Every Connection Isn't a Prospect

I accepted a LinkedIn connection request recently from someone in the podcasting services space. Before accepting, I spent a couple of minutes looking at his profile and company. I assumed we had enough overlap that we'd have a worthwhile professional relationship.

Instead, within minutes I received a message that indicated they didn’t think they connected with a colleague in their mind. They saw me as nothing more than a prospect.

What struck me wasn’t just the pitch. LinkedIn is full of pitches. It’s that it showed they couldn’t take even a few minutes to see who they had connected with. My profile tells a pretty clear story and there’s plenty more on google.

We could have had a real peer-to-peer professional connection. Instead, I got dropped into the same outbound pipeline everyone gets.

To me, it signaled a lack of judgment.

Experienced pros ask questions. They want to know who they’re talking to so they don’t blow an opportunity.

I even gave them a chance to redeem themselves and reset the relationship. They didn’t take the hint.

The irony is that this person sells coaching around visibility, networking, and growing an audience.

If this is the advice they’re giving clients, I would be cautious.

We spend all this time and energy trying to get someone to accept a connection request, reply to an email, or agree to a meeting.

The last thing we should do is then go into script mode.

The “Connect” button isn’t the opportunity. It creates the responsibility to figure out what the opportunity is.

Maybe they’re a potential client, sure. But maybe they’re a facilitator, a mentor, a collaborator. Or, heaven forbid, maybe they’re someone who could use something outside your sales funnel that you could help them with as a colleague.

But you’ll never know if your first instinct is to treat everyone exactly the same and simply dump them into your sales funnel with the same standard script.