Episode 408: Giving and Receiving Recommendations on LinkedIn

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, me, and 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.

00:00:53:09 – (Bob Woods): Welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us for this latest episode of Making Sales Social Live. Coming to you from the social sales like Virtual Studios and brought to you by askSSL.ai if you’re interested. You can see the QR code in the left hand bottom corner right there. I’m Bob Woods. I’m joined by Stan Robinson Jr. and Brynne Tillman. How are y’all doing today?

00:01:17:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Very good. So

00:01:20:00 – (Bob Woods): excellent. Excellent. I’m doing okay. Thanks. I appreciate it. So I don’t know if you all would agree with me about the statement that I’m about to make, but, here we go. One of the more underutilized features of LinkedIn is recommendations. Yeah, I’m. Yeah, I’m pretty much the and I’m. And the head nods all around, so I’m good. So recommendations they’re not just about showing off your skills. They’re about letting others speak for your success, how you’ve helped them. And it also gives you social proof that you are who you say you are. And you do what you say you do because other people are saying, hey, this person does what they say they are.

00:02:07:01 – (Bob Woods): You know, all that other stuff. And what’s really nice about recommendations is that you can also give that same gift that you’ve received from others with positive recommendations for certain connections of yours. Before we get into things, any preliminary thoughts about recommendations? Guys,

00:02:26:09 – (Brynne Tillman): I love your setup and I love that there are recommendations. Two ways it’s giving and receiving. And I can’t wait to jump into the giving part because, we’ve got some ideas that are beyond your typical giving to someone that you from, but I’m going to throw out who’s bought from you and that’s who you want to give recommendations to. So I’m excited to jump into the strategy around that baby. 

00:02:53:01 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Stan. 

00:02:54:14 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes.And one of the wonderful things about recommendations is it’s always better to have someone else talk about what a great job you did, then you to talk about what a great job you did. It just comes across so much differently. So I think you mentioned social credibility and recommendations are all about that.

00:03:13:06 – (Bob Woods): Yep. Yeah. Because they not only give you social credibility, but when you give it, it gives other people social credibility as well, which is in the first section that we’re going to be talking about here, which is the advantages of having recommendations in your profile. So I bet that when you go to and you see other people’s profiles. Like I said, highly underused, underused, you’re probably not going to see a lot of recommendations out there. They’re really important for two reasons. One is reducing the sales cycle, and two is for that social proof or social credibility about who you are. Brynne you want to see how it actually reduces the sales cycle.

00:03:54:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, yes. You know, I do, I do, 

00:05:57:06 – (Bob Woods): you do. 

00:05:58:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. So you know, I’ve had a lot of people say, well, how does having a recommendation reduce the sales cycle? But I don’t know about you guys, but before I had recommendations in LinkedIn, I’d be this close and hang out a verbal on, yep. We’re ready to close. And then the client will say, yeah, but I’ve got to talk to two people before we can sign. So I would always have clients that were willing to talk, but now you’ve got weeks between the excitement of, yes, we want to go forward with you, and then ever getting on to a conversation with one of those clients because of time constraints and all the other fun things.

00:04:39:14 – (Brynne Tillman): So now. if you’ve got enough recommendations from your clients, and I’d love to talk a little bit about what you want in your recommendations, if that’s in your little agenda. But 

00:04:49:06 – (Bob Woods): yeah, it is. 

00:04:51:14 – (Brynne Tillman): But awesome. So now that you’ve got these recommendations, what I would typically say is, Stan, I’m so excited to be working with you. And I completely understand that you’d like to talk with some folks that have gone through our training and coaching. Feel free to look through the recommendations on my LinkedIn profile, and if there’s anyone on there that you’d like to talk to, let me know and I’ll try to facilitate an introduction. And what I have found time and time again is that they’ll say, oh, this was enough. Thank you. Right, that they don’t actually have to have the conversation.

00:05:29:01 – (Brynne Tillman):  Now, I will say, though, one of our recommendations, we had a pretty big client that, Bob headed up, and they had said, we want to talk to someone that has done exactly what you’ve done before, what they were looking for, which was to do a keynote and some breakouts and some conferences. And I had reached out to a client. We had a recommendation from them, but not about that particular thing. And then I went, oh, that’s missing.

00:05:58:18 – (Brynne Tillman): So now we need to get a recommendation for exactly the things that you’re selling. So keep that in mind. And then so, you know, now I’ve got to go back to a different buyer inside of that client and say, hey, thank you so much for talking with our prospect who became our client and we’re actively working with them. Would you mind writing something in a recommendation about that service? And we can go to this new client that loved everything we did and get that recommendation for that service too.

00:06:34:02 – (Brynne Tillman): So it’s not just about just generally getting these recommendations, but specifically thinking in terms of what it is that you’re selling and do your recommendations align with the buyer?

00:06:48:09 – (Bob Woods): That’s huge. That’s huge. And that gets more. And Stan, I’d like you to take this a little bit. Just talk a little bit about social proof for social credibility, especially nowadays where it seems that everybody’s calling themselves an expert in something which in my mind, you should have other people call you an expert, not call yourself an expert. That’s another show for another time. But, you know, to have other people say that you are the person that you say you are is so much more impactful than just you saying it yourself.

00:07:22:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. And Bob, you’ve summarized it beautifully. I think later we’ll get into talking about how when a person writes a recommendation for you and it appears on your LinkedIn profile, it’s also more visibility for them because their picture, everything appears right next to the recommendation. And people can just click through and learn more about them. But we’ll also be talking more about exactly how our recommendations should be structured. So why don’t we keep rolling? Because those are things that I don’t want to look at, you know, to. Yeah. Too far. 

00:07:59:09 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. Let’s actually get into what makes a reliable or an effective recommendation.And this is something that you should be thinking not only for yourself when others write it for you, but when you are actually writing for others. So, you know, an effective recommendation. It’s not just, you know, hey, added, I was going to say add a boy, add a person. I don’t know what it is anymore, but you know, this, you know, pat on the back, good job.

And everything else. It really should be a well-crafted narrative. And there are some questions that are truly effective. Recommendation for LinkedIn should address, brynne. You were champing at the bit before about this. Do you want to take those things? 

00:08:45:02 – (Brynne Tillman): I can certainly do that. But Stan is definitely great with structure. But here’s where, big picture. What I’d love to see is this is the challenge they were having. And I know you probably have notes and I’m going off the top of my head, but this is the challenge that they were having. This is why they chose us to help them with that challenge. This is what it looked like to work with us. And these were the results that we brought. That and went, did I do okay?

00:09:19:26 – (Bob Woods): You nailed them. Precisely how the notes are on that, which is, which is really important. I mean, because it’s like I said, you can’t just give, give an attaboy or whatever you want to say because. Because that just tells nothing. And it doesn’t make the recommendation effective. You need effective recommendations for these things to work at all. 

00:09:39:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Can I answer this? George, is asking, you know, George. Thank you. You have been engaging on so much of our content lately. We appreciate you. This has always been my question. How do you ask for recommendations from customers without sounding needy or making customers feel like you’re taking up their time? So this is and there’s a second part to this. This is a fabulous question. And I may be jumping ahead because I’m so not prepared. The key is when the customer says, man, George, that was awesome. We really appreciate all the hard work you did. Here are some of the takeaways. And here are some of the things that our team is doing now or what’s going on in our organization because of you.

00:10:23:28 – (Brynne Tillman): And then you just say, thank you so much for those kind words. It means so much to me. I’m curious. I’m building out my LinkedIn presence right now. If I kind of recap what you just said, would you be willing to write that in as a recommendation? And I’ll do the primary work, send it over to you. You can use what I write or edit it, whatever works easiest for you. And then when you go through the motion of asking for the recommendation, thank you again. Here’s a recap of the wonderful things you said about how we were able to help you truly appreciate it. And all they have to do is copy that, click a link, paste and done

00:11:05:15 – (Brynne Tillman):  So we’ve got some crispy prompts around that too, which we’ll try to get into the show notes. And I’ll try. I’ll see when you guys talk. I’ll see if I can find that. How do you ask someone for that recommendation? But here’s the thing. You have to have the conversation first. Do not send a request for a recommendation without talking with the person first. That’s so important. You could blindside them and all those fun things.

00:11:35:16 – (Brynne Tillman): So hopefully that, that that helps. We’re going to talk about potentially making a recommendation for that client first. And so I won’t jump ahead. But that’s another way to start that conversation. 

00:11:51:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. And I see you also mentioned how to make clients want to write recommendations without the reps even asking for them. A lot of that has to do with the quality of the product or service that you deliver. Because if you deliver what you’ve promised, they will be delighted to talk about how you’ve helped them solve a problem or whatever solution you brought to the table. So yeah,

00:12:20:26 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. That comes from what I call stark raving fans. And the only way to get stark raving fans is to earn that through, you know, exemplary delivery of products and or services or whatever it is you do. Basically, if you do just such a great job that they’re blown away by it, chances are really good that they’re going to want to help you out and attract others to your products or services because they want to see you succeed as well. So before we go on,

00:12:51:07 – (Bob Woods): There is just one thing that I want to note here. You have to remember to be authentic. And that’s probably the key here. So in other words, don’t go out and just endorse someone just for the sake of endorsing someone. Also, don’t necessarily accept a recommendation from someone if you haven’t really done anything with them. I mean, all of that type of stuff can really come back to harm your credibility, especially if someone buys something from someone else based on a recommendation that you’ve left for them that wasn’t authentic.

00:13:28:12 – (Bob Woods): And if they get, you know, less than stellar service that will come back on you. And, the vice versa is, it is true as well. So, you know, make sure that whether you’re receiving or you’re giving that the recommendations are 100% genuine and authentic.

00:13:49:10 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. 

00:13:50:12 – (Bob Woods): So with more so with that, let’s we’ve already kind of broached the subject about how to ask for recommendations.So, you know, seize the moment and offer to draft it, remind them of your positive impact. If you draft something for them ahead of time, hopefully, you know, whatever you draft for them will already have that positive impact there. And obviously, when it comes to drafting something for someone else, I do think it’s important to say, you know, listen, you can copy and paste this or if you want to write something based on what this is in here too, that’s fine too.

00:14:33:01 – (Bob Woods): I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you know, a lot of times, especially when it comes to recommendations, people are going to get that blank screen syndrome and they’re going to go, oh my God, what? I’m going to what? What am I possibly going to write about? The copy that you provide should be of, you know, copy and paste, obviously if they want to or at least it should give them a really good way to like maybe add something in or maybe take one line out or replace something.

00:15:00:22 – (Bob Woods): But you know, it should be. It should be there in a form where they need to do very little. If nothing depends on how they feel about what it is that you wrote for them. 

00:12:03:28 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah, it’s so true. And even though some people may say, well, do you mean you’re suggesting that we offer to write our own recommendation? And the answer is yes, because number one, it will save the recommended time. Number two, it will ensure that the highlights of your working relationship actually appear in the recommendation. Because, as Bob mentioned, one of the worst things that can happen is for the recommender just to say, hey Bob, it was great working with Bob. He was awesome.

00:15:46:01 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Well, that’s not really helpful. So you will get a much higher response rate when you offer to give them a draft that they can feel free to edit or modify as they see fit.

00:15:58:21 – (Bob Woods): And then and then remember what Brett discussed about the key questions that need to be answered in an effective recommendation. If you start off with writing the recommendation with those four things in mind, you’re more or less guaranteed that that’s exactly what’s going to make it into the recommendation that they do for you. And then obviously, you can flip that. And when you do it for someone else, you answer those four questions about someone else.

00:16:23:18 – (Brynne Tillman): I love it.

00:16:24:25 – (Bob Woods): So with that, let’s go ahead and look a little bit at who you are going to give recommendations to. So we’ve got some categories on that as well. The first one being recommendations for clients. That seems to be kind of obvious. But you know what? If you’ve had someone for like five years as a client and things are just going swimmingly and you all love each other and things are going great, giving a recommendation may just not come into your mind because that relationship is so comfortable.

00:17:02:22 – (Bob Woods): You know, why not? You know, why not reinforce that comfortableness or whatever you want to say, or maybe even give that relationship a boost a little bit by giving a recommendation for clients. And you know, you can show how you’ve helped them overcome specific challenges, the solutions you provided for those challenges, and probably in a generic way, because you may not want to talk about, clients, very specifically, but, you know,

00:17:30:11 – (Bob Woods): results that you can measure. But you, you know, may not want to measure exactly, but you can even use those as the basis for a case study for a client as well, which I really like as well. 

00:17:43:18 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. I love the idea of ultimately creating a case study from that. But I do want to talk about why it’s so important to recommend your clients. So there’s lots of reasons. Number one, it develops a stronger one, see. and trust based. Right. Like the fact that Bob said in the beginning, very few people are getting recommendations. That’s including your clients. So typically I will talk about how wonderful that client was to work with, how we were able to stay on task and

00:18:15:13 – (Brynne Tillman): how, they were great at corralling the cats without saying, you know, prowling cats, but, you know, making sure that everything went smoothly and that they were an absolute joy to work with. That’s about them personally. And that means a lot. And, you know, based on whatever it is that you solve, right? If you are a bankruptcy lawyer, you’re probably not going to talk much about their bankruptcy. So you want to talk about how great they were to work with. So to Bob’s point, be careful with how much you share about what you did internally, and make sure if you’re going to share that,

00:18:53:11 – (Brynne Tillman): that it feels anything like you might be crossing the public line, don’t add that to the, to the recommendation. Just talk about what a pleasure they were to work with and what that looks like. You can, it means a lot. Number two, if your profile is designed well, that will do what you do. That will show people what you do. Right. So there will be a clear bridge. But the recommendations you receive on LinkedIn are what shows, not the ones you’ve given.

00:19:29:07 – (Brynne Tillman): They have to click through another tab to see what’s been given. So our recommendation that we have given and our client has received typically will live at the top of their profile or at the top of their recommendations. And her profile for some time. So we’re getting real estate on their profile. And when anyone from their company or even outside of the company is doing their due diligence, they’re going to see that they chose to work with us.

00:20:02:28 – (Brynne Tillman): And that gives us brand credibility. So I think that this is so important. And the last thing I’ll say on what this really does is when that person leaves the company and we know, according to LinkedIn, there’s a 20% turnover year over year. They’re not going to forget that they worked with you. Right. Like often we’ll bring in a vendor and then Bob might, you know, he said maybe you were working with them for four years, but maybe you worked with them for years ago for a month. This will help them for sure. Remember you were the person they worked with.

00:20:40:08 – (Brynne Tillman): and that can really bring in some great value. Your recommendation can also help them in getting their next job because you were great to work with vendors right. Like it all plays together. So I absolutely love recommending clients for being amazing to work with. There are other folks that we want to recommend as well, and I’ll throw that back to you guys, but that’s my little rant for the day, okay?

00:21:12:24 – (Bob Woods): it’s not a rant. If it was effective, it was just a talk, a conversation.

so I think what I’m going to do is just quickly go through some of the other potential people, groups of people that, that, that you might want to give recommendation to. know, obviously, offer recommendations to those who you’re seeking them from. We talked about that just a little bit already. That’s a particularly effective way to both get and give a recommendation stand. Did you want to think it was you who wanted to talk a little bit more about that, a little earlier.

00:21:46:21 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yeah. Because we also mentioned industry thought leaders. Yeah. As, as examples. So if you’re learning from someone on a regular basis, they’re putting out content consistently. You can mention that as well as referral partners. Yep. Two small things that I wanted to mention, especially for those that are just getting started with recommendations. Number one, if someone sends something to you in a recommendation and you want to, you’d like to ask them to edit it, you cannot make those changes yourself.

00:22:20:05 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): You need to ask them to do any edits. And then they appear in reverse chronological order. Yeah. To my knowledge, once upon a time we could change that. But to my knowledge, right now, you don’t have any control over it. The most recent one is going to be at the top. Yeah. I don’t think you can do that.

00:22:40:14 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. I don’t think you can do that. In fact, I’m going in there right now. Just, just a look at that. 

00:22:49:05 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Once upon a time, you could put, like, the best one at the top, but not anymore. 

00:22:54:08 – (Brynne Tillman): It’s not anymore. Yeah. So it is definitely, based on time, date. But what you can do if you have a premium account is you can link the recommendations to, to your, your featured section,

00:23:13:11 – (Bob Woods): right.

00:23:14:01 – (Brynne Tillman): And so that would be my recommendation there.

00:23:17:12 – (Bob Woods): Yeah.

00:23:17:19 – (Brynne Tillman): I also would love to share my screen in a second. And because I would love to share the crispy prompt for recommendations, I’m just trying to get it into a one night screen. Because here’s the thing. We want to make it really simple for our folks to give us recommendations. We can also, to make it simple, you can, use this prompt in reverse where it ultimately helps you, right, for them. But I am simply trying to lay this out so that you guys have a great image that you can use. And I’m going to teach you a quick little trick also. So this isn’t going to be beautiful, but it is.

00:24:17:05 – (Brynne Tillman): I’m going to share the screen. Maybe. And if you are listening to this later, I’m going to just quickly read this. Can you guys see it?

00:24:33:25 – (Stan Robinson Jr.): Yes. 

00:24:34:12 – (Bob Woods): Yeah we could for a second there. There it is. 

00:24:40:05 – (Brynne Tillman): Okay. So for recommendations we’re going to start with the context. I want to request a recommendation from a client expressing gratitude for their business and reflecting on the success I’ve helped them achieve. Act as a professional salesperson who values client relationships and understands how to effectively communicate appreciation and request feedback. Focus on the positive impact your service has had on the client’s goals. Expressing genuine honor and appreciation for the opportunity to work with them include a call script for the recommendation request and write an email for the recommendation that you can draft based on the client’s feedback.

00:25:19:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Avoid jargon, overly formal language, etc., etc. and then ask me all the questions you need to complete this task one at a time. So if you are watching, if you’re reading while watching this live, you can take a screenshot of what you’re looking at, put it up into your lineman, say, give me the text, please, and you will have the crispy prompt for that. Now I’m going to stop sharing. 

00:25:48:12 – (Bob Woods): Here we go.

00:25:49:28 – (Brynne Tillman): All right. So hopefully that’s helpful. But I did want to share that 

00:25:51:12 – (Bob Woods): okay great. So I think on that note, let’s go ahead and close things out. So whether you’ve been with us live or recorded, thank you for joining us for this episode of Making Sales Social Live, sponsored by Ask. Did you want to take that?

00:26:10:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know we just interrupted this important question. When is the best time to ask for a LinkedIn recommendation from a client, especially if the project is ongoing. So I ask when they’re successful. I typically don’t ask in an ongoing project. Now, if it’s a forever ongoing project, whenever you hit a milestone that might be like, there, you know, we have some clients that we have contracts with that we work with year after year after year.

00:26:39:01 – (Brynne Tillman): One. Would you say that that ended or, you know, so it would be after some successes, maybe after a review when you’ve hit a big milestone, it and and so it just really depends what’s the full scope or what is a complete, the more complete the project is, the better that recommendation is going to sell you. Thanks. Now let’s begin the beginning and the end again. 

00:27:05:12 – (Bob Woods): Yes. So, let’s see here. You know something? Honestly, if you want more info on our podcast, just go to social sales link.com/podcast. All the information is right there, including all the channels that we’re in. You’ll also get access to our interview series where we interview leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas. So we’ve got where we are up to now? 

00:27:30:01 – (Brynne Tillman): 370, 

00:27:31:12 – (Bob Woods): 370 episodes 

00:27:32:01 – (Brynne Tillman): ish?

00:27:36:11 – (Bob Woods): Yeah. I mean, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. But, yeah, that’s just mind blowing. So, appreciate everyone hanging with us and just want to say, when you are out and about, don’t forget. Very welcome. Don’t forget to make your sales so. Sure. Thanks, everybody. Have a great week back here next week. Bye bye.

Outro:

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