Stop Trading Your Sales Playbook For Clout On LinkedIn
If it worked, nobody would give it away.
After you read this post, two things are going to happen:
You’re going to stop leaking your sales team’s playbooks to LinkedIn in exchange for clout from people who don’t care about you
You’re going to stop paying attention to the carnival barkers who make this Faustian bargain (because you’ll understand what must be true for them to do it in the first place).
Let’s begin.
As a commercial operative in the 21st century, you are a participant in the most hyper-competitive attention economy of all time.
Your buyers are inundated by attempts to hook and solicit their attention from the moment they open their eyes until they inevitably pass out in a delirious haze of over saturation. By definition, the vast majority of these attempts must fail.
Ipso facto, your buyers have categorized these ad widgets with the same label: “Not Worth My Time”.
It also follows that if you have an effective outreach strategy - which is to say, one that stands out enough to draw the fleeting attentions of exhausted buyers - what you are doing is necessarily a deviation from the above, and represents the exception rather than the rule.
The second you open your big mouth on LinkedIn, however, you expedite the reversal of this advantageous dislocation. In exchange for some happy brain juice Internet points, you cede your alpha and hand it on a silver platter to the teeming masses, who between the pressures of quota attainment and recurring bills will happily take your (soon to be “in”)effective strategy and crowd its effectiveness into oblivion.
“Don’t hand children dynamite” as Christian Retek would say.
Let us turn our attention now to the carnival barkers AKA the “Sales Entertainers”.
Having left the arena years ago (during the bull market....with few to no receipts...) The Sales Entertainer enters the bazaar - sales playbooks in hand with the spirit of a chef who’s Monday “Catch Of The Day” becomes Thursday’s “Soup and Salad Lunch Special”.
The question to spot three-day-old halibut: “If this playbook is so good, why are you dumping it on the market rather than deploying it yourself?”
Follow these two rules and you’ll do just fine:
(1) Keep your playbooks to yourself.
(2) Stay away from the playbooks being offered to you - unless you want prospects responding to your DM with “what’s that smell?”
CN