LinkedIN #Fail ? Part 2

I'm going to continue this story about LinkedIn's failure to be social with a bit of background.

As a new way for our business development team to find the right people to connect with, we want to use LinkedIn at the Executive level.

LinkedIn has been sending promotional codes for 30 day trial upgrades for a while. When we decided to upgrade 5 free accounts, we discovered that we just missed the deadline for the last promo code, so I started looking for a new code.

Googling LinkedIn Promo Codes led me to believe that they had changed their promotional pricing strategy recently. I searched their website and found nothing, so I decided to reach out to LinkedIn and double check. I tried Twitter and after getting no response, decided to try the old fashioned way, a phone call.

Yesterday, I shared the story of calling LinkedIN.

Here's the rest of the story:

Monday, I followed the instructions given to me over the phone by customer service.

I submitted a ticket and waited for a response.

We have 5 people on our team that we want to upgrade to the Executive level. However we are looking for the first month as a no charge, say 13 months for the price of 12, to persuade our CEO to invest in this for us.

And their response:

Hello Scott, We appreciate your interest in upgrading to the Executive level on LinkedIn. We offer a substantial discount on our annual Executive membership. If you upgrade to the Executive level and pay the one time annual membership fee of $899.55 for each account, that would be a savings of $20 per month or $300 over the year for each account, if you spread out the savings. Times that figure by 5 accounts and your boss will be saving approximately $1500.00. for those 5 accounts over the first year.

In effect that is 15 free months at the Executive level account as it is normally $99.95 per month with the month to month membership. Please remember that there are no contracts to sign and can be canceled at any time. You would be prorated back the amount of any full months that are unused.

If you have further questions, please feel free to reply to this message.

Wendy LinkedIn Customer Service

When I read this, I was disappointed. Wendy simply spouted a canned sales pitch tailored to my request. Except she there was a problem with her offer.



Here was my email back to Wendy:

Thank you for your quick response.

However, this is still the standard pricing that is offered online. Actually, it is a few cents more expensive, online annual price is $899.40, not $899.55 that you quoted.

As an internet solutions company, we know that all of this is negotiable as there are limited hard costs to this service.

We are also considering doing LinkedIn Ads if that will help open the doors.

Again, we are looking at upgrading 5 basic accounts, including our CEO, to Executive level which means $4497.00 for simply saying yes to that 13 months for the price of 12 by offering us the 30 day trial for the first month.

That was Monday. It is now Wednesday. I have not heard back from them.

So what do you think?


ScLoHo is Scott Howard, a Solutions Consultant with Cirrus ABS.

You can contact him here: