LinkedIn for a Business That Sells to Businesses

Looked up before the meeting

Before a first meeting with a new supplier, a business buyer will often look up the people they are about to meet. On LinkedIn, that takes seconds.

What they find is often thin: a profile with a job title and no photograph, a company page with an old logo and a one-line description, and a last post announcing the staff barbecue.

None of that loses the work on its own. It just does nothing to win it, at the moment the buyer is deciding how seriously to take you.

What a buyer checks

• Who the person is, and how long they have done this work.
• What the company does, and for which kinds of client.
• Who else works there, and whether the firm looks established.
• What they know, visible in what they write and share.
• Who they have in common, through mutual connections.

The fourth is the one that separates suppliers. Everybody claims experience; a person who has written clearly about a problem the buyer recognises has shown it.

The company page

The company page is the business's own entry on LinkedIn. Fill in every field: a current logo, a cover image, the website, the industry, the size and the location.

The description matters most, and its opening lines most of all, since they show before anyone clicks to read more. Say what you do, for whom and where.

Then check who can edit it. Pages are often set up by an employee who has since left, and a page nobody can edit cannot be fixed. Make sure at least two current staff are administrators.

Profiles that say what people do

A profile's headline appears everywhere the person does: in search results, beside comments, in invitations. Unless someone changes it, it is a job title and a company name.

A title like Designer tells a buyer almost nothing. A headline saying what the person does and for whom, such as designing sprinkler systems for apartment and commercial buildings, tells them why to read on.

Add a real photograph, a few lines about the work, and the current position linked to the company page, so the logo appears and the person is listed as staff.

Nobody needs a polished profile. They need an accurate, current one.

Posts that show expertise

Most company posts on LinkedIn are announcements: a new hire, an award, a trade show, a work anniversary. They tell connections the company exists, and little else.

The posts buyers stop for explain something. A question a client asked this month, and the answer. A common mistake and how to avoid it. A change in a standard, in plain words.

A photograph from a project with one interesting detail explained works too, with the client's permission.

The test is whether a buyer would learn something useful even if they never hired you.

People, not only the page

Posts from a person's own profile usually travel further than posts from a company page, because LinkedIn shows them to that person's connections.

So the people who deal with clients should post, not only the page. A short post every couple of weeks from two or three staff reaches people a company page rarely does.

It need not take long. Twenty minutes to write up a question answered on a job that week is enough for a useful post.

The page can share their posts, and the expertise stays with the people buyers will actually meet.

A worked example

A six-person firm that designs fire sprinkler systems works for general contractors, architects, mechanical engineers and property managers. Almost all of its work comes through people who know someone who has used it.

Its company page had been set up in 2012 by a technologist who had since left. Nobody could edit it, the logo was two versions old, and the description said fire protection solutions.

Staff profiles listed titles such as Designer and Technologist, two without photographs. The page's only posts were job advertisements.

None of it was wrong, exactly. It had been left alone since 2012, and a contractor checking the firm before a meeting saw just that.

The firm reclaimed the page through LinkedIn's help process for pages without an active administrator, and made two partners administrators.

The description now says what the firm designs, for which buildings and where, and each designer's headline says what they design and for whom.

Two designers post every other week about a question from a recent job: what a tenant's new floor layout means for the sprinkler heads above it, or why a water flow test comes before any design.

Connecting without pitching

Send connection requests to people you have actually met or worked with, with a line saying where. A blank request from a stranger is easy to ignore.

Do not follow an accepted request with a sales pitch. It turns a new connection into someone who regrets accepting.

And avoid tools that send requests and messages automatically. LinkedIn's user agreement forbids them, and accounts that use them can be restricted.

Pointing back to the website

LinkedIn is where buyers form an impression; the website is where they check the details.

A post explaining a problem can link to the page describing how you solve it, and a profile can link to the person's page on the company site. The detail lives where you control it.

Project stories on the website make good posts in their own right: a few lines on LinkedIn, and a link for anyone who wants the rest.

The counter-case

A business selling mainly to households will get less from LinkedIn than from its Google listing or Facebook page, since its customers are not looking there.

A firm with a handful of long-standing clients may need only accurate profiles and a correct page, with no regular posting at all.

And LinkedIn is borrowed ground: the profiles belong to the people, and the platform to Microsoft. The website remains the record the business owns.

Where the buyers are businesses, though, complete profiles and useful posts from real people are the place to start.

This month

1. Check who administers the company page.
2. Complete every field on the page.
3. Rewrite each headline to say what and for whom.
4. Add real photographs to every profile.
5. Link each position to the company page.
6. Post one useful answer every fortnight.
7. Link posts to the matching pages on your site.

Step three is the cheapest change with the widest reach. A headline appears everywhere the person does, so a clear one works in every search, comment and invitation.

Keeping a feed going when there is little news is covered in Instagram Stories for a business with nothing new to show.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.