My clients, whether they are selling a tangible product or a consulting service or simply themselves, are generally looking to sell something abroad.

And one of the most common ways for them to go about it is to post stuff and message people on LinkedIn.

They try the LinkedIn thing for a year or so, it results in zero sales, and they give up, saying we tried selling abroad, but it just didn’t work.

Of course it didn’t work.

Why didn’t it work? Think of what you see on LinkedIn these days. AI slop. Syrupy posts from people who are “proud and humbled” by something or other. DMs from someone selling real estate in Dubai, or maybe an MBA program in the Caribbean.

You probably hold that neighborhood in declining regard, and your prospective buyer does too. Trying to make anything good come out of LinkedIn is like trying to hold a business meeting on a crack-infested street corner. Would you expect to close a deal there?

I get it, LinkedIn seems so easy. And yes, five years ago, you could send a few DMs and within moments be rolling in dough. But not now. LinkedIn has become a trash can. A public toilet.

So what’s the answer instead? Sorry man, you’re not going to like it, it’s slow and tedious: Spend 9 million years searching for the person’s email address. Escalate to Zoom calls. Send a text on their birthday. Call when their spouse is in the hospital. The old-fashioned methods that humans used for hundreds of years.

So if you’ve been trying the LinkedIn thing for a year, and if you think that the fact that you’re not getting what you want is due to something other than the very simple fact that you’ve been hanging out in the wrong neighborhood, recognize that you are actually trying to do something that comes very naturally to humans (exchanging stuff across borders), the problem is just that you have been using a low-trust platform to do a high-trust thing.