Sorry, but LinkedIn isn't that useful for Sales

For Sales, LinkedIn[1] was fun and useful at the beginning, a way to get the attention of someone who you deem a qualified prospect.

But for the last few years it's been less and less useful for our business development. It feels like LinkedIn brings out our hunter and gatherer instincts of collecting contacts.

As a quick mental exercise, try the following:

Estimate the % of LinkedIn contacts which

• You had 0 conversations with
• Number of contacts you met outside of LinkedIn but you connected with anyway

Those two cohorts aside, what do you have left? We had very few, and in the last few years really nobody. Plus we get daily messages from people who are clearly using a shotgun approach, spam like messages that we ignore.

The worst thing about LinkedIn is that it's a time trap, you end up looking up people, get sidetracked with some posts. It's a social media after all, somehow their algorithms know what gets our attention. But that attention is valuable and we suggest you laser focus that on identifying prospects, doing your research and communicating with your prospects.

Word of mouth and personal intros are still the gold standard when you want to sell services. You don't compete on price (unless it's a commoditiy), you compete for someone's attention and getting that is not easy. Here is another flaw from LinkedIn, in theory you know how you are connected to someone. But in reality, they probably aren't real connections, just LinkedIn connections.

Generating business is all about being in touch with someone who could be a good fit for what you are offering. That's what you should be focusing on: Opportunities. Any time you spend on supposedly "Sales" related activities is actually time you are not communicating.

Footnotes:
[1] A big part of LinkedIn is also finding a job but for us, LinkedIn was and is always about Sales, so we are looking at it from a Sales angle.