Over Half the Sales People in the US Aren’t on LinkedIn

Wait, What?

This seems like a crazy claim. How could sales people in today’s social selling environment not be even on LinkedIn? I mean if half were on Twitter, that would be a good number, but not to be on LinkedIn?

LinkedIn isn’t Facebook in its reach – 300 million members verses over a billion for Facebook – but it’s extremely unusual for me to meet a business professional who isn’t on the site. For some reason even my long retired, great Uncle Joe is on LinkedIn.

Do Statistics Lie?

As I discussed in a post about the lies that are spread about sales people , you should always check any stats very carefully. Here is why I think only half of the sales people in the US aren’t on LinkedIn:

• Data from US Bureau of Labor Statistics website shows that there are 14 million non-retail sales jobs in the US.
• Data from LinkedIn advertising targeting website shows that (of yesterday) there were 6,495,834 people who listed their primary job function as ‘sales’ on LinkedIn:

• That leaves us with 7.5M US based sales people who aren’t on LinkedIn, which is 53% of the total.

Who Are These Sales People?

Of the 7.5 million sales people who aren’t on LinkedIn, I guess some of them might have filled out their profile wrong and listed their job function as accounting or customer service or something, right? But wouldn’t you expect the same number of accountants to make the same mistake? Let’s assume one million attention deficit order impacted sales people filled out the form wrong.

What of the other 6.5 million? Perhaps they’re just not up on all this new Internet stuff? They’re the guys still sending faxes and urging the marketing department to use direct mail campaigns. I just can’t believe that.

Maybe the government statistics are wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. Somehow I trust the LinkedIn numbers more.

What do you think is going on here? Let me know in the comments.

(Image of Jerry Chubbuck, owner and operator of the Genoa Tower and Museum courtesy of Flickr user Bradley Gordon. Jerry is not a LinkedIn user as far as I can tell.)