Can we get away with just updating our LinkedIn profiles a bit?, Tim Hughes

I often hear this.

"all we need to do on social, is touch-up our LinkedIn profiles"

It's the line of least resistance.

We know that the world has moved to social, we know that cold calling and emailing no longer builds us pipeline.

But the idea that if just smarten up our LinkedIn profiles a bit, this will somehow magically create the transformation we need. Is total fallacy.

A Marketing manager just before Christmas said exactly that to me. Do people really think that will make the transformational changes you need?

So what usually happens next?

Call the "hints and tips" merchants

A friend of mine's management, called a social selling guru in, he has loads of followers and gets loads of engagement, he's even written two books. They paid him to do a two hour session, sharing his "hints and tips" and guess what? Of course nothing happened.

Why? because social selling is a change of mindset, think of it as changing sport, once you were a swimmer and then you decide to be a cyclist. Where there are many things you need to do that are similar, a warm up and a warm down, diet, stretching, nutrition. You also need to train differently, for example, being on your bike, rather than swimming up and down a pool.

You could get somebody to run your Linkedin profile

I recently, contacted two people, who had their Linkedin profiles run for them. Never got a response, so I recently went back and asked them why they missed out on the massive opportunity? They had never seen my request, the person who ran the account for them miss interrupted my approach. Getting people to run your account also contravenes the Linkedin user agreement, I draw to your attention clause 8.2. If Linkedin catch you, then they will block your account and you will never get access to it ever again. Big risk.

I could get somebody to write my profile

There are plenty of people on LinkedIn that will offer to write your profile for you, they will interview you for 30 minutes and then convey your life story from this 30 minute interview. Again, this is not transformation.

OK Tim, what is this transformation you keep saying to me?

By using our social selling methodology, you will find that buyers will rather than dismiss you as yet another salesperson in a sea of sameness, they "walk towards you". This is transformation.

Why would you need a framework for social selling?

Social selling methodology

Elite athletes, have a process where they train, they know they have to make certain actions in a certain order to get the results. They then do this, time, after, time.

Here at DLA Ignite we help elite sales people with our social selling methodology along similar lines. This isn't just about using social media, we also take people though how the buyer has changed and how we can use simple psychology to be attractive to them. Regardless if this is inbound or outbound selling.

We teach people to use not just Linkedin but other social platforms (one client in North America only uses Instagram and Facebook) this after all is about being social, not just using a tool.

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