Today I thought I would take fifteen minuts to make my LinkedIn Profile Summary a bit more compelling to viewers that might actually be interested in buying something from Inprove IT Infrastructure or ProcoliX. That turned out to be very optimistic.

Before today, my summary was this:

As Open IT Entrepreneur I run two highly technical IT business: Inprove IT Infrastructure Solutions and ProcoliX Managed Hosting. By employing very seasoned technical people we are able to deliver cutting edge IT Infrastructure.

Inprove IT is focused on providing enterprise grade open storage and other IT Infrastructure solutions. Inprove IT is the oldest and most experienced Nexenta Reseller in the Netherlands, has a very prominent position in the Enterprise (sas) SSD market in Benelux with HGST and Sandisk. We are actively looking for new Software Defined Storage and Infrastructure products. For example we are engaged with Compuverde, Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, Microsoft Storage Spaces with DataON Storage, OSNexus QuantaStor, DataCore, OutpaceIO, Mellanox interconnect and Linbit Distributed Replicated Block Device (DRBD).

ProcoliX is focused at Managed High Availability and High Performance Hosting in the Dutch. ProcoliX provides end-to-end solutions for making and keeping advanced websites and applications available to large groups of demanding users. One of our identifiers is that we offer sustainable hosting.

My personal technical experience is Designing, Building and Managing High Available Unix and Linux infrastructures in a mixed environment using internet and open source techniques and paradigms. Since a few years I have added selling these designs as a solution to enterprise IT customers to my activities.

Specialties: All Flash, Full SSD storage systems, Nexenta, NexentaStor, ZFS, Storage High Availablity, storage replication techniques, DRBD, Compuverde, OSNexus Quantastor, Hedvig Distributed Storage Platform, DataOn Storage, Linux Virtual Server, Xen Virtualisation, Blade technology, Debian, Centos, RedHat and Suse Linux, Clustering Technologies, remote monitoring, managed hosting, PHP hosting, Perl hosting, Pacemaker, Apache, MySQL Clustering, iSCSI, NFS.

I was quite happy with the summary I had…

I was quite happy with the summary I had, but after reading chapter two of the Social Selling book I realized that in it’s current form it would probably not be very compelling to anyone that is not in a pissing contest for technical expertise. And of course that will not help.

The first thing I did was write two paragraphs in Dutch. That actually made a lot of sense. Although this blog is in English and all other communication on LinkedIn and Twitter (and even Facebook) is mostly in English, my desired customers are in the Netherlands and Belgium and chances are very high their native language is Dutch or Flemish. So it will be easier to read for them.

… my desired customers are in the Netherlands and Belgium…

After doing that I realized that there is also a type of people I would like to contact via LinkedIn that I do want to reach out to me, but I don’t really have to sell to. These people are mostly the very technical kind of people from all over the world that also work in Open IT. So I split my summary in two, one in dutch with a text that should appeal to the native Dutch reader and potential buyer, and one in English. The English text should attract other tech experts from all over the world to get in touch with me.

I really wanted a call to action that would stand out and since there are no markup options for the summary I decided to put in capitals (and in Dutch) ‘INVITE ME FOR A CONVERSATION’ in the second paragraph. Then I thought: ‘Perhaps I should add my phone numer, but I had rather people e-mail me or connect on LinkedIn first.’ So I changed the line to ‘CONNECT WITH ME ON LINKEDIN NOW and invite me for a conversation’. That should lower the bar for taking direct action too.

… I had rather people e-mail me or connect on LinkedIn first.

I will probably tweak and alter that summary a bit over the coming weeks, but let’s first see if this change will help. And of course I will ask some of my customers and other contacts what they think when they read my summary.

Here is what it became after rewriting for more than two hours:

NL
Door gebruik te maken van hardware-onafhankelijke software wordt een IT Infrastructuur veel flexibeler. Er kan betere performance geleverd worden voor hetzelfde geld of dezelfde performance voor minder geld.

Wil je het ook een keer met me over de mogelijkheden van Open IT, Software Defined Storage of IT Infrastructuur in het algemeen. CONNECT NU MET ME OP LINKEDIN en nodig me uit voor een gesprek, ik kom graag bij je langs.

Maar IT moet natuurlijk wel werken, en daar kan ik je met Inprove IT en ProcoliX mee helpen, met Storage, Servers, Netwerken en het implementeren en beheren daarvan. Het grote probleem met open IT en ‘software defined’ is dat je kennis nodig hebt om het geheel tot een succes te maken. Het opbouwen en gebruiken van die kennis is waar ik met Inprove IT Infrastructure Solutions en ProcoliX Managed Hosting een business van gemaakt heb.

We helpen je graag met het bouwen van een passende IT Infrastructuur. Onze IT experts hebben jarenlange ervaring in het bouwen en beheren van kleine en grote IT omgevingen.

EN
Coming from a technical and practical IT background I have made helping others with Open IT my business. That means I am constantly looking for new, better and improved ways to do IT Infrastructure.

I love Open Source, Linux and other flavours of Unix and I give special interest to ZFS and other storage technology like DRBD, Gluster, Ceph and Compuverde.

Combining these with enterprise hardware and implementing and supporting them in my local area (Netherlands, Belgium) is what makes my business ProcoliX and Inprove IT tick. Helping others create a fitting and reliable IT infrastructure to run their business on gives me great satisfaction.

What do you think? I would love to hear what works and what does not.