LinkedIn? Value Strategies for Bankers

More than 420 million people have virtually joined hands on LinkedIn — nearly 40% of those users reside and do business in the US. Someone joins LinkedIn every two seconds (there’s one, there’s one, and still another) — maybe one of them is your next best client.

LinkedIn is irrefutably the catalyst for facilitating business connections. It takes Six Degrees of Separation to 3.5. Second, third, even Group level connections are now as important as your first, and what you do when you’re connected can make the difference when opening a door to a new partnership by providing an idea when a business owner needs it most or sharing a resource that makes a difference.

"All relationships require hard work, patience, understanding, and, yes, tactics and strategies designed to make them blossom. But don't confuse that with manipulation."  

Tommy Spaulding Author,
Speaker, Net-Giver

Unfortunately, this amazing tool is still woefully misunderstood and underutilized by financial services sales professionals. The average banker is on LinkedIn just 17 minutes per month. Compare this to other top industry sales professionals who log on for about 120 minutes per day.

Some bank CEOs are still wrestling over whether to allow their colleagues to be on LinkedIn at all — newsflash: they are already on it and likely looking for a new position at a company that is with the times.

In a recent marketing and business banking study we conducted with Kadince, results indicated that while more than 90% of banks allow their bankers to use LinkedIn and more than 60% are encouraged to do so, 83% of business bankers do not actively use the tool on a regular basis.

Part of the reason for a lack of activity might be ongoing misconceptions about LinkedIn. Here are a few of the scary comments I’ve heard recently from the many bankers who call me about LinkedIn:

• LinkedIn is a recruiting tool. I don’t want my people to be poached by the competition so why would I allow them to be on it?
• My bank won’t allow me to log onto LinkedIn at the office and I’m not taking my free time to do it at home.
• I don’t want to connect with my clients or prospects I’m talking to because my competition will find out who they are.
• What about security and hacking. There’s too much risk in opening up the world to our customer information.
• LinkedIn is nothing more than the latest cold calling mechanism and I use lists for that. I would rather spend my time on the phone versus being on the computer looking for names.

Sound familiar? The thing is, we’re a product of our experience which forms our opinions; unfortunately, many of our beliefs have led to every other industry passing us on the LinkedIn freeway. We have been left in the dust and it’s time to rev our engines.

Here are some ideas and success practices we’ve helped our clients execute to maximize their ROLI – Return on LinkedIn Investment.

1. Looks Matter

If you choose to have a subpar profile, stay away from LinkedIn. Everything starts there and the first thing people see is your photo. While there are certain safety and privacy considerations that might cause you to avoid posting a picture, in general, a photo is a must. That photo makes you 14 times more likely to be seen and taken socially serious. Without one, LinkedIn’s photo default looks something like the men’s and women’s restroom signs at Wrigley Field.

Some photo best tips:

• Take your picture in color and avoid too many filters. Sepia is great for your moody winter landscapes, not for your professional photo.
• Use a plain colored (white, blue or black) background. Save pictures at Happy Hour for Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat.
• Organize a LinkedIn photo day at your bank for colleagues. All you need is a blank wall and a good professional photographer.
• The second key component of your profile is your professional headline or “Tagline.” This has a 120 character limit. It’s great that you’re a “VP of Lending” or “Branch Manager” but that means little to the outside world. Make your Tagline creative and different, within the bumpers of both propriety and bank policy. How about; Banker Getting Things Done in NAME OF CITY?

Some Tagline tips:

• No need to put the name of your bank in the tagline. That is listed under Current about two lines below.
• No one wants to deal with a non-decision maker. It doesn’t make you bad to be an Assistant something and your bank doesn’t need to change all of its titles for LinkedIn. Just leave the “Assistant” off.
• When someone hovers over your name on LinkedIn only the first 80 characters of your Tagline are visible. Those are the most important letters so use them to make an impact.

2. Make the Summary About Them

Forget about loans, deposits, and stuff you sell; no one cares how big your organization is or how long you’ve been there. They don’t do business with you just because you have a $50 million loan portfolio. In fact, all of that could make eyeballs click to another profile.

What potential buyers look for is what you can and will do for them and how you are different than the many thousands of bankers they could work with. Avoid words like passionate, motivated, expert and driven. Save those for job interviews and annual reviews with your boss.

When an entrepreneur sees your profile at 3:17 AM while looking for a new banker, they want someone who stands out – someone unique. The summary is your 24/7 personal brand. Here are some ideas for great summaries:

• Make them long. You have a 2,000 character limit. Use them wisely. This is your unique calling card at 3:17 AM and all other times.
• Interview your top three clients and ask them why they selected you as their banker, what value you provide beyond services and what they would say if a prospect called them.
• Interview your boss and ask why he/she hired you, promoted you, sees in you, etc.
• Talk to your spouse, a significant other, or a close friend and ask about your best personal character trait.
• Take those words and phrases and create a summary with bullets and paragraphs. If writing isn’t a strong suit, go to your marketing department and ask for help. Worst case, pay someone to ghostwrite. It’s worth it.
• Include a testimonial. Recommendations are good and having something from a great client in your summary is a plus.

3. Be a Groupie

LinkedIn Groups are ubiquitous. There are 2.4 million of them and you can be in up to 100 at once. Don’t join just for the badges on your profile; the real value is in participation. Select a few strategic ones that create win-win opportunities. It’s better to be engaged as a meaningful member in a few targeted groups than an ineffective member of many.

Join a banking related group to stay current on trends. Be a member of some local or regional groups (Chamber of Commerce) to keep in touch with the community. Align yourself with industries you target – physicians, manufacturers, CFOs (your competition likely won’t join these). Don’t forget one other category – sales. There are many great LinkedIn Sales Groups like Sales Gravy, Sales Best Practices, Sales Management Association and many more. These can provide some ideas for you, articles you can share and even help with some just-in-time training on key skills.

Finally, be active. Share content, comment professionally and share ideas. It not only helps your LinkedIn profile, it makes you more Google-icious, too.

4. Customize Connections

There’s a new term making the rounds called LinkedIn Spam. It’s associated with people who connect with anyone and everyone indiscriminately. Don’t be a spammer. Invest some time to craft a personalized connection invitation with the right people. Remind the person how you met or of the connection you have in common. This will keep your message from getting lost in the junk file forever.

The average number of connections CEO’s have is 930 and having 500+ shows you are connected. I have more than 5,400 (as of March 2016). I add new ones every day and I make them one at a time. I do this on a laptop because it’s hard to customize a connection request on a smartphone or tablet.

Once the connection is accepted consider:

• Reaching out with a thank you message for their acceptance. Since your connection is now at the first level with you, messaging back and forth is free and easy. A banker I know in the Midwest does something more intimate. When someone connects with her she sends a personal note with her card via snail mail. Handwritten notes are now a novelty!
• Perusing the connection’s own second level connections to see if there is someone else you might want to connect with. This small investment of time can pay big dividends.

5. Endorsements & Recommendations

Endorsements and Recommendations are two important components of LinkedIn. Recommendations are the more important of the two. These written testimonials from clients, business associates, community leaders and those you have worked with in your marketplace are under your control for posting. Work with your recommender to be certain everything is spelled correctly and that the message is on point.

Some consultants suggest that you reach out to ask for recommendations. I don’t. My belief is that if someone is willing to recommend you, it should come from their heart. You earn recommendations just like you earn referrals.

Finally, I don’t suggest you get recommendations from internal colleagues or your boss. That seems very self-serving and those viewing your profile might think about your recommendations less favorably if they are from inside the bank.

You can make the most of the second important feature, Endorsements, by moving this block right under your summary. It’s easy to accomplish. Customize your list of endorsements based on skills you want the marketplace to see and review endorsers from time to time to make certain you still want them on your list. Remember, endorsers may be contacted by one of your prospects at any time to get a read on you. Make certain your list is current and that those on it would say good things. Remove any that would not or that don’t fit with your values.

LinkedIn stack ranks your Endorsements numerically. You can move them around if you wish. As an example, I want to be endorsed for Public Speaking (which I do often) and Resource Management (a concept I am trying to get business bankers to adopt). I moved those two endorsement categories to the top so they can be seen more easily as someone scrolls through my profile.

6. Tag – They’re It

You’ve got your Profile nailed, brushed up your Summary, added Contacts — now it’s time to organize them. LinkedIn provides some basic tags that help you chunk like-minded or like-titled people so you can more easily communicate with them. You can create up to 200 personalized tags.

Once you’ve tagged someone — and they can be tagged with multiple titles — you can bring up a list of them at the click of a button. If you want to make an announcement, invite like-minded folks to a seminar, or ask folks to complete a survey, you can do so easily and quickly in a targeted manner.

I insert tags every Sunday morning. I sort my new connections from the week and go through each one of them to tag. This keeps you current. The weekend is great for LinkedIn “paperwork.”

7. Groups, Pulse and LinkedIn Go Mobile

Users access LinkedIn on mobile devices more than 50% of the time and there are lots of great tablet and smartphone apps tied to LinkedIn.

Groups keeps you informed about who has commented on your shares and content. It pushes relevant articles to you as well as highlighting new conversations within each Group. Based on the Groups you are already in, it also suggests others you might like to join with the tab called Discovery.

Pulse is LinkedIn’s content engine that allows you to see a multitude of amazing articles from well-respected authors. Some topics might be relevant to your network — these are great to share and send as value adds. You can save them so you can share them later as well.

8. Follow the Leader

You can follow up to 1,000 companies on LinkedIn. While LinkedIn used to push emails when something happened at companies you were following, it got overwhelming, so they stopped. The Company tab does have relevant information like earnings, articles, and new company hires that can be valuable to you in sales conversations. Start this process by following your own bank, your top clients and prospects, and certainly your competition.

You can also get a list of those following you from the person who manages your LinkedIn page. There could be some solid prospects there.

9. Share, Share, That’s Fair

There is untold valuable content that can be pushed to your network – constantly — and it starts on your home page. When you follow someone on Pulse or in some other fashion, their articles and ideas will appear here. Your connections may have forwarded something and that would appear on your home page.

Here’s what I do when I’m not on an American Airlines jet going somewhere. Every morning I find something from one of the folks I follow. My favorites are: Tony Hughes, Mike Kunkle, Don Peppers and Jill Konrath — all great writers with practical and usable stuff.

I go to my homepage, bring up an article, read it, and leave it minimized all day. Every 30 minutes I then share that article with one of my groups. When you do that, everyone in your group sees the article along with all of your connections. This serves to increase and improve your personal brand and your Google presence. You can also share articles with individuals in your network, thus personalizing this process even more.

In the marketing survey I mentioned earlier, more than 60% of marketing professionals and 68% of business bankers suggested they were poor at sharing content beyond job postings. LinkedIn is a huge differentiator when bankers use it to share relevant content, it becomes social collaboration not social media.

One final thought on content. LinkedIn allows anyone to publish content. You simply have to submit a writing sample and become an approved author. Once that happens you can write articles or have someone write them for you. One word of caution: make certain you know your bank’s social media policy and vet your articles through marketing and compliance.

10. Open Your Wallet

All of the above are available in some form or fashion with the free LinkedIn service. For great sales people, however, it’s not enough.

There are two other options for those that want to invest a little more. For between $60-80 a month you can receive lots of great features through LinkedIn’s Premium Service. With the free service you can see the last five people who viewed your profile. With Premium you get a 90-day picture.

You can build up to 8 lists with Premium. One of the biggest benefits is InMail, LinkedIn’s email service. With a premium Business Plus account you receive 15 InMails monthly, which can help you reach people even when you don’t have their email address.

And then there is Sales Navigator, the newest and best tool ever designed for sales professionals. Sales Navigator is a standalone sales platform. It can serve as your personal CRM as you create lists and find leads, follow accounts and receive virtually unlimited InMails. Perhaps the best feature of Sales Navigator is TeamLink. This component allows you to see connections of anyone on your bank team that is also on Sales Navigator. It makes the world smaller and allows you to collaborate both inside the bank and outside. It’s not an inexpensive program but then what is the price of ignorance and what is a tool like this worth if you can build more relationships by using it?

10.5 Put it All Together

LinkedIn is not the end all/be all. Nothing really is. When you add all the components together and connect them to your personal and bank sales process though, you have a dynamic trust and value machine.

Bankers that are the most successful using LinkedIn have a point of view. They have a philosophy about what this tool can do. It is NOT the next cold calling trick. It is NOT Facebook for business and your connections are NOT your friends.

Rather, LinkedIn facilitates value creation and resource management. It helps elevate your profile in the community. It helps you educate the marketplace on trends, ideas, and best practices. In essence, LinkedIn is the execution engine of trust-based conversations.

Get some training on this amazing tool. Keep learning and build a LinkedIn habit. Take 15 minutes a day at minimum and build – your network, your career and some value for your connections.