Giovanni Proietta on LinkedIn, Sales and Fractional Leadership
When you listen to Giovanni Proietta talk about sales, it does not feel like a job description. It feels like a life philosophy.
Founder of SaLi and fractional sales leader, Giovanni joined the Startup Sales Talks podcast by GrowTech to share his journey, his mindset, and why LinkedIn is one of the most powerful tools a modern seller can use.
This blog is built around his own words with context around each idea.
“Work is a commodity. You are the product.”
At some point in his career, Giovanni realised something simple and brutal about modern work.
“Work is a commodity. There is a quantity and a price.
When you understand that equation, the only question is am I happy with how I spend my time and how I am paid for it”
As an employee, your value is often locked inside a fixed frame
one employer, one title, one salary band.
“If your product sits on the employee shelf, the price range is given.
The quantity is given. You give eight hours. That is it.”
Moving into fractional work for him was not just a lifestyle experiment
it was a repositioning exercise.
“You are the product. When you move from employee to fractional, the value you can create changes.
The value the market attaches to you changes as well.”
His take is not that everyone should become fractional tomorrow.
His prediction is sharper than that
“I do not think everyone should be fractional.
But I do think almost everyone will do fractional work at some point in their life.”
“Sales is creating something that would not exist without you.”
Giovanni did not fall into sales by accident.
He liked building things even as a kid.
“If you are not there in front of your client in that moment, that business does not exist.
You literally create business from nothing.”
For him, that is the magic of our profession.
Not the pipeline graphs. Not the revenue targets. The creation.
“You can have the most beautiful idea in the world, but if you are not there selling it, it does not exist.”
This creator lens explains why he prefers sales over other corporate roles
“I tried roles that do not have clear numbers. You talk about performance with words. I hated it. In sales you have numbers. You can test, improve, like a scientist.”
“Nobody cares. That is the beauty of it.”
One of the most vivid stories he shared comes from his very first sales role in France.
He was given a difficult region, a phone, and a forgotten desk in the corner.
“I was put in the corner. Nobody really cared what I was doing. I had a list and a phone. For 6 months it was just me and cold calls in French.”
At the time it felt harsh. Looking back, it was a gift.
“It taught me something important nobody cares. Which is beautiful. You are free to make a million mistakes and learn.”
He calls sales a lonely profession, but not in a tragic way
“At the end of the day you are alone with your numbers. You have a team, a manager, support. But the scoreboard is yours.”
Once you accept that, you stop waiting to be saved by a manager, a new tool, or a new company.
“On LinkedIn, if you do not take the space, someone you dislike will.”
For Giovanni, LinkedIn is not a place to drop corporate announcements.
It is a place to occupy territory.
“If I do not post, the world does not change. But someone else takes that space maybe someone I deeply disagree with. So I post.”
He is very clear about who you should not be posting for
“You do not have to care about people that do not care about you. They can unfollow you. They can think you are a chatterbox. That is fine. They are not your market.”
One of his favourite examples is beautifully simple.
He once posted a photo of himself having a beer by a lake in Lithuania
with a casual caption, nothing about software.
“A friend commented. We started chatting in the inbox, just life things. Then he told me they were building their own solution. They had ten developers on it. That conversation turned into a seventy thousand opportunity.”
The lesson is not that you should spam sunset photos.
It is that being a person online opens sales doors that robot content never will.
“Do not only show your robotic professional face. People relate to you as a person first, thought leader second.”
“Cold calling is whispering in a stranger’s ear.”
Giovanni still has a soft spot for cold calling.
“Cold calling is still a way to make a living. I still do it sometimes. It still works.”
He has this beautiful line
“It is the closest you can get to a stranger. You are literally whispering in their ear.”
Once you have done that hundreds of times, everything else in sales feels easier.
“After cold calls, speaking on Zoom is easy. You have already survived the hardest version.”
His early six months of cold calling in French in that corner desk became his mental reference point
a kind of inner boot camp he can always go back to.
“Thought leaders can be boring. Be a person first.”
He is not anti content.
He just has a strong allergy to generic thought leadership.
“Thought leaders can be boring. You can aim to become one, yes. But somewhere on that journey, remember you are a person.”
So what should salespeople post about
Not just product. Not just generic sales tips.
Your industry, your clients, your life in a way that lets people see how you think.
“You never know which angle of you will be interesting for someone. Maybe it is your take on work. Maybe it is your love for Italian food. Maybe it is a stupid joke about lakes in Lithuania.”
And behind all of this there is one practical reason to take LinkedIn seriously
“Space on LinkedIn is free. Organic content can source millions in pipeline. If you care about something in sales, it is one of the easiest places to talk about it.”
“Do not confine your value to a job title.”
If there is one red thread through Giovanni’s story, it is this
do not let your job title be the ceiling of your value.
“If you want to go fractional or independent, do not think of yourself as a fractional employee. Zoom out. Ask what problems you solve for companies, not which role you fill.”
That mindset is what took him from
Italian kid with a phone in a corner
to leading a million quota business unit
to advising multiple early stage startups as a fractional sales leader.
Want more from Giovanni
You can catch the full conversation on Startup Sales Talks EP 12 with GrowTech where Giovanni goes deeper into
- his time at Interactio
- why he loves early stage chaos
- how he approaches clients as a fractional leader
- the books that shaped his thinking, from Challenger Sale to Nonviolent Communication
Connect with Giovanni Proietta on LinkedIn and follow GrowTech for more raw sales conversations that mix mindset, tactics, and the real stories behind them.
