver on his promise of making e-mobility simple and that he’s nice to work with. We do this through social proof so we updated the skills section to be customer-facing. All that’s left for Károly to do is to start collecting endorsements and recommendations from customers.

Nothing screams “trust” more than seeing that others like me have had a good experience with him.

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