Selling Yourself in the LinkedIn Question and Answer Forum

This article is a bit of a continuation or enhancement of a previous post “Selling Yourself on LinkedIn: Sales Skills for Networking.(Opens in a new widow)” I received a comment today that made me believe this would be very useful to others.

The twist here is how to sell or promote yourself (your business) within the answer to the question and NOT come across as “selling” which as we learned in the previous post doesn’t work well.

How to go wrong

The first thing you must know is that when you do this wrong it looks like self promotion. This is NOT good and something I will not allow others to do in my own LinkedIn questions. The value of the Questions and Answer Forum is too great to allow sales pitches in the discussions.

Second, the wrong way to do this is to start off by not answering the question at hand and doing a good job at it. You can’t use this technique if you don’t leave a strong answer to the question.

So how do you sell yourself in your answer to a question?

Sometimes you simply get lucky and the question asks you to sell yourself by telling how you would handle a specific situation. Please don’t confuse this with the question that asks for a recommendation of product or service that you might provide – that’s a different situation and requires a different approach.

The key to selling yourself is tying the answer of the question to something you actually did. In your example you now have the ability to display results that show your proficiency. Here’s a personal example.

Question: Should we always blame the salesperson if they fail?

To this question I gave the basic answer “NO” you should never blame the salesperson as it is always the manager’s responsibility for a salesperson’s failure.

From there I gave a personal example form my career of what leadership can accomplish with a sales team. I then tied that back to the fact that you can’t blame the salesperson for failing if they aren’t given the tools. Then, I stated that in the end the manager either hired the wrong person, or didn’t provide the necessary tools thus proving my point.

Through this process I was able to show the readers what I can accomplish with a sales team (A resume of sorts.). However, I did it in a way that I have added tremendous value to the reader wanting the answer to the question. In this case, I answered the question completely and my example becomes a valid part of that answer rather than a sales pitch for my services.

Summary

In this case I successfully sold my wisdom/competence/skill to the reader.

Just take care in how you do this. You must make absolutely sure that the example you give is closely woven into the answer to the question. You give yourself insurance of not being seen as “selling” by writing a very high quality and detailed answer to the specific question.

From Flyn…

I really do appreciate your commenting on the posts, adding value to the content, asking questions, or just telling others what you think of the content (Thank you in advance for your kind words, and criticisms as they are both of value to me.) And if you happen to come by this post via an outside source where you have commented, please share the comment here as well.

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