hi y'all my name is Zoe Hartsfield I run evangelism here at Apollo I am joined by my colleague James O Sullivan James do want to introduce yourself really quick Hey Zoe James o salvin part of the Apollo Academy team and we are here to walk you through step one of our social selling framework we're going to focus on step one the LinkedIn profile and we're actually going to do a live tear down of James o Sullivan's profile we'll jump into it pulling up your profile now James this could use a couple of improvements the very
first thing we're going to want to fix is up at the top up here your url if you look up at the top your url reads James AO and then a bunch of bananas numbers my lucky number 9217 whatever most people's URLs look like this and I think one of the quickest easiest adjustments you can make to make your profile look just a little bit more professional like you've put a little bit of time into it is actually to edit it so if you were to go into the upper right hand corner you're going to
click the pen and when it takes you to the edit page further over to the right a little bit higher you're going to be able to edit your URL and I would highly recommend you change this either to first. last I've seen people you know do it as the name of their company whatever youd prefer but just make it something so that it isn't that long string of numbers that step one right there is going to make you look infinitely more professional like you care about your LinkedIn profile okay that makes sense next let's take
a look at you know your eyes smoo down just to 10 tiny bit your LinkedIn Banner photo what is this it's a glen plaid nice classy few images I had saved on my computer at the time so I wanted to have something there instead of the default okay I will say this is a step up from the default I'm glad it's not the gray kind of nebulous non LinkedIn Banner but it's probably not the best this is really valuable real estate the first thing that somebody's going to see when they come to your profile I
would highly encourage one of two things your company probably has a bunch of branded LinkedIn banners that you could like swipe that's going to be a good way to plug your company or two is you could create your own in a tool like canva and have it speak to some of your expertise I've seen a lot of really good examples of this we could show some this is valuable real estate I would recommend you use it to direct people to other resources let them know your expertise or talk about your company onto your profile photo
this actually isn't bad I've seen I've seen a lot of uh more interesting profile photos I like that it's got the Apollo yellow it kind of represents your company the only thing I might recommend is one where you're like sitting up slightly straighter you know people have like a very clear head shot so this is okay well moving on right under your name you're going to see your tieline I'm going to ask you this does this headline tell me who you are no and then does it tell you who you help not really no I'd
like to thank everybody but that's not really the case though if your headline can answer for me very clearly who are you who do you help that's going to make a big difference is something like helping sellers close more Revenue through product education at Apollo would probably be a slightly clearer headline you could also make that more creative you can make it sillier I would recommend you get a tad bit more specific about who are you who do you help and you'll be Off to the Races [Music] okay this is a really important section this
line like it feels personal at the end of the day if I went to your LinkedIn profile I'm trying to get to know you James O Sullivan who is James who does he help this real estate is really great for telling a story about you I'll recommend you move this to a lower section as we scroll down the page yeah that's that's all still there from a previous time being unemployed and wanting to tell a story of like being in sales forever and some of the highlights so I think I did I think I shorted
it but I just didn't have anything to replace it with so I just left it there I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with this I just think it could be better if instead of these long bullet points you wrote you know three to five sentences about who is James what does he care about who does he help what's your area of expertise and then save all these wins for what I would call a Sizzle reel down in your experience section which we'll get to in a moment okay all right featured section this is okay
it could be better you can post posts here but you can also drop links you could drop articles you've been featured in I think variety is what wins so instead of a uniform list of several posts you've done I would include maybe if you're trying to drive people let's say you have a side hustle and you're trying to drive people to that landing page you could drop that link let's say you were featured in like a top 200 Sales people list and you want to drop that article link there I would mix it up and
create some diversity visually that's going to catch people's eyes a little bit better cuz right now this looks pretty huge it looks like just different versions of the same video over and over yeah I would would think that this is just like the same post copy and paste it over and over it's not it's just cuz your background is the same but all right and then moving down your activity section this is good this is automatically updated based on comments likes whatever you're posting but one thing I would just emphasize that I think you're doing
well is you are actively engaging if you haven't done anything in 90 days all this section will say is no activity in 90 days that'll set off a huge red flag for people so I think this is good and then this is the last section that I feel like we really want to highlight there are other sections you could add or change but this is probably the last important section so I think you could leverage this section James to drop your wins how many courses you've done how many webinars you've hosted the attendance how you've
driven uh conversions things like that would be a great thing to put in this section here you got to update it when you don't need it cuz by the time you do you don't even remember all those stats or Awards or things that you'd want to highlight anyway so yeah and this is worth revisiting every six to eight weeks I would check your profile make a couple of updates update your newest stat and make sure that your profile is up to date and ready to go cool well uh thanks for uh the audit of my
profile zo all right so that concludes our tear down of james' profile thank you so much for following along if you want to learn step by step how to tackle social selling in your sales strategy go back to the Apollo Academy and watch that webinar we just released additionally if you want to do your own LinkedIn audit we have a checklist so you can download and follow step by step to make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized for social selling as well don't forget to like And subscribe to our channel for more selling tactical tips
and leave a comment if you have questions about your LinkedIn profile we'll go through and make sure that we're answering those periodically and get you all squared away so that you are set to be successful with social selling [Music]