And LinkedIn. And, somewhere in there, me.
I say “unaliving” because we’re not allowed to say the other word anymore. Apparently the algorithm gets squeamish about mortality but has no problem at all with your seventeen-touch automated sequence. Priorities.
If I needed someone to help me ruin my reputation, I’d hire you.
Except I wouldn’t have to hire you, would I. You already did it. For free. Last week. In my inbox. A message that opened with “Hi Glen! I can tell you’re passionate about leadership” and closed with a Calendly link dropped in like a ransom note, and in between, four hundred words of a machine wearing a person’s face.
You want to sell me lead generation. You want to do to my prospective coaching clients exactly what you just did to me.
Let me walk you through my thinking, because I want you to appreciate the full architecture of the no.
Option one: I hire you to annoy my prospects. You annoy some prospects. They are not my prospects, because you don’t know who my prospects are, because nobody does, because that’s the actual job. So I end up finding them myself anyway, except now I’ve paid for the privilege and I have to explain to a CEO in Bethesda why a stranger with my logo in his signature block called him a thought leader.
Option two: I annoy them myself. For free. With better grammar.
I’m going to go with two.
The target on the back
When an executive signs up for LinkedIn, it is functionally identical to having a tracking chip installed. The profile goes live and somewhere a dashboard chimes. Congratulations, you are now a Decision Maker, which is a technical term meaning animal in season.
Every kid who read a growth-hacking thread at 2 a.m. now has your name in a CSV. Every agency with a laptop and a dream has you in a nurture flow. You have been enriched, scored, tiered, and sequenced. Somebody in a time zone you couldn’t find on a map is A/B testing which flattery gets you to open.
And here’s the part nobody selling the software wants to model: the executives are leaving.
Not loudly. Nobody announces it. They just go quiet. The photo goes stale. The headline degrades from a real title to “Building things.” The posting stops. Then the accepting stops. Then the checking stops. You watch a whole generation of senior people go into witness protection on the one network that was purpose-built to find them.
You didn’t just annoy them. You burned the commons. You lit the hornet’s nest on fire and then complained that the honey business is down.
Looking into the camera, speaking directly to you.
Yes. Hi. I’m aware.
You are currently reading a blog post written by a man who sells executive coaching, and I have just spent 900 words preaching righteousness about marketing. Sit with it. I’ll wait. It’s uncomfortable for both of us, and that’s fine; we’re adults.
Here’s the distinction, and it’s the entire point of the piece, so if you skim, skim to here:
I did not come to you. You came here.
I didn’t slide into your DMs at 6:40 in the morning to tell you I admire your journey. I didn’t guess. I put something in the water and you swam to it, on a day you chose, for a reason that belongs to you. That’s not a technicality. That’s the whole model.
Stop spear fishing. Buy a net.
The spearfisher has to be right about four things simultaneously: the right fish, the right water, the right moment, the right angle of light. Miss any one and you’ve got a wet spear and a fish that now hates you personally.
The net fisher has to be right about one thing. Be in the water where the fish already are, at the moment the fish gets hungry.
Nobody buys an executive coach on a Tuesday because a stranger messaged them. They buy one at 11:40 on a Sunday night, after the board call went badly, after the CFO said the thing in front of everyone, after they lay in the dark doing the math on how much longer they can fake it. And then they open a laptop and they type a real sentence into a search bar.
Your job—your only job—is to already be there when they type it.
Which means, concretely:
- Publish what you’d actually say in the room. Not the sanitized version. The version with the uncomfortable question in it.
- Be specific enough to be findable. “Leadership development” is not a search term. “My VP of Sales is my best rep and my worst manager” is a search term.
- Answer the 11:40 p.m. question. Whatever it is in your category. Write that down. Put it where a search engine can see it.
- Show up where the buying committee already congregates. Their peer group. Their conference. Their group chat. Not their inbox.
- Let referrals do the spearing. Humans are extraordinary at it. They know the fish. They know the water. They know the moment. And they do it for free because you were useful to them once.
Be findable. Be worth finding. Then shut up and let the phone ring.
I want to end this with a joke, and I’ve got one loaded, but I’m going to hold it, because there’s a thing underneath all this that isn’t funny.
That executive at 11:40 on Sunday night is actually drowning. Not metaphorically—the marriage, the drinking, the two hundred people whose mortgages depend on a decision she has no idea how to make. She needs help and she is finally, finally ready to go find it.
And she doesn’t, because the last four hundred messages from people claiming they could help were garbage, and she’s learned that everyone with a hand out is lying. You did that. Not alone, but you helped. That’s the cost, and it doesn’t show up on your dashboard.
Okay. Here’s the joke.
I noticed you’re passionate about leadership. Do you have fifteen minutes Thursday?
Glen Hellman is an executive coach, CEO peer group facilitator, faculty at the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering, and a novelist. He did not send you this. You found it. That was the point.
