Are you sure what you’re doing is “networking”?

I want to let you in on a secret…

That thing you’re doing on Linkedin probably isn’t going to get the result you think it is.

Here’s what I mean.

The other day I got a cold invite to connect from a company where I already had connected with the co-founder.

The first person pitched me on their business almost right away which I didn’t love but I let it ride because I was curious to see how they planned to engage customers.

But when the second invite came through I made a point of saying I had already connected with his colleague. 1. He should’ve know that we had a mutual connection even if I didn’t 2. I mentioned this to him exactly because I didn’t want him pitching me… so here’s what happened next…

… we exchanged a couple of messages and then overnight I got what was clearly an auto-generated message intended for someone he hadn’t interacted with you on there so I pressed him on it and this was the response:

I personally respond to those who respond to me.Why connect on LinkedIn if you are not going to actually network?

Do you see the issue there?

If you think connecting and immediately asking for something or saying “buy my stuff” is the way to win in business, you’re setting yourself up for way more resistance to sales (at best) and unsustainable failure of a business (at worst).

What’s more is this is the exact same problem many job seekers face when trying to find leads. There’s a right way to do this, though, and it starts with crafting your breakthrough resume.

I teach you how to do that here based on first hand experience:

https://ericpbutts.com/breakthrough-resume-writing

– EB