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April 12, 2022
LinkedIn is a great platform for sales executives to find potential customers. But it’s also an effective way for potential customers to learn more about those sales reps. After your LinkedIn headline, LinkedIn profile summaries are the most important (and visible) section and what helps you make a great first impression.
An enticing and compelling LinkedIn summary is necessary for your connections to learn more about you and your experience — and ultimately — to help you close those deals.
How? The summary section is the part of your LinkedIn profile where most people go to get a professional TL;DR about anyone these days. If you send a connection request, a compelling summary or about section is likely what will get them to accept.
But don’t dismiss the formatting of this tiny section at the top of your profile. There is a 2000 character limit for the about section. However, the copy gets cut off around 260 characters for desktop and even less for mobile, forcing you to expand the section to keep reading.
Here’s what your LinkedIn summary might look like:
The challenge is to make those 260 characters count so that the reader is compelled to click on the “…see more” button. Don’t worry though, we won’t leave you hanging. Here are our most important tips, tricks, and best practices for writing a LinkedIn summary for sales professionals:
Achievements and data are closely intertwined. But achievements are more about specific wins you’ve received, like awards, accolades, customer success stories, and other notable career highlights. When you combine the two, you get a much more complete image of the sales rep and their accomplishments as a whole.
It’s important to be genuine and transparent with your LinkedIn profile. Though you’re online and shielded by a screen, you should still treat your interactions on the platform as you would your deals in real life. Starting from your connection message all the way to individual posts and comments — authenticity is essential to your success on LinkedIn.
Like we mentioned earlier, there is a 2000 character limit for the whole section, however the preview only allows for about 260 characters before the reader is prompted to click “…see more” to view the rest of the section.
You can help make your about section short and scannable with bullets, make it easy to read with brief sentences and leave plenty of white space. Just because you have 2000 characters, doesn’t mean you should use them all up.
Provide a call-to-action (CTA) at the end of your LinkedIn about section. This can be anything from “Follow me on LinkedIn for tips on XYZ” to “Email me to find out how you can solve ABC pain-point.”
Your LinkedIn summary should also focus on how you help your customers solve their pain-points. Here are some examples:
Remember to tailor what you solve based on your own experiences and knowledge.
When it comes to sales, numbers are like a photo: they’re worth a thousand words. That’s because with statistical results, you can paint a clear and concise image for the reader. Here are some ways you can frame metrics within your summary:
Everyone writes their own LinkedIn about section, so there’s no need to talk about yourself in the third-person. Use first-person (me or I) when writing about your accomplishments, skills, and experience. And when you talk about your customers, refer to them in the second person (you) instead of a generic third person (they or them). That way, you’re automatically endearing potential customers instead of sounding cold and distant.
Jargon is always a tricky thing. Too much jargon, and you can scare off some folks. Too little, and others might assume you don’t know what you’re talking about. The trick for using jargon, is to make sure it’s jargon that everyone in the industry uses and that you don’t throw out terms just as filler.
Strike the right balance to ensure your message are intuitive and easy for your target audience to understand, while highlighting domain expertise.
Like Google, LinkedIn can be a powerful tool to search for very specific things. Therefore, using keywords strategically can help your profile actively appear in more search results.
But, how do you figure out what keywords to use? There are a few different strategies to integrate relevant keywords. Here’s a short but informative video on how to do this in several ways.
Be true to your personality. Let the reader see how working with you would translate in real life. Are you friendly and like to crack dad jokes, or are you more formal and buttoned up? Always be yourself in your profile so that there aren’t any surprises when you get on a call or meet someone at conferences.
Some people might treat skills and experience interchangeably, however these are two different things. And both are important to share.
A skill is something you do well, something you’ve learned and honed over time. For a sales rep that might be prospecting, organization, negotiation, or even using technology like a CRM. Experience, on the other hand, is something that you’ve done over time, like the jobs you’ve held and the responsibilities you’ve fulfilled.
Stories are 22x more memorable than just listing facts. That’s because stories stimulate neural activity 5x more, causing more of our brain to work and forcing us to focus on the narrative. That’s why you should tell a story whenever possible instead of simply laying out facts. That’s how you can make your profile – and especially your LinkedIn summary – a memorable one.
Lastly, whatever format you choose to use for your LinkedIn summary section, ensure there’s a clear and logical structure to it. Don’t just start off with “Once upon a time…” and then go into a bulleted list of sales stats and conclude with random jargon.
Your LinkedIn about section is enticing and authentic, tells a story, as well as shares your accomplishments. It’s the best LinkedIn profile on the site. Now what?
First, check in on your summary every few months to update or add any information as needed. It should be treated as an evolving concept so that it’s always relevant and optimized for your audience.
Next, grow your network and start engaging with your ideal prospects with social selling tools like CoPilot AI, which does most of the heavy lifting for you. To learn more about how CoPilot AI can help you scale your LinkedIn prospecting strategy, book a demo with our team.
