New Year Resolution—Quantify Yourself

The beginning of a new year means it's time for New Year resolutions. So now is the time to set your professional goals, as well. This article highlights a couple tools that are aimed at helping you track and quantify your online activities so that you can be more productive, reach more people, find more opportunities, and close more deals.

Track your emails

In spite of the use of enterprise systems for managing projects, content, and customer relationships, emails remain the primary tool for many—if not most—knowledge workers. Not only is email used for communication, it is also used as a customer relationship management system, a to-do list, note taking tool, a project management system, and even online backup tool (think sending attachments to yourself).

Rarely do we know what happens to the emails after we click the ‘send’ button. Sure, you can turn on ‘read’ or ‘received’ notifications. But recipients also have the option to disable such notifications too. It’s time to track your own emails and learn whether recipients open your emails, how long they read them, and how long it takes them to reply.

Yesware provides such tracking and reporting capabilities. There is a plug-in for Outlook as well as a Gmail extension. It also connects with Salesforce.com.

You can also create email templates for use with prospecting, pipeline, objections, and customer service. With a tracking tool like this, you can see how effective your email communications are so that you can tailor your communications tactics accordingly.

Increase your profile views on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become the de facto online networking platform for professionals. Rarely does one go into a new meeting without participants first checking you out on LinkedIn first. In addition to serving as a glorified resume, it is also a platform for publishing.

In February 2014, LinkedIn upgraded its profile visit analytics. The key metric here is clearly all about profile views. The more times your profile is viewed, the more likely that you would get noticed for job opportunities if you're a job seeker, or your company would get noticed if you're in sales and marketing.

There are two top-level tabs: 1) “Who viewed your profile”; and 2) “How you rank for profile views”.

Under 'Who viewed your profile," there are four sub-tabs with infographics giving you more information about your profile views. In the first sub-tab, there is a line graph giving you a week-by-week analysis of how many people viewed your profile in the last 90 days. It also projects how many views you are likely to have for the coming week. The line chart is stacked on top of a bar graph counting how many actions you have taken. Actions are new connections you have made, new updates you have shared, or group topics you've posted. This is trying to correlate the number of actions you've taken to the number of profile views you get.

The second sub-tab features a pie chart telling you how your viewers find you--whether it's from an email in their LinkedIn inbox, from Linkedin.com, or other sources.

The third sub-tab features two pie charts indicating what companies these viewers work for and what cities they are located in.

The fourth and final sub-tab has two more pie charts that indicate viewers' job titles and the industries they work in.

The second top-level tab provides a percentile of how you rank against your connections based on the number of profile views. And it tells you who the top 10 profiles are so you can see what they are doing differently.

LinkedIn suggests ways that can help you get more profile views and how these changes may help you improve your profile views. For example, LinkedIn may suggest you to update your profile summary so that recruiters can contact you for the right opportunity or to upload a profile photo if you don't already have one to make your profile stand out visually.

LinkedIn will suggest new people to connect, companies to follow, and groups to join. And of course, it will suggest you to upgrade your LinkedIn membership to the Premium version. The point here is that if you are everywhere, you will be seen more often.

Conclusion

With increased profile views on LinkedIn, the notion is that you will reach more people, thus opening the door for more possibilities and opportunities. And with an email tracking tool such as Yesware, you will no longer be sending emails out blindly and then anxiously await for a reply—or wonder what has happened to your emails.

Do you know other good tracking tools that will enhance your professional goals? Please comment.