“Do not connect and pitch, add value before you go in and pitch.” – Josh Roth in today’s Tip 578
Do you connect and immediately pitch on LinkedIn?
Join the conversation below and go check Josh’s LinkedIn post.
Josh Roth on LinkedIn
Josh’s LinkedIn post
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. A few weeks ago Josh Roth wrote a great post on LinkedIn where he suggested that “we all need to start calling each other out for these ridiculous connect & pitches and calendly links in the first message” on LinkedIn. I wholeheartedly agree and worry about the future of LinkedIn because of this and asked Josh who is the Senior Business Development Manager for the Enterprise & Strategic segment at WalkMe to record this tip:
Josh Roth: In today’s sales culture. So often I think that salespeople feel the need to reach their quotas and do whatever they can to hit every single day, every single month. And what that’s causing is salespeople, sales representatives are reaching out and they’re connecting on LinkedIn and then they’re immediately pitching. Sometimes that pitch is even in the connection request. Sometimes it’s promptly upon the connection request, being accepted. We as a sales function must get away from this. LinkedIn at its core is a professional social network. It is not a place to be connecting and pitching. It’s a place to add value.
So what can you do instead of connecting and pitching? So what I’ve found is really effective in not only having conversations with people, but really building relationships is going through and engaging in their content, understand what it is they’re doing on a day to day, on a week to week basis. What are they reading? What are they engaging with? What are they talking about?
That’s going to do three different things for you. One, it’s going to have your name be associated with providing value to the prospect. Instead of just a wild, connected pitch. That’s coming out of nowhere.
Number two, you’re going to start to learn the language that your prospect is speaking. How are they talking about their role? How are they talking about their industry? So that you will understand better if first of all, you can align with your prospect and with your prospects function. But you’re also gonna learn how they’re speaking. So you can help frame your messaging to the way they speak and not vice-versa.
Number three. You’re also going to begin to help your prospect on LinkedIn. You’re going to help them get their content out wider, and you’re going to have your network see that, and your prospects will appreciate that because they’re going to associate your name with helpfulness and kind of ties back to the first point a little bit.
And we as sales leaders, we as salespeople, we, as a sales function must move away from connected pitch because what’s going to happen is selling over LinkedIn will not work anymore. We’re already seeing this with email. Email, open rates are down. Email conversion rates are down. Email automation is way, way up. People do not want to feel like a robot is selling them. They want to know there’s someone on the other end of that, that has done their due diligence. That is a person that has feelings. They want to feel the authenticity. And the more we automate LinkedIn, the more we automate the sales process, especially early on in sales development and business development. We are making our jobs harder. Moving forward. We already see a different cell phone carriers in different phones, actually disabling cold calling. You can literally go in and turn off the ringer for numbers you do not recognize. We are seeing filters on companies’ websites, that disallow emails that have links or gifts or memes. Do not let this happen on LinkedIn. Add value, deposit before you withdraw. But most importantly, do not connect and pitch, add value before you go in and pitch.
Scott Ingram: If you’ll click over to DailySales.Tips/578 you’ll find a link to Josh’s LinkedIn profile where you can follow him, and Josh continues to hang out near the top of the LinkedIn Sales Stars Top 100 list that we just updated this weekend. We’ll have a link to that list there as well. DailySales.Tips/578. Once you’ve followed Josh, be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!