Summary

The easiest way to spot a fake sales guru on LinkedIn is to ask one question: are they selling you something before they’ve proven anything? Fake gurus manufacture credibility through aesthetics and urgency. Real sales professionals build it through results, relationships, and time.

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn. As a sales expert, it comes with the territory. And lately, the platform has a serious noise problem.

I recently sat down with Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson, co-founders of We Have a Meeting, a UK-based new business development agency, and co-authors of Sales is Therapy. Between the two of them, they have spent nearly a decade in the trenches of B2B sales, building pipeline the old-fashioned way: picking up the phone and talking to people. 

What started as a discussion about authentic personal branding turned into something more useful: a clear-eyed breakdown of who to trust, who to avoid, and how to show up on LinkedIn in a way that actually serves your career.

What a LinkedIn Snake Oil Salesman Actually Looks Like

You already know this person. They show up in your feed with a rented Lamborghini, a borrowed Rolex, and a course priced at $1,997 — specific enough to feel legitimate, vague enough to mean nothing. Their content’s polished and engagement is high, but their actual sales experience is practically non-existent.

Jack and Zac have a name for this: the snake oil salesman. The red flags are consistent once you know what to look for. They push a course or program before demonstrating verifiable results. Their advice reads like it was formed years ago and never pressure-tested against a real market. They manufacture urgency and make you feel behind so that buying something feels like catching up. Zac’s tip on knowing how to distinguish the noise: “Real wealth and knowledge is often much quieter than people expect.”

The loudest voices on LinkedIn are rarely the most credible ones. That gap between volume and substance is exactly where the snake oil salesman lives.

Why It Works

The fake guru playbook is effective because it exploits something real. Nobody wants to be left behind. LinkedIn has become a place where manufactured success triggers the same psychological response as genuine achievement. You scroll past the Lambo post and something registers, even when you know it’s performative.

Jack put it bluntly: “People go, I want that. If they’ve got that, then hopefully they can get me from A to B.” It has always existed in sales culture in some form, and social media has given it a bigger stage and a lower barrier to entry.

Understanding why it works makes you less susceptible to it. It also makes you more intentional about what you are building and why.

What Real Credibility Looks Like

Jack and Zac built We Have a Meeting by doing the work most people talk about online but avoid in practice. Their agency fills B2B pipelines by picking up the phone, having real conversations, and earning meetings through genuine qualification. There’s no aesthetic shortcut to that.

During our conversation, Zac referenced a UK entrepreneur named Dean Forbes, who built a B2B unicorn starting from cold calling and worked his way up to becoming a billionaire. Most people in sales have never heard of him. He’s a useful counterexample. Genuine operators at that level tend to be accessible through a handful of podcasts and a few well-placed conversations. 

The salespeople worth following are the ones who are visibly doing the thing, refining it, and sharing what they are learning along the way.

How to Build an Authentic LinkedIn Presence

The practical question most salespeople wrestle with is how to show up on LinkedIn in a way that feels genuine without disappearing into irrelevance or becoming cringeworthy. 

Write for yourself first. Jack described his own approach as posting content that functions on two levels: something that reads as normal LinkedIn content on the surface, but rewards the person who actually reads it with a layer of humor or honesty underneath. The joke, as he put it, is for the person three paragraphs in trying to figure out if it’s real. That kind of specificity builds a real audience rather than a passive one.

Zac’s framing was even simpler: “Never refuse the muse. If you feel like you want to write something, just start writing. But if you’ve got nothing to say and you’re doing it for the sake of it, don’t bother.” Consistency matters, but forced content is its own form of noise.

The through line in everything they said is that authentic LinkedIn presence is a byproduct of having something real to say, formed through real experience. The people trying to manufacture it are the ones ending up in the Hall of Shame.

Reward versus Respect

LinkedIn rewards volume, but it respects substance. The snake oil salesmen will keep posting, keep running their courses, and keep collecting followers who want the view without the climb. That’s fine, but the gap between them and the salespeople doing real work keeps widening in the right direction.

The question worth sitting with is what your LinkedIn presence is actually communicating about who you are and what you are building. Every post is either adding to that or subtracting from it. Jack and Zac have built careers, an agency, and a book around the idea that selling with integrity compounds over time in ways that performing success never can. The phone calls get answered. The meetings get booked. The relationships hold.

Your LinkedIn profile is often the first thing a prospect sees before they decide whether to take your call. Make sure it’s working for you. Download the free LinkedIn Profile Makeover Checklist and start building a profile that opens doors.

Frequently Asked Questions