WholeLife Matrix: Financial Viability – Marketing / Sales – Pipeline – Qualifying

“Cats have a scam going – you buy the food, they eat the food, they go away; that’s the deal.”
-Eddie Izzard

Doing business online with people we have never met has become a common thing and we can easily find people we would like to connect with on social media sites such as LinkedIn, which is a trusted business networking site.  But we must still be careful to avoid scammers and know how to identify a scammer.  Here are some tips:

Look at the Person’s Profile
The scammer’s social profile is often incomplete or blank and they have few connections, often no more than 10.  There may be no picture at all of a person or maybe a logo is used or a common picture such as a picture of the ocean.  The job title of the person may be a bank executive or a human resource manager if the scammer is posting a job.  The profile owner is often not in North America but their profile may say that they are somewhere in the United States.

The Scammer Will Ask You to Do Something for Them
Scammers will ask you to do things for them without you really knowing anything about who they are.  The first thing they will often ask is for you to communicate with them outside of a network like LinkedIn.  So they might ask you to email them at a certain email address. They might post a job on LinkedIn and ask you to start doing “tasks” for them without ever having spoken to you on the phone or having a written agreement with them.  They may ask you to set up accounts for them and send you the passwords for the accounts. Also, they will often have no website and when you ask for one, they might say that their website is down or that they are working on creating one. Yet in their job description, they might say that they are a large, successful company.  A company like that should have a website.

What to do When You Realize You Are Being Scammed
If you realize that you have connected with a scammer, discontinue communications with them, remove them from your connections and report them to the site where you connected.  This may be Craigslist, LinkedIn, etc.  Reporting the person can help prevent you and others from being victimized in the future.

It is important to know that the people you are adding to your network and staying in touch with are legitimate.

In the WholeLife Matrix, the Marketing & Sales pipeline involves:

1.  Qualifying

2.  Adding to the Database

3.  Staying in Touch

4.  Maintaining the Database