Epic Linkedin Sales Fail

I’ve been using LinkedIn for at least 10 years now. And it’s been a great platform for connecting with business contacts, and networking. But to be honest with you, ever since LinkedIn’s IPO, there have been a lot of changes. I really like the fact that you can publish articles on LinkedIn. I’ve heard reports that LinkedIn is great for generating sales leads. I don’t do that, but I do get my share of sales pitches. It’s this most recent sales pitch that I just had to laugh at. This is, by far, the biggest epic LinkedIn sales fail that I have ever seen, though.

Unfortunately, it came in the form of an SEO firm, from a Senior Sales Consultant at an SEO firm in my area. This is the first time that I’ve heard of this company, and I’ve been in this business for over 15 years. Well, honestly it looks like this company has been knocked out in the first round. It only took one punch. TKO.

Here’s the text of the LinkedIn sales email I received:

Hey Bill,

Happy New Year! My name is (redacted) and I just noticed that you might be someone to speak with in regards to your company’s SEO. I checked out your website ….. just now briefly and know we can be of great help to you.

I’ll keep it short and simple; can we schedule a time to for me to pull your websites rankings on Google for the keywords you’d like to target? Takes about 2 minutes and afterwards I’ll email you a PDF of the report for you to keep (free of charge of course) so you can know where you rank. My only request is that if you’d like someone to help you with your SEO now or in the future then you can at least reach out to me. Fair enough? No sales, no pressure, none of that stuff! My approach is the same as Zig Ziglar’s famous quote: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.”

Thanks and hope to hear back from you Bill.

You would like to get more leads, traffic and sales from customers finding you on Google in 2015 right??

(redacted)

I replied to this guy telling him that I was interested in how he can help my site rank better, but haven’t heard back from him. If I have time later today I might give him a call to see what he has to say and how he can help.

Oh, and if you don’t completely understand why this is an epic LinkedIn sales fail, here’s a few reasons why it is such a huge sales fail:

– My LinkedIn Title is “Senior SEO Strategist”.
– I work for an SEO firm. A competitor of this company.
– The guy, (redacted), lied in his email. Don’t lie to people when trying to sell them something. He obviously did NOT visit my website, or he would have seen that we’re a competitor.

If my job title doesn’t give you a hint that I might be a competitor, then looking at my website (which he clearly didn’t do) would have tipped him off, correct?

This is exactly why I’m so sick and tired of SEO firms sending out spam, especially via sites like LinkedIn, and not even taking the time to limit their spam to companies that would possibly have an interest in their services. I guess if you send out 100,000 emails like this you will get a few companies interested in your SEO services, but it doesn’t work very well if LinkedIn ends up removing your account for sending out spam.