Episode 237: LinkedIn Recommendations – Proving Your Worth

Bob Woods  00:00

Greetings, salutations, and, of course, welcome to Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the Social Sales Link Virtual Studios, I’m Bob Woods of the aforementioned Social Sales Link, and I am joined by a fellow trainer and consultant who is also a LinkedIn Sales Insider –  officially – Brynne Tillman. Brynne, How are you doing? Sup?

Brynne Tillman  00:24

I am so good, Bob, I can’t even tell you, just a fabulous recovered weekend. And I’m getting full of energy.

Bob Woods  00:32

Yes. Brynne was a little under the weather last week, but she is back with a vengeance. 

Intro 00:39

Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show.

Bob Woods  01:02

So with that, we’re gonna go and get into what we’re talking about today, which is a feature that many LinkedIn users seem to overlook, and that is, recommendations. So here’s the thing about recommendations. How else can you prove that you are who you say you are? And that you do what you say you do? And that you’re really good at it as well. The answer, of course, is recommendations. 

Now, if you don’t already know, LinkedIn provides its users with a way to both give and receive recommendations. Both are equally as important too, because others can speak to your successes. And then you can speak to their successes. And you both can talk about the differences you and your company made or the difference that their company made to you, or however you brought value to them, and how they brought value to you and why the experience was fantastic. 

So before we get into the actual giving and receiving stuff, let’s talk about the big advantages of having recommendations in your profile. And there’s two that I can immediately think of, Brynne, and that’s social proof or social credibility, and depending on which way you want to refer to that. And it can also reduce the time of your sales cycle, which is really interesting. And I bet a lot of people don’t necessarily think about that one.

Brynne Tillman  02:27

Yeah. Well, Let’s start with the first one. Actually, you know what, I’m gonna reverse it. Let’s start with the second one. I know. 

Bob Woods  02:36

She’s an ostrich, she’s off the rails. Everyone. This is going into uncharted territory. Go ahead.

Brynne Tillman  02:41

Okay, well, I’m always off the rails. So how does it reduce the sales cycle? It reduces the sales cycle, at least for folks that are often asked, “Can I talk with someone about someone that you’ve worked with?” “Can I get an idea?” “Can I have referrals from clients?” Right? And we tend to get those. When we’ve done some outreach, inbound, they typically don’t ask, but when we’re outbound, they want some more than social proof, they want conversations, Right? 

So typically, prior to LinkedIn, I would say, Sure, I have three people I can introduce you to, I’ll copy you both in an email. And by the way, I had some of these clients that we’re taking two to three of these calls, maybe a month or every couple of months, because so many people were looking for those referrals. So once we started leveraging the LinkedIn recommendations, we’d have the client do it once, Right? 

We would say, “Mr. Client, we’re so glad we’ve been able to help you do X, Y, and Z. It would be an honor, if you would be open to writing a recommendation for me, I’d be thrilled to help you out with that. I can write it and you can edit it would be, you know, really helpful.” And, you know, as long as you do it with the right client at the right time, they all say yes, and they’re grateful that you wrote it, because they don’t have to think about it. And then you get exactly. Right? Yeah. And they’re saying exactly, mostly, exactly. 

I had someone reach out to me, who was an author who asked for a recommendation, and I love her book. And I said to her, “Yeah, send me what you want me to say.” Even though I read it, and I couldn’t give it, I still want to recommend now I might edit it. I made add something she didn’t think about, but it gets me started. And she gets for me to say what she wants me to say. So here’s the thing, so how does that help to reduce the sales cycle? 

Well, now when someone says to me, “Hey, Brynne you know, this sounds great. We love the proposal. We’re all good. We just need to talk with a couple of people to know, “Not all our i’s and cross all our T’s.” And now what I say is absolutely check out my profile in the recommendations, read through them. If there’s anyone on that list that you’d like to talk with further, please let me know. And I have tons. So they’re reading, and they’re reading, and they’re reading. 

And I have tons because I’ve been doing this for 10 years, by the way, but you know, they’ve been reading and they go, I don’t need to talk to anyone. So what’s great about this versus the recommendation on your, on your website, is they can click through, they can see the person, it’s a real person, it’s, they get to see, you know, do that you have other people in common, there’s just a connection to that human being, where sometimes they don’t ever even need that conversation. So getting those client referrals is a big deal.

Bob Woods  05:54

And then, and then just really quick, just a little side tip for the marketing people out there who are doing websites and things like that, if you have a recommendation on your website. And obviously, it’s a real recommendation for everything, put their LinkedIn profile in there, too. link, link, link to their LinkedIn profile so that it appears even more real.

Brynne Tillman  06:14

That’s a big one. I love that. That’s awesome. Fabulous. Okay, cool. So the second one reminds me of which was the first.

Bob Woods  06:26

Social proof and social or social credibility, which you’ve already gone into a little bit with that extra, extra explanation, explanation, God, what is wrong with my mouth today? explanation, which is absolutely true. Because everything when you have all that to reduce the time in your sales cycle, it also is social proof, or gives you social credibility, that again, you are who you say you are, you are good at what you do. And you have, and you already have clients who love you.

Brynne Tillman  06:56

I love this. Dustin had a couple of comments, but I want to bring this one up. There is exactly one element of our LinkedIn profile that we ourselves don’t write. And that is the recommendation. Very good point, that is, we are willing to document for the entire world to see as 1000 times the impact relative to what we stated about ourselves. Amen. Dropped the mic.

Bob Woods  07:22

Excellent. Dustin, thank you for that. We appreciate that Dustin Martin, Dustin Martin, everybody out, it’s almost like he stepped up on stage. 

Brynne Tillman  07:29

Dustin Martin. Yey

Bob Woods  07:30

Yeah, no, but seriously, that was great. That was just an absolute onpoint. And comment about exactly why we talked about writing recommendations. And we think they’re so important. And now hopefully, after all this, you will think that they are just as important as we think they are.

Brynne Tillman  07:48

So there are different kinds of people that we want recommendations from right from the one that we just talked about with clients, I’ll come back to that. We would love recommendations from co-workers, maybe people that we did, we did a project with recommendations from former bosses, it’s hard to give a recommendation to someone you are currently either reporting to or someone that’s reporting to you. There’s some HR things and other things that can happen around that. 

Ask your company before you do that. But um, you know, a former boss, or a former person that reported to you getting recommendations from them is fantastic. Obviously, clients giving recommendations and by the way, networking partners, so if you’re a banker, like Dustin, may be getting from CPAs that you referred business to right. And they talk about what a great networking partner you are, that can absolutely help. But let’s talk about the kinds of people that we want to recommend. 

And I think there are three major I mean, it’s, it’s your coworkers, etc. vendors that you’ve purchased from, you want to make sure that you’re giving them the kudos that they deserve. So it makes sense. And you want to have a kind of a balance. If you have 10 recommendations that have been given to you you want, you know, between eight and 12 that you’re giving out, just so it doesn’t seem I was at a profile where he had like 30 recommendations and he hadn’t given one. And it was a little icky. 

I’m like, That’s so one way, right. Yeah. Make sure that it’s bounced a little, but what I’m gonna throw out is the moment where he was gonna go, “Oh, I never thought of that.” Recommend your clients for being awesome clients. Why? Because you now have real estate on their profile. So you know, and most people are not getting recommendations. So by recommending a client that was wonderful to work with. And you talk about how great they were, what great community gators they were, how easy it was, how it was just such an honor to help them solve X problem. 

All of a sudden now, you are building a deeper relationship with that client. They appreciate it when other people visit their profile, you’re showing up, right? So they know who they chose to work with. And it deepens the relationship to a point where if someone else cold called them or tried to get in the door, I mean, they have this amazing recommendation from you. It’s harder to switch, it’s harder to leave you once you’ve done something like that. So highly recommend that you’re recommending your clients, as well as getting recommendations.

Bob Woods  10:50

Absolutely 100%. So I think with that, hopefully, you all now see just the huge, huge value of recommendations. They really are big and again, they don’t get nearly enough love they do on the client, I’m sorry, on the job seeking side rather, which is obviously because that but we can but we as salespeople can use them just as much so if not even more so especially with some of the things that Brynne mentioned on the giving side because we are givers as well as obviously receiving kudos from the people who want to leave those on our profiles as well. 

Brynne Tillman  11:34

So we have a comment from Joe Sabatini, a great note brilliant. And I’m gonna say that I was watching a movie yesterday, and Joe Sabatino was in it. So it was like, “Oh, I didn’t expect that.” So that was pretty cool. Anyway, my favorite actor. Thank you, Joe. And then Dustin, having earned a diverse set of recommendations adds power to a profile. And another reason to add your personalized LinkedIn hyperlink to your resume. Yeah, absolutely.

Bob Woods  12:08

Yes. As well as putting that personalized LinkedIn hyperlink in your email, in your email signature area, because then they could go ahead and click you and check you out directly from any email that you send with just being totally independent of LinkedIn.

Brynne Tillman  12:26

Yeah, that’s great. I love the feedback. 

Bob Woods  12:30

And great today with feedback. So with that, we are going to go ahead and wrap things up. Thank you, again, for joining us on making sales social live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, or the former Twitter now known as X, whatever, right now, we do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions. If you’re listening to us on our podcast, which means it’s recorded and you haven’t subscribed already, go ahead and hit that subscribe or follow button to access all of our shows, including previous ones. 

And when the new ones drop, more info on our podcast is available at socialsaleslink.com/podcast Hopefully that’s pretty obvious. We do two shows weekly. We do this one and our making sales social interview series, where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business, and many more related areas. So when you are out and about this week, be sure to make your sales.

Brynne Tillman  13:30

Social, Bye guys. 

Bob Woods  13:32

Thank you everybody. Bye bye. Appreciate it. 

Outro  22:24

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