It is nearly mandatory these days for certain types of individuals to be active on LinkedIn. I certainly am - I use it the way it was originally intended, to network with my peers, learn what is going on in my industry, and occasionally to find candidates for roles I have open. However the dark side of LinkedIn is that being active exposes you to the desperate sellers of the world, canned spam that has evolved from email and now is even more prodigious on LinkedIn because there is no spam filter.

On any given day, I will receive 15-20 LinkedIn contacts in the form of connection request, "InMail," or "Sales Navigator" requests. I do not have time to sort through them all, and 99% are irrelevant. If I bother to take the time to say the product does not meet my needs, I will be asked with virtual certainty to set up a call so I can help the person trying to sell me/pitch me understand my business, which I decline.

Oh yes, one of those.

So here is my seemingly unpopular opinion: Your job as a seller is to know your product well enough to understand if it can possibly assist me, and then learn about my business enough to be able to craft that into a story to tell about your product and my business. It is not my job to teach you about my business so you can sell me your product.

I have worked with and around excellent business development and account executive people in the past and seemingly every single one of the very best knew their product backward and forward. The pretty good ones knew it at least forward. They made it their job to understand what the product was and how it functioned so that when they landed an intro or a call, the work they needed to do was to understand the business. Having sat in on many of those calls, some of the time was used for clarifying questions - "I understand you do X and it appears to me that your approach is Y, am I correct in that or am I missing something?" wouldn't be far off from a something I heard.

Something like that indicates that the seller has taken the time to at least do some digging and make sure