LinkedIn is a powerful tool to engage with your peers and potential customers. Of all the common LinkedIn mistakes this one can kill your credibility, reputation, and make you seem super needy and desperate. Let’s change that.
You know we have nothing but love for salespeople. Salespeople are our people, we’re here to help you. That’s why we do what we do and why we put out content like this. We want to help and we want you to the best salesperson you can be. Today, let’s talk about LinkedIn and this common LinkedIn mistake.
We’ve all made this mistake or seen this mistake made – we see a potential client, prospect, even an acquaintance, hit the blue “Connect” button and then as soon as they accept the connection request hit them with a sales message: “Hey! Thanks for connecting, I’d love to get 10-15 minutes of your time to talk about [product/service] and how we can do this or that.” Stop it. 
LinkedIn is not a cold selling platform. Using it in this way makes you look like the modern day telemarketer. You’re tanking any positive emotions or feelings your new connection had towards you or your organization. Any chance of becoming of a trusted advisor or someone that can be trusted to help the client solve their problems is flushed away almost instantly. It makes you look desperate, pesky, and sneaky.
We just finished the holiday season. Think about it this way. During the last month or so most, if not all, of us attended some sort of function where we met someone new. Imagine if this new person you had met introduced themselves and immediately opened the conversation with: “I work for a SaaS company, we offer this product/service, if you’re interested in this we have a fantastic deal going on right now that gives people the ability to achieve x, y, z. Do you have 15 minutes to chat about how we can help you?”
I can almost certainly guarantee you’d walk away as fast as humanly possible thinking “what the fuck was that?” We don’t do that in these type of settings. We don’t immediately start selling, pitching, or talking about our products. Why would we do that on LinkedIn?
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If you’re doing this, stop. Be honest with yourself, if you’re connecting with people on LinkedIn just to send them a pitch or a spammy style message knock it off. If you’re not doing that, good for you, keep it that way. This is not the way to sell on LinkedIn.
Look, cold calling and cold emailing, those are hard jobs. It is difficult to sell this way and LinkedIn has made this process easier. But that’s not what it’s for. Learn to engage with the people on LinkedIn. Build relationships with people. There are some great Social Selling experts on LinkedIn. Go connect with people like Jamie Shanks and Jack Kosakowski, they’ll teach you how to social sell the right way. They’ll teach you how to leverage platforms like LinkedIn to build connect, engage and build a relationship with people so at the right time you can begin to have a conversation about how you could help.
Play the long game. Don’t punch people in the face out of the gate with that annoying sales message.
I block people that do that and it’s only getting worse. I have thousands of connections I haven’t accepted but when I do and they immediately hit me with “Hey, I want to sell you x, y, z” – nope, gone, poof, blocked. You don’t need to do this on LinkedIn. For you own sake, for you own personal brand, for you organization’s brand, stop doing it
If you or your organization want to start changing the sales culture, getting less sales objections and building your credibility, click here to schedule a call with our sales team.
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