Professional network. Unprofessional behaviour.
If you seem to have been getting a lot more attention on LinkedIn lately, you’re not the only one. It’s exploding in use as both a place to c
onsume content and a haven for the most annoying people of them all. Social Media Marketers.
“Hi Dante, I was browsing through other consultants on linkedin (sic) and noticed we had a few shared connections. I’m hoping to expand my network and connect with more professionals like yourself! Would love to have you in my network! Cheers, *Some Guy on LinkedIn.” — *not his action name, of course.
I’ve learned that no good connection on LinkedIn starts like this. But I still get sucked in to it out of a fear of missing out on a valuable new connection or client. I allow the connection.
“Hi Dante,
Thanks again for connecting, just looking through your profile again I think you could really benefit from leveraging linkedin (sic) to generate leads for your business.
I’ve just put together a detailed step by step article for people with no linkedin (sic) or lead gen experience to start generating high quality leads in 20–30 minutes.
It’s the same core concepts I use with my clients to generate new leads month on month.
If it sounds like something you would be interested in learning about I’d be happy to send through a link?”
I knew it was going to be just like that. Yet I allowed it anyway. I had it coming!
I’m not sure if it’s a numbers game that these people play, and if it works for them at all, but it feels like betrayal. Betrayal of the trust of “hey, we have some mutual connections.” It just feels sleazy and kinda like all those times when a new acquaintance invites you for a coffee and a catch-up only to hit you up with their new network marketing scheme where they seem to think that you would be the perfect candidate to “join their team.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate sales. I also don’t hate marketing. I am both a sales person and a marketer. I applaud those who can do it again and again and again, facing rejection everyday. I don’t applaud unsolicited, intrusive, non-contextual sales that is thrown in your face before you’ve not even had the chance to be qualified as a likely customer. And while you may do as I did, and politely decline with a “no thanks” I almost launched in to a knee-jerk tirade at this sales-jerk.
The trouble is, that this guy hasn’t earned the right to ask me to buy something from him. I have no idea who he is, am certain that I’d find that we don’t actually have any contacts in common, and I have no reason to trust him enough to even ask more about his product, let alone buy something from him.
If we had connected on Monday, then I had seen a post from him come up in my feed on Tuesday that offered some insight and expertise in the field that he is an expert in, noticed a few comments and likes on my posts on Thursday, and we’d conversed a little in those comments, then, if he had sent me a message telling me about what he did, I would have been more likely to hear him out. I might even find out what he was selling, and perhaps decline again — or refer him to someone I know who may be able to use his help.
But, instead, I got an immediate message upon connecting, from some stranger in another state hitting me up to buy for his expertise on LinkedIn. An expertise that has seen him gain just the one recommendation, despite having 5 years of what he does under his belt and only four articles, all of which have been written this year. Ironically, one article which is all about how you shouldn’t act in sales in exactly the way he just did with me. An article where he asked for people’s thoughts on it, got no thoughts and just five likes.
This doesn’t sound like a trustworthy LinkedIn marketing and sales expert to me. But I could be wrong.
How, then, do you approach people on LinkedIn when you’re wanting to sell something to them?
Find some context — and if there’s none, create some. If I don’t know you and have no relationship with you, I’m not likely to take too well to being sold to as the first point of contact we have with each other. If we don’t have context with each other from which to introduce me to your product, then spend a little time creating that context. Especially when you’re trying to sell a big ticket item for an intensely personal thing as my business.
LinkedIn may be a professional network where we have come to expect people to be constantly selling us something. But we’re still human. We still get that little hit of dopamine when someone likes something we’ve posted or comments on something we’ve shared. It may be professional social media, but it’s still social media.
Dante St James is a Facebook Australia/New Zealand Community Trainer, Head of Digital Solutions at Treeti Business Consulting, an ASBAS Digital Solutions trainer and advisor and founder of his own digital agency, Clickstarter.
