Now, this one is a bit of a rant, so please bear with me.
I received a LinkedIn invitation to connect, from someone with a somewhat relevant background, and actually a decent invite message. I generally ignore invitations from people I don’t know who don’t even bother to write one, or copy-paste the “we know the same people, so…”.
Within a day (or perhaps it was minutes), I received a not-so-thinly-veiled pitch for whatever they were selling (not very well described). Normally, I would shrug it off and ignore, but for some reason this one REALLY triggered me.
It started with the words “I’ve been in your shoes.” Dude, you know nothing about my shoes. Your background is corporate and then some individual consulting, you never built a company, and in my current role, which you clearly haven’t even bothered to check properly, I’m obviously not your target audience for whatever it is you are peddling.
Now, I’m all for, and often guide my clients to conduct customer interviews. This is especially true for new products. Interestingly enough, actually cold “calling” is not the worst method to get good, unbiased feedback.
But the situation I started off with here is such a wrong way to do it. What a missed opportunity! If the guy actually asked a question, I probably would’ve replied. If he wanted to get something from my experience, I’d happily share it. What did he expect?
I wonder, really, how successful his campaign is. Maybe it’s fantastic, and I’m the odd one out, but I somewhat doubt that.
So, how should it be done, if one finds themselves in similar circumstances?
First, we’re not trying to sell (yet), we’re looking for market validation. We are asking people to do us a favor by giving us their time and attention. We don’t presume we are relevant to what they deal with. So, ask for time, qualify to make sure you’re talking to the right person, and then ask for whatever it is you need. When asking right, you would be surprised how often the response is positive.
Something like:
“Thank you so much for connecting! I really appreciate it.
I’m trying to get early feedback from people in … position who are ideally dealing with … problem, for which I’m building …. Would that be you?
I know it is a lot to ask but I would be very grateful for your take. Can we …”
Any of these introductions would likely spark my desire to help, assuming I’d be the relevant person. And if I wasn’t, I may even go as far as introducing someone who might be.
After drafting this rant, one of my early readers asked: “So what did you do? Did you just ignore him?” I actually went as far as replying that he knows very little about my shoes and that I don’t appreciate him reaching out in that manner. Re-reading the response, I think I wasn’t particularly helpful, reserving the lesson to be had for this article… Maybe he’ll read it, as we’re still connected on LinkedIn!
Speaking of lessons, I missed mine. Since then I accepted a few genuine-looking connections which subjected me to similar “thanks for connecting, I’m sure you need this thing I’m selling” treatment. I need to stop. If you want to connect with me, just say upfront why! Worst case scenario, you save both of us some time.
Is it just me? How do you handle LinkedIn shamelessness?
