I was talking with my friend Jefre Outlaw this week (he was trying to help me help my wife find host homes for several foreign exchange students with an urgent need — thanks, Jefre and all the others who helped), and he was telling me a great LinkedIn anecdote about the importance of keeping your profile up-to-date.
If you look at Jefre’s profile, you’ll see that he’s a “portfolio entrepreneur” (like me and so many others). Among other things, after more than 20 years as a real estate investor and developer, he decided to actually go get his own real estate license and join his cousin Blake’s agency, Outlaw Real Estate Group.
“At first I completely forgot about updating my LinkedIn profile,” he said. “But I got a request to forward an introduction and it reminded me that I should probably go update my profile to include my new gig as a realtor.”
Good thing he did!
Just a couple of weeks later, one of his extended network found him in a search on LinkedIn for realtors and contacted him about listing his home for sale. Well, they did end up listing with Jefre’s agency, who got the home sold pretty quickly. $170,000 home x 3% commission = about $5,000 to the brokerage.
Now, Jefre was careful to say, “Let’s not overstate what happened. Being on LinkedIn didn’t get me the business. We were one of several realtors the client talked to, and I brought in my cousin, who’s a great closer and more experienced than I, to meet with the client. But the fact that I was in there, that my profile was up-to-date, that I have over 20 really good recommendations on my profile — all that put us on the short list.”
Is your profile up to date on everything you’re doing? If not, plan to update it right away — no telling how much it’s costing you in missed opportunity if you don’t.
Excellent post! This is exactly the reason I use LinkedIn. It’s a subtle, constant advertisement – much like email signatures, etc.
I’m now going to revisit my profile and see what changes I can make to it, to make my LinkedIn profile a “$5,000 profile”.
Regards,
Mary Stewart McGovern
President
Stewart McGovern Enterprises
http://www.stewartmcgovern.com/
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Nice story.
If you were looking for someone who’s an expert at what you do, would you bother to investigate yourself based on the profile and recommendations you see on LinkedIn?-)
steve