Bob Young on Nostr: Some people on this instance love LinkedIn, some don’t. And, BTW, I don’t care ...

Some people on this instance love LinkedIn, some don’t. And, BTW, I don’t care whether you like it or not. I’m not here to change your mind. You do you.

I like it because I get new business from the site, so I’m active, posting about five times a week. When you get to a certain tipping point, for whatever reason you become “popular,” and you start getting a lot of connection requests. I’m somewhere in a middle area, where I get a few requests almost every day, but I can still take the time to look at each profile and make an individual decision.

I reject half or more of the connection requests I receive, because I’m not interested in a big follower account; I’m interested in building relationships with people in my fields, and with potential clients.

I have a short standard list of things I look for first, that are automatic rejection items. I won’t list them all here; proprietary formula and all that. But I will tell you about one automatic rejection item:

Mention business development in your profile.

Every time I’ve accepted a connection request from someone in business development, it’s followed by a sales pitch. Period. That’s the only reason they connected. The thing is, I’m a sole proprietor, and I am just not that interesting to them. They want big clients with thousands of dollars to spend on enterprise-grade software.

So I don’t feel bad about rejecting them. Fact is, if they’d bother to do any research at all, they’d reject me, and wouldn’t even send me a connection request.

The irony here is that I’m on LinkedIn for ... business development.

But I never mention the phrase. I just post useful information. People read it and say, “This guy knows his sh*t.” Later, if they have a need that corresponds to the subjects I post about, they say, “I’ll check with Bob.”

My sales advice to you is, don’t try to pull in unwilling customers. Be there, be helpful, and let the customers come to you.