It is hard not to find the response to the meme I posted to LinkedIn a few days ago, and featured above, telling — and interesting.
The Meme
You accept an invitation with the best of intentions, and a few minutes later you get a canned, CRM-generated, or blatant cut-and-paste sales email offering you a product you don’t need, don’t want, and are often aren’t even qualified for.
It gives astute professionals every opportunity to know important details about who they’re contacting. I am contacted by others on LinkedIn regularly, and if they took the time to learn a bit of what I’m about — sales coaching and consulting — I’m almost always willing to extend the professional courtesy of receiving their greeting and information favorably.
And I may not buy what they have to offer, but it’s a good bet I know people who might.
Those guilty of the crime portrayed in this meme are only hurting themselves. You need only see the numerous comments as a warning.
Rules of Thumb:
~ Make sure the person you are contacting can actually use your product and suggest how they can SPECIFICALLY benefit.
~ Look at their website, read their profiles, and any other blogs or social media they have. Are they a fit?
~ Open email or other dialogue with specific feedback on something they’ve done. For example, you might say to me “Frank, I read your hilarious meme post, and I’d like to talk to you about how I’m not that person. Let me prove it to you.”
Sales and Sales Training Specialist Frank Bastone can be reached at 718 662 8581, or schedule time for a chat here.
