Avoiding Shiny Objects in Business

In 2023, I was offered Top 30 Coaches in the World, Top 10 LinkedIn Elite Voices and Most Ambitious Business Leaders to Watch.

I turned down all three.

Not because I have anything against recognition. I help clients win and succeed. They get more sales and do better on LinkedIn as a result of working with me, and I am proud of that. But I would never call myself top in the world at anything, and I was not about to pay somebody to say it for me.

Can you buy a business award?

Yes. All three of those awards were available to me for somewhere between $2,000 and $6,000, from businesses that are perfectly legitimate and operating openly.

It goes further than awards. You can be on the front cover of many business magazines for the right price. You can win a good number of local business awards if you know the right person or spend enough money at the awards event itself. I have been offered those too and rejected them as well.

Nobody is doing anything illegal here. The magazines exist. The awards ceremonies happen. Somebody stands up and reads out a name. The only thing missing is the bit everyone assumes is there, which is any independent judgement of whether the winner is actually any good.

Which business awards actually mean something

It is not that I do not value awards.

I received a Top Voice in Sales award from LinkedIn HQ, back when getting a LinkedIn award meant something. Somebody at LinkedIn looked at what I was publishing, decided it was worth reading, and gave it a badge. I could not have bought that and I could not have applied for it.

Compare that with now, where you contribute to a collaborative article for thirty minutes and a badge appears on your profile. Same platform. Completely different thing.

If you are the one buying, here is what tells you whether an award is worth anything. Not all of these will apply every time, but the more of them that are missing, the less the award means.

• Somebody had to nominate the winner, and it was not the winner themselves
• The judges are named, and you can look them up
• There was no fee to enter, or the fee is small enough to cover admin rather than fund the ceremony
• Losers exist and you can find out who they were
• The organisation giving the award has a reason to protect its own reputation

Why we choose what we want over what we need

I understand why people buy these things. We all want easy.

What you want, which is shiny objects, and what you need, which is results, are usually different things.

Think about how this plays out somewhere with no stakes attached. People will choose the fitness coach who promises they can eat whatever they like over the honest coach who says this will be hard work and you will find it tough. The first one is the one you want. The second one is the one you need. Everybody knows this and almost nobody acts on it, because the honest version asks something of you and the shiny version does not.

Business is exactly the same. The agency promising fifty leads a month with no effort from you is selling you the version you want. It is more comfortable than the version where you have to change how your team sells.

Why most LinkedIn lead generation agencies get poor results

Most LinkedIn lead generation agencies are terrible, and there is a simple way to check before you sign anything.

Go and look at their own LinkedIn profiles. Look at their posts. Count the comments. If a company is selling you LinkedIn growth and its own founder is getting three likes on a post about hustle, you have your answer. They cannot do it for themselves. They will not do it for you.

Ask them these things before you pay anyone:

• Show me your own engagement over the last three months, not a client case study
• Who writes the messages, a person or a tool
• What happens to my company's reputation if the outreach annoys people
• Can I speak to a client who left you

The last one is the question nobody wants to answer.

Why automation and cold outreach get ignored

Most automation does not work because it is not personalised. That is the whole problem in one sentence.

The technology can send a thousand messages while you sleep. What it cannot do is know that the person receiving it just announced redundancies, or posted about their father dying, or has already told your colleague no twice this year. When you scale a message to a thousand people, you scale the mistakes too.

Roughly 99% of the cold emails and LinkedIn DMs you receive will waste your time and, more often than not, irritate you. Think about how you respond to them. You delete them without reading past the first line. Now ask yourself why you would expect a sales director with a full inbox to behave any differently when your team sends theirs.

What actually generates more sales

So when you are looking to generate more sales to end the year strong and kickstart 2024, please remember this. None of it is quick and none of it is a shortcut, which is exactly why it works when the shiny stuff does not.

• Standing out and being different. If your outreach could have been sent by any of your competitors, it will be treated like any of your competitors.
• Offering massive value. Give something useful away before you ask for anything. Most people ask first.
• Listening. Properly, without planning your next sentence while the other person is still talking.
• Asking smart questions. The quality of your questions decides the quality of the meeting.
• Understanding the importance of a pause. Silence makes people uncomfortable, and uncomfortable people tell you what they actually think. Leave the gap.
• Wanting to serve others. People can tell within a minute whether you are trying to help them or trying to close them.
• Knowing how to write effective emails. Most people send one, hear nothing and give up, which is why I wrote about how to follow up effectively in business.
• Giving clients more than they paid for. It is the cheapest marketing there is and almost nobody does it.
• Controlling imposter syndrome and fear. This holds back more capable salespeople than any skills gap I have ever seen, and I have written about dealing with imposter syndrome separately.

How to spot a shiny object before you pay for it

Whenever something lands in front of you promising recognition, leads or growth, there are three questions worth asking before your card comes out.

First, who is paying whom. If you are paying for the honour, it is not an honour, it is a purchase.

Second, would this exist if I did not pay for it. Real awards, real coverage and real referrals happen whether or not you fund them.

Third, what does this actually change on Monday. A badge on your profile changes nothing about how your team sells. Being able to ask a better question in a meeting changes everything.

This is what I help business owners, start-ups and salespeople with daily. If you want to do better and generate stronger results, have a look at how the sales training works or get in touch.