Your team's LinkedIn profiles carry more weight than you might realize. Whether or not your team is active on the platform, people still look them up, and what they find shapes how they see your team and your company. An outdated or generic profile can cost you an opportunity, and you'll rarely know it happened. 

Those look-ups happen every day, in moments like these: 

• A prospect viewing your colleague's profile before a meeting 

• A referral source including your profile in an email introduction 

• A key candidate reviewing your leadership team's profiles before an interview 

• An event organizer sourcing speakers on LinkedIn 

• A potential investor or acquirer doing homework on key players in your company 

Each of those people is making a judgment call before you ever get a chance to make your case. If you don't know how your team shows up on LinkedIn, that's a blind spot. If you don't care, that's a risk. Either way, every day you leave your team's profiles alone is a day they can cost you, and fixing them isn't a heavy lift. 

A Complete Profile Isn't the Same as an Informative One

Most guidance on this topic stops at completeness: fill in every section, add a headshot, list your roles and education. That's a start, but it doesn't answer what people actually want to know about you and your team: who you are, your backgrounds and expertise, the little things that add credibility and color and, above all, if there's a compelling reason to connect. 

Plenty of "complete" profiles fall short here. A "title-only" headline says nothing about what you do or why it matters. An About section that lists responsibilities instead of impact reads like a job description, not a professional story. And when people on your team describe your company differently than your company's own messaging does, that inconsistency raises real doubt about which version is accurate. For a new contact, that doubt can be enough to make them hesitate. 

What Separates a Profile That Works From One That Just Exists

Three things make the difference: 

• It's specific. A CFO whose headline just says "CFO at [Company]" gives a visitor nothing to go on. One who signals they have M&A, global expansion or consumer products expertise tells a very different and far more useful story, even at the same title. 

• It's findable for the right reasons. The words a prospect or recruiter would search for show up naturally in the profile. For example, if you have PE experience but don't explicitly say it, you won't appear in their search results. 

• It's consistent with how the company talks about itself. If there's a mismatch between how the company describes itself and how the person does, that's noticeable, and it creates an unnecessary question in someone's mind: "Wait, I thought [Company] did X? This person's saying they focus on Y, and that's not what we're looking for." 

Get this right across the leadership, business development and sales teams, and the improvement becomes exponential. The stronger the collective impression, the more credible your company looks overall. Credibility builds trust and turns a passing glance into someone ready to learn more and ultimately do business with you, refer you or hire you. 

Find Out What People Are Really Seeing

You don't need to guess how your team's profiles are landing. Book a complimentary review with us. We'll look at selection of your team's LinkedIn profiles beforehand and discuss what we're seeing and what a workshop to strengthen them would look like.