8 Ways to Destroy Your Sales Career on LinkedIn
If used correctly, LinkedIn can be an awesome resource to connect with potential clients, employees, employers, and like-minded professionals. Combined with Spiro’s AI-powered sale automation CRM,, salespeople can network and sell with the utmost efficiency.Used incorrectly, LinkedIn can ensure you stay unemployed for good. Here are eight ways to destroy your sales career on LinkedIn:
1. Inappropriate Profile Picture
Salespeople appreciate the work hard, play hard mentality. That said, LinkedIn is a networking site for professionals. Unless you’re a professional beer drinker (we would be extremely envious), it’s best to keep your brews in your cooler and out of your profile picture.
2. Including Useless Experience
Is making it through the Oregon Trail computer game an impressive feat? Yes. Is it going to help you be a better salesperson? Very unlikely. If your mom still packs your lunch, it’s not relevant experience. Keep including irrelevant experience on LinkedIn and you career will end up like dead.
3. Forgetting About the “Press Enter to Send” Feature
Likely one of the most annoying features on LinkedIn is the “press enter to send” option that is commonly activated. Few things are less professional than accidentally sending a potential employer “Hi John,” as if you’re IMing a friend in the early years of this millennium.
4. Forgetting that LinkedIn Commenting is Far From Anonymous
Ignoring the fact that LinkedIn becomes more and more like Facebook every day, as this picture’s first comment posits, it’s very important to remember that the vast majority of things you do on the site are publicly visible. This modern-day casanova’s valiant attempt at wooing a model is likely not going to earn him many interviews.
5. Following the Wrong Accounts
Although it could potentially lead to a “limited working proficiency” ranking in German on your profile, this is certainly not the ideal first impression you want employers to see. A good rule of thumb is to make sure only to follow pages that you would want your mother to know about.
6. Being Endorsed for Strange Things
LinkedIn allows some rather strange things to be endorsed on users’ profiles. There are exceptions to every rule, but unless your dream job includes a combination of silly animals, eating pies, German fashion, and YouTube videos of basketry, it’s likely better not to include random interest endorsements on your profile.
7. Making it Seem Like You Got a New Job When You Actually Got Fired
One of the only ways to feel worse about being unemployed is if droves of your LinkedIn connections congratulate you for it. This salesman found a foolproof way to be consistently reminded of his inadequacy by random high school classmates that he hasn’t spoken to since “No Scrubs” was a number one hit.
8. Accidentally Adding an Ironic Meme Picture to a Post
To the untrained eye, the picture above is a stock photo of a friendly geography teacher. To those familiar with the sarcastic side of the Internet, this is the subject of a meme called “Unhelpful High School Teacher”, probably not the best example for a tutoring company.
LinkedIn should be a place where you sell yourself the same way you sell your product each day (so don’t be like the half of all salespeople not on LinkedIn). The examples above are certainly not good selling points for your personal brand. Now that you know what not to do, go forth and network!
