It's the last week of August and hopefully you're grabbing a few last days of summer, but your kids may already be back at school providing an accelerated intensity around the house. For me, Tufts classes start the week after this when we accelerate from 10mph to 100mph in the first hour of next Tuesday.
Given longer weekends, I moved my normal Friday blog to this morning and I'm easing in with something light for this Monday, but not without serious impact on your productivity and the velocity to achieve your quota for the balance of the year.
For years I've watched salespeople treat LinkedIn like a business card: post it once, polish the headline, add a decent photo, and then... wait. Wait for the algorithm, wait for the recruiter, wait for the deal to fall into the inbox. That's not Sales. That's not Marketing. And that's certainly not Strategy It's just a check-the-box action hoping that someone will find you...and if they do, they'll take notice...and we all know what results in meeting your quota from hoping!
Here's the piece of the Science of Sales that gets skipped:
LinkedIn isn't a broadcast channel! It's a listening channel. The salespeople actually winning with it aren't the ones posting the most. They're the ones who know, before a first call, that their prospect's company just made an acquisition, that the VP they're emailing just changed roles eight weeks ago, that a mutual connection sits two degrees away and could make an introduction in thirty seconds. That's not luck. That's the discipline which is tattooed inside my own brain of "Process-Tools-Tech-Math & People". That same discipline needs to be applied to your Linked In.
Here's a Monday challenge for you, whether you're selling med devices or running a beverage company, or you're hunting for your next job: before you send out your next five messages, spend five minutes on each reading your prospect's Linked In before you write your message. Check what and when they posted last. Check who you both know. Check what's changed in their company, or maybe in their life. Only then write the message that only someone who did that homework could write.
So, here's the question to sit with as summer winds down this week: the next time you open LinkedIn, are you there to be seen with material that you may not have updated at all this year or to actually discover something about your prospects and customers before you call or send an email?
And it's not just salespeople. If you're job hunting whether you're a 23-year-old rookie or a 40-year-old warrior, your LinkedIn isn't your resume's replacement, it's your resume's proof. This is exactly the muscle I push my students to build in my book The Marketing of Me™: the hiring manager or hiring salesperson checking you out for ten seconds isn't reading your headline, they're reading whether you did your homework on them, too.
HERE'S A 15 MINUTE CHECKLIST WHERE YOU MAY NEED A TUNE UP:
-Do you need a sharper, more-looks-like-you photo?
-You need to use the full landscape of your LI and not leave the ugly gray-green backdrop.
-Does the "More Info" button have both your cell and your email?
-Read the words aloud in your "ABOUT" section. Does that sound like you and the real value you bring?
And then, of course, you should be posting something on LI at least every two weeks!
Enjoy the day, the week and the long weekend. You deserve it!
Jack is a Managing Partner of Derby Management, a strategy consulting firm, and founder of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University, where he has taught for 20 years. Every semester is significantly updated, with heavy emphasis in 2026 on AI in Marketing & Sales. At Derby Management, Jack and his team architect and build business strategies focused on sales and marketing processes, tools, and technology platforms.
www.derbymanagement.com | Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts
