Episode 361: Make Over Your Profile For 2025

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

0:00:53 – (Brynne Tillman): Hi, Stan.

0:00:55 – (Stan Robinson): Howdy. How are you, Brynne?

0:00:58 – (Brynne Tillman): I am so excited to talk about today’s Making Sales Social Live.

0:01:05 – (Stan Robinson): Yes. And I will be talking about making over Your profile for 2025. Hard to believe it’s here already.

0:01:14 – (Brynne Tillman): I know, but I’m excited and I’ve got a great feeling about this year. I think it’s going to be fantastic for everyone in business, but one of the challenges is if their profile, your profile, you listeners if your profile is not aligned with your business goals, it may get in the way of new business and new opportunities. Now, you know we’re going to talk a lot today about tactics, but I want to start with the why.

0:01:48 – (Brynne Tillman): I really want to start talking about LinkedIn’s profile. Your profile on LinkedIn is your personal landing page. Even if you are not actively using LinkedIn, it is where people are vetting you. When people Google you, your LinkedIn page is coming up very high in that search. It’s so important that this page is positioned to promote you as a subject matter expert, as a resource, and as a thought leader in your industry, with the goal of attracting, teaching, and engaging your ideal targeted audience to start conversations.

0:02:33 – (Brynne Tillman): So, Stan, talk to me a little bit about where you see the importance of updating the profile in 2025 and then we’ll go into some tactics.

0:02:44 – (Stan Robinson): Yes, and this is a great time to do it because it’s the beginning of the year. You’ve probably thought about your business goals for 2025 last month and so you want to make sure, as Bryn has mentioned, that your profile properly presents your business objectives and how you want to position yourself for the year. So whether you want to use it this way or not, people are looking at you and expect to be able to learn about you from your LinkedIn profile.

0:03:17 – (Stan Robinson): That’s one reason why it is so important. So we’ll talk about exactly what to do and how to make sure it properly represents you.

0:03:26 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I love that. And you know, something really important that we’re really talking about is that this is not your resume. We’re shifting it from resume to resource. If you’re in job search mode, resume matters. If you’re in a business development mode. Excuse me, a business development mode. This really needs to be a resource. So while it’s about you, it’s really about how you help them and actually showing up. Not just telling them how great you are, but proving it through bringing value in your profile.

0:04:06 – (Brynne Tillman): So let’s start top down. I’m going to start with the LinkedIn banner, which potentially has a change that we’ve seen a few people take advantage of, which is. And I had it for 30 seconds and it went away. But if people want to check it out, Kevin D. Turner has it working and it’s the opportunity to upload, I believe, up to five banners and they scroll. So it’s kind of like we’ve always talked about the background banner as your billboard. Well, now it’s a digital billboard.

0:04:46 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. And you can have lots of things going on. So we have not been able to play with it ourselves. But if you have that opportunity and I think there’s a line that’ll say enhance your, your background image. If you don’t click on it, it leaves forever. We know that now. Well, not forever. I’m hoping forever changes that it comes back. Yeah. For you to take advantage of it, you need to click the moment you see it. At least that’s what we’ve understood.

0:05:17 – (Brynne Tillman): So that’s, that’s important. But what’s the purpose of the banner? In my opinion, the purpose of the banner is to attract folks to want to keep reading your profile. Right. What would you say is the purpose of the banner?

0:05:32 – (Stan Robinson): A billboard best describes it. It catches someone’s eye and as you said it allows you to catch their eye quickly and create curiosity and they can quickly decide, hey, should I read further or not?

0:05:52 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I love that the other thing this can do is work as a call to action. So you can put a QR code if you have an event coming up. And that’s what I’m excited about, having options like here’s the event and you know, so there are different ways that you can leverage. Don’t overword it. Think of it as an image like a drive by, like it’s really important. Right. If you put too many words in it, then they skip the whole thing.

0:06:22 – (Brynne Tillman): The next piece is your headshot. I’m not going to spend any time on this, but just make it professional and make it look like you. So if you colored your Hair or stopped coloring your hair, update your profile picture. If you got cataract surgery and you no longer have glasses, update your picture. Yes, I’m talking about myself in all of this. Right. But I had red hair and big glasses for most of my career and that has changed and so has my headshot.

0:06:55 – (Brynne Tillman): If you shaved a beard or grew one, make sure you update your profile. Because when people show up on those Zoom calls, I want them to recognize you. I want them to know it’s you. That’s really important. So we’ll move on from that. But just that’s 2025. Update your photo. The next is your headline. Talk about the importance of headlines from your perspective, Stan.

0:07:20 – (Stan Robinson): Headline, that’s what you want people to get to. So they’ll look at your banner. They’d say, oh, this looks interesting. I’m in, I’m in revenue development. Let me see if this person can help me read down. They’re going to jump down to your headline. They will look at your photo. Absolutely. Because we’re attracted to other people. But the headline is where you’re talking to two audiences, the human visitor, which is what we’re thinking about. And it’s where you also start talking to the search engines.

0:07:52 – (Stan Robinson): So it is a good idea just to be cognizant of the fact that the search engines will be looking in your headline for keywords as well. But most important is your human visitor.

0:08:04 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that.

0:08:05 – (Stan Robinson): Yeah. That what you say attracts the attention of your ideal customer profile.

0:08:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. And one of the things like we have a prompt that’s an ask SSL that will ask you who do you help. How do you help them? What are the results they get? What is your product? And in 220 characters you are going to get a headline. But guys, it’s this simple, right? Just write this down. Who do you help? How do you help them? Why would they work with you? What are the results they get and what do you do? And play with it because those are the things that will attract them.

0:08:45 – (Brynne Tillman): This is like the headline of a newspaper. The goal of that is to get them to want to keep reading. Now the other goal that Stan mentioned that I don’t talk enough about is search engine optimization. So I love that you mentioned that because these keywords are found in searches. And by the way, you’ll start to notice there are a lot more profiles coming up in Google searches than ever before. So if you’ve got a lot of those search engine-optimized words, you may start coming up in those searches. But even more important with search is the new services feature.

0:09:23 – (Brynne Tillman): So I’m just going to touch on this. This is something that I think is vital and totally underutilized. So almost a year ago now, LinkedIn converted their providing services to services, which are now available to everyone. You don’t need a premium. Everyone has this and it allows you. It’s still not robust, but it allows you to complete this section, talk about the services that you provide, and open you up to search around those solutions so people can actually request a proposal right through LinkedIn.

0:10:11 – (Brynne Tillman): Now, I get a lot of these. I actually will decline many because a lot of them don’t align with what we do. But about 2 or 3 out of 10 requests I respond to, and I know that I’m off topic here, but the response is pretty simple. I’m looking forward to learning more about your initiatives. If you would like to explore working together, here’s a link to my calendar. I’m looking forward to talking with you and if they decide to book, great. If they don’t, fine.

0:10:44 – (Brynne Tillman): I have now closed three pieces of business that came directly through that feature. So one of them was a keynote, which was awesome. That’s great business. So make sure that you’re taking advantage of providing services. As we move down the profile, I think the next thing, although I don’t have it open, but is the about summary. Stan, talk a little bit about the about summary from your perspective.

0:11:11 – (Stan Robinson): One of the key things of the about section is we tend to think of it as, okay, this is where I can start to talk about myself. Well, if you’re in revenue development, you want to make sure that your About section talks about your ideal customer profile and their concerns, and what’s important to them. One of the things you want to do with that section is position yourself as a resource that can help them so you can talk more about yourself later and experience.

0:11:42 – (Stan Robinson): But in the about section, make sure that it’s very clear as to who you help and how you help them and the fact that you understand them and what’s important to them.

0:11:56 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, I think that’s great. I think something that you said, I think is really, really important. Like what is their challenge? What is happening inside of their organization, in their role right now? So if we start with that, I think that’s a big deal. So what is the challenge they’re going through? And then I’m going to, I guess, reframe what you said around insights, because I think that’s really important.

0:12:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So what is their challenge? And then like Like Stan said, this is. You’re a resource here. Add three to five tips. Now, these tips need to be vendor-agnostic. This is not an opportunity to say, work with me and I’ll help you do this. This is actually providing value. But that value will lead to your solution. Right? So if you. This is a perfect opportunity where we say, lead to your solution, not with your solution.

0:12:52 – (Brynne Tillman): If you list, here are the three ways we help our customers. That’s a pitch. If you actually list three ways to help customers where they read it and go, oh, that’s a value. Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, I learned something new that’s getting me thinking a little differently about how I’m doing things today. We are leading to your solution and it’s reframing the same concept from a pitch to an insight.

0:13:18 – (Brynne Tillman): By the way, that’s the way you want to write your content. Too often I look at this about section like a blog post. Right. It’s bringing that value. And then my call to action is if you’re exploring how to fix this, let’s chat. So the next section is featured. I love the featured section. Talk a little bit about that.

0:13:41 – (Stan Robinson): So featured is wonderful. It’s been around for a little while now, but it’s where you can really add some more dimensions to your profile because you can use everything from video to documents and you. And you can actually point to some of your posts as well. And I can’t get around saying, feature this in your featured section. You can showcase these things in your featured section. Again, it’s another way to catch the eye of your audience.

0:14:15 – (Stan Robinson): This is the perfect time to make sure that the content that you showcase there and featured is current and is consistent with how you want to position yourself in 2025.

0:14:28 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So I think that’s great. And there’s so much content that we can include. If you have a free LinkedIn account, you can include a post, you can have links, you can upload content. If you have a premium account, you can actually highlight events. Or maybe you can on the free too, but your recommendations or other profile sections. So there’s a lot that you can do. The litmus test is if my prospect got here and they clicked on it, would this lead them closer to my solution? Would this make them interested in setting up a call with me?

0:15:05 – (Brynne Tillman): So, yeah. So, yeah. So that is. And I’m answering a quick little question here, which is, thank you for asking this. So we have, for those of you that are here live and on video, we have a free offer so Ask SSL is the sponsor. Our new product of this podcast, livecast live stream. And we want lots of people to see it and we want to thank you for wanting to see it. So we are building out a free prompt, a custom prompt based on your needs and wants. And if you go to social sales link.com

0:15:51 – (Brynne Tillman): demo, that’s social sales link.com demo and then I’m going to put the, the, the QR code back up also. But it’s a socialsaleslink.com demo and we will show you the product and we will write you a prompt and if you want us to write a headline for you or something using it, anything, anything that we’re talking about today, we can build your, your about section live in the demo. Right? You’ll have some fun.

0:16:27 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay, so feel free, to scan the code or go to socialsaleslink.com demo back to our show. All right, so we talked about the banner, the photo, the headshot, the headline, the services section, the About section, the featured section. I want to talk about three more sections. The next one I just want to talk about is your, your job, your career section. I’m going to say you mentioned search engine optimization because LinkedIn is a job seeking tool.

0:17:07 – (Brynne Tillman): Your title in your job section is hugely search engine optimized. So if you are a CEO of a company, don’t just write CEO in the title. Use some keywords that will help you get found. This is huge, right? So I think I have LinkedIn and Sales Navigator training something around that I guess I should know what my. Maybe it’s time in 2025 for me to audit my profile, and make sure it’s all still good because I don’t even remember what’s there, but I build it out for those search engine optimization keywords.

0:17:47 – (Brynne Tillman): The other thing that I just want to mention, and you can take a look at my profile if you’d like. But the other really nice piece of this is the way LinkedIn builds out the experience. Experience. I couldn’t think of the word builds out the experience. It’s based on like I got promoted, so I have different jobs that are threaded together. But if you’re, if you’re an owner or partner in a company or you know, a solopreneur, you’re not getting promoted.

0:18:20 – (Brynne Tillman): So let’s take advantage of this real estate. Even if you have been promoted, do your prospects really care or would they care about your offer? So we call this, I hate to use the word hack when it comes to software or whatever, but it is a really Good experience hack where instead of saying I was the, I was a sales rep and then the director of sales and the VP of sales. Right. Instead of having that progression, you can actually have your products and services.

0:18:52 – (Brynne Tillman): Why? Because I just said those titles are what are search engine optimized. So it doesn’t realize if someone is searching for your products or services, you get that extra boost by having it listed in your experience. Just a little fun hack on that.

0:19:13 – (Stan Robinson): That is a great. Yes, that’s a great tip.

0:19:17 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So two more sections talk about skills and why that’s important.

0:19:23 – (Stan Robinson): Yep, skills are important also because of keywords. And now you can also. Well, now this has been for a while where you can attach skills to the relevant experience section. So you can, you can actually demo. You can have up to 50 skills and make sure that. Well, as long as it applies, you do include your highest-value skills. In other words, you know, if you know Excel, so does the rest of the world. Don’t worry.

0:19:57 – (Brynne Tillman): Unless you’re an Excel consultant.

0:19:59 – (Stan Robinson): Yeah, exactly, exactly. So do make sure, take the time to make sure that your highest skills, even if you don’t put all 50, although it’s a good idea to take advantage of that. Make sure that you know if, if you’re doing business strategy or strategic analysis or something along those lines that those are included in your skills. And then you can attach the relevant skills to each of your experience sections as well.

0:20:28 – (Brynne Tillman): And you can have up to 50 skills. And we want to take advantage of it for search engine optimization. So I’m going to throw out an AI tip. Okay guys, if you want to know the right search engine optimization keywords, grab either the link. Let’s go into your favorite LLM. Ours happens to be AskSSL, but yours might be Gemini or Chat or Copilot. Grab a link to your website, put it into your LLM and say, please give me all of the keywords and phrases that are part of this or that made up this website.

0:21:12 – (Brynne Tillman): Stick the link in and say give me up to 50 and what that will do. So your marketing department or the company you hired to build your website spent a lot of time figuring out those keywords and phrases that people are googling to find your website. Consider using those in your skills. Yep, just a little AI hack. If you love that AI hack, put in chat. Just a thumbs up or oh, I like that. I’m going to grab my skills from there. And those are also keywords that you can use in your headline in, in the experience in like those are the keywords.

0:21:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Assuming you had a professional build out your website, it’s going to absolutely blow your mind at the keywords that are coming up. I’m going to give you another hint. You can do that with a competitor’s website to find out what keywords they’re using. Okay, I’m done for the day on that. Those little AI hacks. But it’s really good, like it’s a really good marketing perspective. Right, we want to do that last one.

0:22:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Let’s talk about recommendations. I’ll let you start, Stan, and then I’ll close out.

0:22:25 – (Stan Robinson): Yep. Recommendations are underutilized. As long as you’re directly connected with someone on LinkedIn, their first-degree connection, you can give each other recommendations and recommendations add to your credibility. And the person who is recommending you, their photo appears right next to the recommendation. So a person can click the through and see, okay, who is this? This recommended Brin. So it is. They’re phenomenal. For credibility, we do suggest that you offer to when you ask in advance if they’re comfortable recommending you, we do suggest that you offer to send them some bullets or write them a draft to make their life easier.

0:23:16 – (Stan Robinson): And that way you can include the, the main content, the most important keywords, the value that you delivered. You make sure that that’s included in the recommendation.

0:23:29 – (Brynne Tillman): Love that. I’m going to throw in kind of a recommending for 2025 to consider spending a little bit of time recommending others. So as much as we want recommendations, recommending others does a lot. Right. It builds rapport and strengthens relationships. And by the way, you can recommend your clients for being great to work with. You can recommend vendors, referral partners, if you’ve done any joint venture partners, people that have worked together, maybe someone that gave you a great tip, or maybe you were in a mastermind with someone and they gave you a great idea, recommend them. Right. So it’s not just about asking, it’s also about giving.

0:24:19 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So welcome to 2025. If you’re listening to this in the middle of 2025, because you are, it’s not too late. If you’re listening to this in 2027, hopefully you’ve updated it over the years. Now I’m just playing, but you know, this is the time once a year where we really need to just take inventory of, make sure everything there is relevant and updated. And if you have any questions, a couple of things.

0:24:51 – (Brynne Tillman): Number one, book a demo to see Ask SSL and you can ask us questions. You can also join our [email protected] library and there’s lots of content in there and that’s totally free. Or you can join us at one of our guest [email protected] events and we can help you build out or refresh your profile. Stan, any last words?

0:25:18 – (Stan Robinson): No, that is great. Just do take the time put some time on your calendar to update your profile and make it sure that it properly represents you. Thanks Brynne.

0:25:30 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. Thank you. And guys schedule your little demo at socialsaleslink.com/demo and we’ll build you out your custom prompt and even build little bit of your profile if you’d like using ask ssl. It’s really fun. And when you are out and about don’t forget to make your sales social. Bye, guys.

0:25:56 – (Stan Robinson): Bye all.

Outro:

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