Does anyone use LinkedIn for outreach or 'cold calls?'

Nat

Nat

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I'm looking to sell some IM related services to different local businesses/individuals. I realized that a lot of them are on LinkedIn. I've got a legit LinkedIn profile and figured that instead of trying to directly contact through phone/mail/email that I could send out some connect requests with short messages.

Has anyone done anything like this before? I don't want to spam or automate too much (at least right now) because I'm using my actual account (and my name is attached).

Side question: when reaching out to someone you don't actually know -- is one of the options better than others? aka saying they are a friend vs saying you are colleagues from a company where you weren't actually.
 
So, quick update. I just got a direct call (completely unexpected) from a bossman of a pretty big company. Unfortunately, he was already taking measures to handle some negative online feedback. However, I still talked to him for over 10 minutes.

I did spend several hours manually sending connect requests to businesses. So far it hasn't been worth the effort, but hopefully time will tell. Still looking for any suggestions :smile:
 
I'd think it would work great. People can immediately vet you. It's far more personal and realistic. Everyone tends to manage their own social profiles as well. I've spoken with celebrities and even lined up work with them this way back in the Myspace days. Not much has changed with this. You can tell which are offloaded to a marketing team, and it's very few.
 
Nat said:
Side question: when reaching out to someone you don't actually know -- is one of the options better than others? aka saying they are a friend vs saying you are colleagues from a company where you weren't actually.
Click to expand...

if I understand this correctly, that you are not friends with the nor that you have worked for a companny that you'd claim, I would say that none of the options is better and the reason simply is, that you'll be starting a business relationship based on a lie, and both are fairly high risk lies so there is a pretty good chance of being cought, and the most fundemantal thing in business is trust.
 
Friend Or Other

They limit the number of times you can hit 'friend' in a day BUT... at least 2/3 of the time you'll be able to find their work e-mail on their website, or even on their profile so you can just hit other and paste the e-mail in to stay below the limit and add more per day.

Personalization, and outreach at scale

I tested spending a lot of time personalising the messages heavily but ended up using a generic one for each niche because I don't think a lot of people notice/read the message. The way it pops up now 'so and so added you' I tend to just click it, scroll their profile, then hit accept, and I guess from the results (only a tiny uplift for personalized vs the usual huge uplift you'd get for say a personalized e-mail) a lot of people don't either.

Tip 1: Comment Love

One thing that works well, and I should do more of it, but I must admit I've let LinkedIn slide a lot this year, is to comment on a couple of their posts with something of high utility before you add them. This has the double effect of getting you on their radar (they may have actually liked or responded to your comment) and making sure you're only adding people who are actually regularly active on the platform anyway.

Tip 2: Who They Know

The other thing that works really well is looking at your connections who have a lot of connections and asking for intros (LinkedIn has a system for it) from any that you have a 'vague' familiarity with to the one of their connections you're interested in talking more with. Even though the connections between you all are tenuous sometimes, to say the least, that seems to be more than enough to significantly boost the success rate of ending up connected and talking to the other person.
 
It just ocured to me that I use linkdin far too litlle so I retract everything that I have said on this thread
 
Some broad from Hubspot just tried this tactic on me.
 
One of most popular LinkedIn searches is "Who visited my profile?"...

Guess why, develop strategy that connects your offer with visitors and here you go!
 
planBman said:
One of most popular LinkedIn searches is "Who visited my profile?"...

Guess why, develop strategy that connects your offer with visitors and here you go!
Click to expand...

I like where this is going. You can also connect with the people LinkedIn recommends and start messaging them. Dont use Linkedin that much but probably should start
 
I thought I would post an update... Another person in a similar industry contacted me the other day and asked if I was interested in contract work.

I've experimented with groups. Most seem heavily spammed and inactive. However, I have found a few good groups and I'm trying to just contribute content (not linking to personal website or anything like that).

A number of people that I directly messaged within the connect request have connected, but never responded to my message. I've followed up and gotten ignored each time.
 
Hey Nat, when you messaged them with a follow up were you offering them value to respond? I have experimented a lot with Linkedin and found people can be extremely sensitive with being contacted about work outside of LI on their personal emails.

There are a number of software programs you can use such as profile hopper to create views on others profiles (you will need a Linkedin premium $69 a month membership to properly utilize them) I have set them to as high as 2k before getting a temporary ban. I would recommend somewhere between 500-1000 a day depending on how many connections you have and how aged/used your account is.

Also for interaction the order of activity goes like this,

  1. Updates (by far the most likely to go viral or get attention)
  2. Long Form Posts - Posting something helpful at least twice a week gives you an algorithmic bump to how many people see your profile.
  3. Groups - Honestly I would not even bother. The latest algorithm update (Proton ML) made them almost irrelevant.
 
I get so many Linkedin messages... I just ignore them all.

99% are literally desperate businessmen spamming.

Annoying to say the least. Most of the time these people aren't even in the same industry as me.

I don't check the feed or group either. It's just a waste of time to be honest. Linkedin has just become an online resume site at this point. If I was going to try to network with someone, it makes it easier to find out where they work/their background/etc though. But the rest is on me to get a hold of them outside of Linkedin.

99% of the people I know don't even use Linkedin. They built out a profile because everyone else had one.. And employers started asking for them.
 
Have to politely disagree with you on this one Contract. Have built a nice stream of traffic from Linkedin in the past. They claim to have a user base of 450M but it is more like 50M active users. Utilizing the "update" feature yields the best results. Formula that has worked well is,

Smart CTA
Link to url being promoted.
Insertion of square min 600x600 picture (you must do this separately not just let LI use the one associated with the url you are promoting) This yields a larger picture.

Also the more contacts you have the more people will see your updates, you can buy Linkedin contact lists from places like Fiverr but I would not recommend it. Taking the time to target people who would be interested in your product can be well worth the effort. The Linkedin suggested tool works well, again with the premium membership. As they really limit what you can do with free accounts.

As soon as someone comments or likes it. A percentage of their contacts will see it. Things can go viral very quickly. I have seen much better traction on Linkedin than on FB.
 
LinkedIn can absolutely be a valuable tool for outreach, depending on your niche and the profile of your target demographic. It's amazing what you can accomplish just by connecting and asking sometimes.

Just this week, I made a few simple connect requests to C suite-level executives at a few different companies, and got several "Yes" to link requests, as well as a couple promising prospects for different parts of the funnel to work further, or for other products/services. And a couple of those were CEO's agreeing to link. :wink:

It's all a matter of how well you know your target demographic, how well you structure and orient the value proposition, and how proficient you are at mindfucking them. Sometimes you have to think peripherally or laterally, although watch out, because that can always be a deep rabbit hole. :wink:

On the passive side, there's usually some good success to be found working the "viewed your profile" angle for sure. Try stuff like changing your summary section, or possibly even your current experience section (so it shows in your profile card in most summaries) to concisely mention something about your product/service, that you're trying to sell, and that will catch their eye. The idea being along the lines of the whole "5 second rule", in terms of making an impression. They get that email, or they see their dashboard notifications, etc. and they might only briefly glance. Wouldn't it be great if in that couple second glance, the first thing that pops out is your "current experience" line stating something like, "Currently selling qualified [your niche] leads". Just planting seeds. You don't always have to try to go balls deep all the time, everytime. Work those angles and plant those seeds.

Another angle, get someone to "walk you through the door". In short, work ~1 level below what you feel would be the actual decision maker. Sometimes you might determine the decision maker might not be receptive to the direct sell, especially from out of the blue. So bring it to someone else within their company, that you have a reasonable degree of confidence they'll just be forwarding/referring you to that decision maker anyways. Even if they just tell you to "get in touch with so and so", at least you can approach from that direction, "Hi, I'm so and so. Bob said you were the guy to talk to about lead acquisition.."

For a really high value prospect that's non-receptive to the direct sell, if the value is worth the effort, you might even work that lower level "foot through the door" in stages. In short, connecting with that lower level employee for an unrelated or indirect reason, if you can find one to justify it (group you're both part of, hobbies you both like, whatever), and after a few conversations, once the relationship has been established, then going in for the referral.
 
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