Ken Krogue

(This blog is longer than most, but one of my favorite ever – Read on! – Ken)

LinkedIn is the greatest source of business to business (B2B) sales intelligence and research data for the average sales professional ever invented. This kind of tool has never existed before. LinkedIn let’s you connect with people and see their network of connections. Once you understand that you can only see relationships that are 2 levels deep it gets much easier to use and understand.

My LinkedIn Network of Professionals - 3 levels deep

I just came from training a great team at Veracity Networks, a local internet, voice, and tv provider in Utah and long-time customer of ours. We talked about all the ways that LinkedIn can help in B2B prospecting. I also promised on my last webinar that I would make a list of 20 ways to use LinkedIn, well I got carried away.

Here is one thing you can do for every day of the month.

1- First, use LinkedIn to get in to a new account. I remember when I wanted to get into the inside sales department at a company just up the street by the name of Novell. I looked up the company, found an old friend of mine that works there named Morgan Spencer, contacted him, and asked for a referral.

My friend Morgan Spencer worked at Novell when I needed him

Now he works at Concierge Communications, so maybe I should see if he can refer me again. Anyway, it worked and took just a few minutes. That was my first productive use of LinkedIn years ago.

2- Follow your customers companies. That means you should be connected through LinkedIn to ALL OF YOUR CUSTOMERS! That seems like a no brainer, but very few companies do that. We recommend that your CEO, VP Sales, VP Support, etc. reach out with the welcome pack to each new customer and connect. Then ping them now and again to ask “how are things are coming?” Follow each of your customers companies in LinkedIn.

3- Make sure you complete your profile, keep it fresh, and set it up correctly so you have credibility. Complete the profile! That means 100%. Salespeople never take the time to finish and this hurts them.  

4- Use a good close-up picture that stands out. Our company uses black and white short-cropped head shots that are sort of cool. Why black and white? We stand out. Nobody else on the page is black and white. I like to zig when everyone else chooses to zag. (Sorry you can’t use this one, everyone else has to stay with color pictures.)

Notice my name in the Public Profile has my name!

5- Grab your name before someone else does! Make sure that your public profile is shortened to contain just your name, ie: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kenkrogue. If you leave this to LinkedIn it will have lots of crazy random letters and numbers and looks like a mess and is hard to link to. Write a compelling introduction to you and your company so people know what you do! If your company is hiring, mention it like our VP Sales did, it works!

6- Have a point person at your company. LinkedIn works by letting you connect to people 2 levels deep. It is a good idea to have at least one person in the company who reaches out to lots of connections. If everyone else at the company is connected to them, they act like a “window” with great connections for everyone else.  I’m connected to over 2200 people, and through me, all of my sales reps have a connection that is far more broad than their own.

7- Connect to your employees. Spend time and teach your colleagues and employees the value of using LinkedIn as a team. By designating a “point person” as mentioned above, make sure that person is connected to every single employee. Do it from day one in the onboarding process for all new hires.

8- Connect to your customers. Who in the B2B world is more important than your customers? I like to use Tags to connect to and classify my customers as part of my LinkedIn network. Why? I care deeply about my customers. They are like the kinds of prospects I want to also become my customers. Be getting to know them well, I can connect to others just like them. I can find the groups they are part of. I can ask for referrals or recommendations that will really have impact (if I have earned it.)

9- Connect to your prospects. We ask our salespeople to connect to all of their prospects right after the first contact attempt. Do they always do it? The smart ones do. Why have them connect? Increases rate of building a relationship. LinkedIn increases response to communications by 300% versus email.

You can also search by keywords to find lots of prospects. For us anybody with “inside sales”, “lead management” or “salesforce.com” in their LinkedIn profile is a prospect. What are your keywords?

10 – Do a 3×3 analysis of your prospects. My friend Steve Richard from Vorsight, outsourcers in inside sales training, taught me this. Take 3 minutes before calling a prospect to find 3 things you have in common to talk with them about.  LinkedIn is great for a resume, company, college sports or alma maters, common trade groups perspective, Facebook for hobbies, sports, etc.

11- Join relevant groups. One of my favorite LinkedIn Groups is Inside Sales Experts that was originally formed by Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group. When I first joined it there were about 8000 members, now there are over 13,000 members, all inside sales professionals. I think there are more members in this group than all others combined about inside sales. I have been dozens of people who I now call friends just by joining the conversations that are going on.  Trish’s only rule? No SPAM or self promotion allowed.

Trish Bertuzzi Manager of Inside Sales Experts LinkedIn Group

12- Find and join local LinkedIn groups. Go to the Groups search window at the top right and type in your home city and/or home state to find groups close by to you. Now look for industries that you want to prospect into. These groups usually have quarterly or annual meetings. I love the American Association of Inside Sales Professionals – Salt Lake City Chapter.  Change my city to your city in the search and go join today!

13- Make your wedding and funeral list and connect in LinkedIn. This is an old prospecting technique with a new twist. I am asked all the time by new sales reps what is the first thing they should do when they get hired. I tell them to make their wedding list (if they are young, and their funeral list if they are old.) What is that? The 250 people you know well that you would invite to your wedding or that your family would invite to your funeral. I’m told that wedding planners and funeral directors estimate the average wedding or funeral at 250 attendees if they don’t know how many are coming.  Imagine if you linked to 250 people who care about you, wouldn’t they be the best place to start prospecting and looking for introductions, recommendations, and referrals?

14- Respond first to email, then by LinkedIn. This is a way to make connections with interesting people and valuable people. Whenever someone emails you that would be a valuable connection to make, simply respond by email and mention in the email that you will be connecting by LinkedIn. Then reach out and connect. Remind them you just emailed them. LinkedIn penalizes you if you try to connect to too many people who reject because they don’t know your or don’t remember who you are.

15- When you go to trade shows connect with LinkedIn. My favorite task after going to a trade show is to take time that night back at the hotel and reach out by email then connect with LinkedIn.  I also have my team me reach out to everyone that comes by our booth at trade shows. Remind them of the “common experience” you had together at the trade show when you reach out by LinkedIn so they remember you and don’t reject you.

16- Follow your prospect Companies. Use the “Follow Company” feature and follow the target prospect companies you have. This ties you in to news about them and you can see connections you already have to their employee base.

17- Offer value to your LinkedIn Connections. Interact occasionally with your LinkedIn connections and build relationships with them. Offer things of value to them: information, training, good books, ideas, tips, tricks, best practices, and best of all, referrals. My friend Paul Allen, the founder of Infobases, Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, and FamilyLink.com told me about one of his favorite books called Love is the Killer App, that teaches this very thing.  I reach out about every six months to my LinkedIn connections in Utah and share my latest seminar with them for free. I probably have 70-80 people come. I do the same with webinars nationally. Warning: Don’t try and sell them something, it’s a turnoff. Just offer great content. If they want to buy something from you, they will seek you out.

18- Kill two birds with one stone. By linking Twitter with the “share an update” window on your main page in LinkedIn you can put in one message that is shared with both systems. This takes advantage of the Signal feature on LinkedIn which is a lot like the “Wall” on Facebook. It’s a way to see the latest news about your connections, but I like to filter it down or it’s just overload.

19- Connect a Widget on your Blog. I also have a twitter widget on my WordPress blog that allows me to update LinkedIn, which updates Twitter, which updates my blog. Pretty cool!

20- Share your blog on LinkedIn. There are ways to go the other direction by putting the most recent articles on your blog in a section on your LinkedIn page. I love the WordPress widget for LinkedIn which puts my three most recent blog articles on my LinkedIn page.

Use Tags in the Contacts section of LinkedIn

21. Use Tags to categorize your customers from prospects, friends, etc. As your Connections begins to grow it is wise to use the Tags feature on LinkedIn to create categories for your Contacts. This lets you slice and dice your LinkedIn network for all kinds of communication purposes.

Tags are found in the Contacts section of Linked in and are absolutely invaluable for more advanced methods of using LinkedIn for prospecting.

I use Tags to categorize partners, friends, association members, customers, etc.

This takes some time and I’m just getting started in effectively using the Tags feature.

22. Use Events in LinkedIn to promote real or virtual events. One of the things I try to do to offer value to all my friends on LinkedIn and to keep in touch with them is to offer free webinars or seminars on topics I’m familiar with around inside sales and lead management. I have found that the Events feature of LinkedIn is especially powerful in allowing me to post the important information, invite my connections, and post attendees so they can interact and network amongst themselves also. We do this every quarter for the AA-ISP in Salt Lake City.  I never use these events to sell, but only to network, educate, and raise awareness for the inside sales industry. Sale introductions have a way of taking care of themselves.

23. Use the 3 free backlinks in LinkedIn for Google juice! I wrote an article years ago about the SEO value of LinkedIn. We have 85 employees. Imagine if each of them used all three links to drive keywords for InsideSales.com, hmmmmm.

24. Look for LinkedIn Events Corresponding to all Trade Shows! This is one of my favorite tips for using LinkedIn for B2B prospecting. My friend Jay Weintraub, the founder of LeadsCon, was one of the first to really use LinkedIn to promote his trade show.

I am attending LeadsCon West 2012

Now it is a standard for hundreds of people to add his events to their calendar. Well when they do they are open to you to go out and introduce yourself and invite them to come meet you at your booth.

People attending a LinkedIn Event

Notice the link with 194 other people attending the same event you are going to. That gives you 194 people you can introduce yourself to BEFORE THE EVENT BEGINS!.

My favorite rule for events is to schedule enough appointments before the event begins to pay for the event.  LinkedIn helped us invite over 600 people to come visit us last year at Dreamforce 2011.

The power of the LinkedIn Events can help you do this all by itself if you start a few weeks ahead of time.

25. Share that you are attending LinkedIn Events. Remember I have linked my LinkedIn to my Twitter. So when I share in LinkedIn, it goes out to my 2800+ followers of Twitter. I like to help promote all of the events I go to, speak at, sponsor, and exhibit so that it helps all of us.

26. Freely give recommendations to co-workers, colleagues, former employers, authors, etc. Don’t wait for people to ask. Make a personal goal to reach out and recommend one person a week. If someone does something special, tell them. Business is crazy, take time to show gratitude and respect. Show the love!

27. Ask for recommendations from co-workers, colleagues, and former employers. This is an obvious practice and is a great way to “prime the pump” of getting lots of recommendations in your LinkedIn profile. Once you have lots of honest and frank recommendations from those closest to you then I like to move to asking for recommendations from customers.  I love to recommend people.

28. Ask for customer recommendations using LinkedIn. At this service this looks very hard to accomplish, but it is actually a good practice to get into. It works best when you ask for this early in the process as a measure of how well you do.  I also do this if a prospect is asking for additional pricing discounts or negotiating terms aggressively. I say, “Well, with this discount I’m giving you, I’m going to need to make up for it by selling more clients (smile), would be willing to recommend me in a format like LinkedIn if I have earned it?”

29. Ask for customer referrals using LinkedIn. I live by referrals. I tell my prospects that “one of the best ways I grade myself on how well I do is whether or not you are willing to recommend me to other people just like yourself when we are done.” I set this expectation up early and remind them once or twice during the sales process. The big problem is getting people to think of 3-4 good referrals. Quite often I need to prompt them with ideas. Well, recently I’ve been using LinkedIn. Before I ask for referrals I go look at their LinkedIn network and find several accounts I would like my teams to get into. Then it is easy to say “To make it easy for you to help me grow my business with your recommendations, I’ve already found a few people you know that I would greatly appreciate an introduction to.” Then you can use the normal LinkedIn process, I still like a live phone introduction though, as it is stronger. But the LinkedIn process is better then me calling them on my own.

30. Ask for LinkedIn recommendations,  and comments from blog readers! Ok, if you liked this article, especially if it helped you generate a lead or make a sale, I want something in return. I want a recommendation on my LinkedIn, a reference to this article, or a comment with Linked tips, ways to use LinkedIn, or best practices I haven’t mentioned for B2B prospecting.

Fair enough?

Now for one thing NOT TO DO!

31. Don’t send sales or marketing messages by LinkedIn. This is another word for SPAM! Overzealous marketers ruined the telephone, faxing, and email by sending SPAM. Just don’t do it. If someone sends SPAM to me I try to let them know that only rookie salespeople do that in LinkedIn. It’s like urinating in the public swimming pool, it ruins the swim for everyone. It’s a mistake we should only make once. I just wish we had a dye that turned their LinkedIn page red for a week!

There are tips and tricks in the inside sales industry that can be classified as science. There are others that are definitely classed as art.

Some books on sales are science, “The Challenger Sale” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, others are fine art “Snap Selling” by Jill Konrath (both of these I’m writing summaries on currently, watch the blog.)

Science is when you can prove it with research, and others can follow right behind you and prove it as well. Art is when you try it and it seems to work really well and everyone else tries it and they all agree with it because it “feels” right.

This tip is art, not science.

I have noticed that when a sales rep buys a house, their sales go up 20%. When they buy a car, sales go up. When they have children, sales go up.

One of our best sales reps had twins lately… and yup, you guessed it. Sales went up, and stayed up.

Can I prove it? Probably.

How do you use this tip?

Push your reps to higher levels of personal and professional commitment. Spouses, kids, houses, cars, whatever.  They will step up. And sales go up as a byproduct.

In your performance reviews, find out what makes your reps tic. Help them set goals in these big areas that require a commitment.

Has anyone else out there noticed the same thing? I welcome your comments. – Ken

I have heard that the original thanksgiving meal began with the Native Americans and Pilgrims just after the Mayflower landed but it was one of my three favorite presidents Abraham Lincoln, on October 3rd, 1863, that proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday.

He was well into the civil war when he declared:

“The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.”

“No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.”

“It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American People. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to His tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and Union.”

I long for the day when another President will again sit in the Oval Office who is willing to commend us openly to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God.

This article by Chris Brogan of Forbes is VERY thought provoking. And though he targets it to Chief Marketing Officers, I thing the inside sales space better look closely.

He knows you are thinking, “The LAST thing I need is to figure out yet another social network” and he has spent over 250 hours in Google+ and has these 10 points for us to think about: 

1. A social network offered by Google will impact search marketing.
2. Google+ evolves from Gmail with hundreds of millions of users.
3. Google+ will soon offer business pages.
4. Google+ added 10 million users in 2 weeks.
5. Google+ blends business and personal with “circles” that categorize easily.
6. Google+ is indexed and searched by Google much easier than LinkedIn or Facebook.
7. Many companies block Facebook, Google+ hasn’t been thought of yet.
8. Google+ isn’t just a “social network,” more of a “communications backbone” that works with email.
9. Google is committed to the Google+ platform, which should make it amazing.
10. First usually wins and Google+ expertise may put you ahead for a while.

Chris hasn’t predicted a “next big thing” for a while. But Google+ is already the #1 referrer of traffic to his website, so for him, at least, it’s working.

Confucius

One of the very best rules and patterns to live by and sell by is the Golden Rule. The only rule that I’ve found to be better is the Platinum Rule (go to the end of this article.)

“What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.” - Confucius 551-479 BC

“We should behave to our friends as we would wish our friends to behave to us.” - Aristotle 384-322 BC

Aristotle

“What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.” - Hillel 30 BC – 10 AD

Hillel

“What you hate, do not do to anyone.” - Judaism

“No one of you is a believer until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” - Islam

“Do nothing to they neighbor which thou wouldst not have him do to thee.” - Hinduism

“Hurt not others with that which pains thyself.” - Buddhism

“Do as you would be done by, is the surest method that I know of pleasing.” - Chesterfield 1747

“Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so them, for this is the law and the prophets.” - The Bible — Matthew 7:12 (King James Version)

“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and Prophets.” - The Bible – Matthew 7:12 (New International Version)

“Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” - Golden Rule: Common form (Bartlett’s Quotations)

The Golden Rule - Norman Rockwell

“Do unto others as they would have done unto them.” – The Platinum Rule, a slight improvement on the Golden Rule – Requires a good needs analysis… asking lots of questions.

About three years ago we were analyzing the leads that come from our website trying to find out if some were better than others.

Everything we do at InsideSales.com is based on metrics. Instead of just hiring marketers, we hire math majors and economics majors in our marketing department because it is all about studying and testing and analyzing.

So we charted out our leads and we found that there were two obvious “clusters” of leads based on the types of offers we had made to generate them. I call them “Buying Signals” and “Tire Kickers” and we found there was an 8 to 1 difference in the results they generated based on overall revenue.

Buying Signals are just that, respondents to offers that clearly say I’m anxious to talk to somebody at InsideSales.com about making a purchase decision. I have “need,” not just “interest.” Anything product-centric, pricing-related, commitment-based, etc. We learned that even a toll free number is an “offer” somebody can choose to accept on a website (and is often the very best one.)

Tire Kickers want to learn something. They aren’t ready to buy, they have “interest” but not need. They may not know that have need yet. The way to turn a Tire Kicker into a Buying Signal is with compelling information and education. Our research shows that a Tire Kicker is 8 times less likely to buy than a Buying Signal.

I was reminded that interest is the counterfeit of need. Interest belongs to the marketing department, whose job it is to educate. And need belongs to the sales department, whose job it is to build value and close to fulfill need.

Kinds of Buying Signal leads:
Free trials, demos, product overviews, contact us, product slicks, pricing requests, proposal requests, toll free phone numbers.

Kinds of Tire Kicker Leads:
Company overviews, white papers, research papers, webinars, on-demand webinars, how-to’s, forums, blogs.

So what did we do?

We cut out most of our Tire Kickers and focussed on Buying Signals. We even scaled back our well-known research papers like the paper that Inc. Magazine recently quoted.

What happened?

Things went great for about two months. Our sales went up, then they went down. And our leads started drying up. We couldn’t figure out what happened until one day we looked at previous leads and found that people typically downloaded 2-3 Tire Kicker offers before moving to the Buying Signal leads. It was a “lead funnel” and we had stopped the new leads from entering the funnel.

So immediately we put back all of our Tire Kicker information leads and expanded them.

It was almost a disaster, but it turned out to be one of the most important things we have ever learned.

Hope it helps!

Ken

One of the most powerful things I have ever learned in managing salespeople is the power of posting results visibly. When I do that results go up 20% almost overnight. I don’t care what it is; dials, appointments set, demonstrations, closes. Now of course, depending on length of sales cycles, it takes time for more results-based numbers to show.

Why?

I think sales reps are extremely competitive. They are the competitive athletes, the warrior class of the business world. The most correlated measure when I hired top performers was a competitive resume in athletics in college or high school. They can’t stand to be beat, or to be second. (see my blog on “Hiring Athletes… A Great Bet for Inside Sales Jobs“.)

My friend and mentor Jeff Call taught me this principle when I was back at FranklinCovey managing the fastest growing department in what was then one of the fastest growing companies in America. He would have me post the individual and team stats every day. And our numbers kept rising.

Where did he get the principle of performance visibility? “Putting the One Minute Manager to Work” by Ken Blanchard. Ken was a guest lecturer and a bit of a mentor to us at Franklin during those days. His other book “Raving Fans” had also been a recent hit.

Thanks Jeff. This is one of those gifts that keeps on giving!

A very interesting article by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson, both of the Sales Executive Council, show recent research that selling is not just about relationships, but rather about teaching customers, tailoring sales messages to the customer, and taking control of the sale.

I have been following the Harvard Business Review (HBR) since the time we did research in conjunction with them in the March 2011 issue entitled The Short Life of Online Leads.

The Sales Executive Council did a global study in 2008 involving more than 6000 B2B sales reps from nearly 100 companies in many industries.

They classified these sales professionals into five profiles:

1- Relationship Builders: who focus on building strong personal and professional relationships.

2- Hard Workers: come early, stay late, make more calls, make more visits, and go the extra effort mile.

3- Lone Wolves: are very self confident and may break rules by doing things their way or not at all.

4- Reactive Problem Solvers: are customer-centric by being reliable and detail-oriented with strong follow-up and well executed implementation.

5- Challengers: understand their customers’ businesses to push their thinking and drive the entire sales conversation with themselves in control. They are not afraid to assert even controversial views with customers and bosses.

These five profiles are almost evenly distributed among typical salespeople, but only one stands out for performance… The Challenger.

In fact, the Challenger makes up 40% of the high performers.

What makes them different?

1- They teach their customers. They focus their sales conversation not so much on features and benefits but on providing unique insight on the customers business with new ideas to make and save money. They help customers see things they didn’t know existed!

2- They tailor their sales message to the customers needs. They are deeply tuned in to the objectives and value drivers of the customer and position their sales pitch to each different stakeholder within a customers organization.

3- They take control of the sale. They are assertive, not overly aggressive, but comfortable with tension and rarely give in to a customer who doesn’t know their solution like they do. They can press customers to make a decision, even on price.

If the Challenger is the winner, who is the loser?

The Relationship Builder. In fact, they account for only 7% of high performers in standard sales situations.

Why?

The data seems to say that relationships have changed. Challengers push for better decisions, while Relationship Builders give in when the customers push back to preserve what they think are relationships. They are likable and generous, not competent and valuable.

The study goes deeper, Challengers dominate the world of complex solution selling by making up 54% of the stars, while only 4% of Relationship Builders make up the stars in more complex sales.

Restated, Challengers win because they have mastered the complex sale. This fact is extremely valuable when considering the future. With a down economy, this looks like an even more valuable trait. In other words, the Challenger looks to be the profile skill most desired for sales results well into the future.

Wow, lots of things are changing, BANT, relationship selling, what next?

Click here to see if you are considered a Challenger or to see a graphical summary of how the Challenger stacks up against the other profiles.

I’m looking forward to their new book “The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation” which goes on sale at Amazon on Nov 10, 2011

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You would think after four years of doing a “Secret Shopper” on the attendees of Dreamforce the response times to fictitious leads submitted to their websites would get faster, wouldn’t you?

Not so.

In fact we dropped from 41 hours to 42 hours this year as the average time taken to respond to a lead. At least we are slightly more persistent with an average number of calls before giving up of 1.1, versus 1.07. The data makes me look like I’m being sarcastic, but I’m not.

Symantec has fastest Dreamforce 2011 ResponseAudit of 51 seconds

Some companies, like the behemoth Symantec, really get it. Their response time came in the best at 51 seconds. And companies like Treehouse Interactive demonstrated that they keep getting it because they were ranked #7 in 2011 and were also ranked in the top 100 back in 2009.

But not many others are seeing the low hanging fruit that they could grab if they just responded immediately and persistently to their leads.

How important is it?

Well the original study we did that was most impactful was with Dr. James Oldroyd.

Inc. Magazine just published a summary of this research with a link to the original study.

I just got off the phone with my friend Marge Bieler, the CEO of RareAgent. She has worked in the lead generation space for many years and has been having great success in promoting LinkedIn as a tool to connect with decision makers. She has written a wonderful white paper about what she has learned and I asked her if I could summarize here for my readers and friends and point them to her LinkedIn profile for full access to the original.

Here is a Ken’s Note summary of what she says:

Gather your professional experience, interests, and capabilities, and use the Top 10 Tips below to help you begin designing your profile.

1. Craft an informative profile headline: Your headline becomes a slogan for your professional brand, such as “Conversations to Cash Creator” or “Automated Social Media Methods.”

2. Upload an appropriate photo: Select a professional, high-quality headshot of you alone.

3. Boast about your education: List all the institutions you’ve attended, provide highlights of your activities. Don’t be shy.

4. Cultivate a professional summary statement: The first few paragraphs should be concise and confident about value, goals, how you solve a particular pain.

5. Use Keywords to fill your “Specialties” section: Phrases that an individual might type into a search engine to find a person like you.

6. Update your status on a weekly basis: Stay on other people’s radar.

7. Show your connectedness with LinkedIn Groups and badges: TIP: when searching on group, leave the group search area blank, and hit search, the groups with the highest memberships will show on top.

8. Collect third-party-recommendations: Get at least one recommendation associated with each position you have held.

9. Claim your exclusive LinkedIn URL: Include your LinkedIn URL in your email signature.

10. Share your work: Share your templates, blogs, and showcase your writings, design work, media interviews or other accomplishments by displaying URLs or adding LinkedIn Applications.

You can download the full version by going to Marge Bieler on LinkedIn.

Great info Marge!