It’s no news that LinkedIn is the largest professional social network in the world. With 722 million members and more than 310 million monthly active users, LinkedIn is an excellent platform for meeting new people and making new business connections. Besides that, in the last few years, LinkedIn has become more and more influential in terms of B2B lead generation and sales in general. This has a lot to do with the consistently growing community and a number of newly added features & tools that are making the process of B2B lead generation on LinkedIn way more effective and much easier than on any other platform. No wonder why so many professionals prefer doing lead generation outreach through LinkedIn, and that probably includes you too, since you’re here.
If you have decided to do LinkedIn cold outreach but still confused on how to write effective LinkedIn cold outreach messages, then be sure that you are not alone and know there are dozens of other people like you who struggle with that too. Lucky for you, in this blog we are going to give you a detailed guide on how to write a powerful LinkedIn cold outreach message so that you can easily connect to your leads, make them your business partners and increase your sales numbers. So if you are ready to get into the details, let’s get started.
Narrow Down Your Outreach Target Market
Before we get into the details on how to write a LinkedIn cold outreach message, let’s first of all understand who are the people that you are planning to contact. What is their LinkedIn connection degree? Are they really included in your target? and who is your target anyway?
These are some fundamental questions you need to ask yourself and have exact answers to. If you are still unsure about who your target is or how to find them, then here are some key tips that can help you in that.
● Grow Your Network Wisely
What this means is that instead of connecting with hundreds of random people, focus on connecting with individuals who are actually in your niche. Growing your community with a more targeted group will help you find more relevant leads and do it much more easily. Besides that, sharing posts with an audience that has similar interests will make your work much more effective and beneficial for you.
● Focus on 2nd Degree Connection
The next thing you can do to narrow down your outreach target is to mainly focus on 2nd-degree connections (at least for some time). Growing your network through 2nd-degree connections will open doors to the people who are currently out of your league, aka the ones among your 3rd and 4th degree LinkedIn connections. To put it shortly, the more mutual connections you have with your leads, the more likely they are going to accept your connection request or outreach message. Besides that, having influential mutual connections can be used for connecting to your prospects, which brings us to our next point.
● Consider Asking for Help
The next thing that you can do to get closer to your potential leads is to check whether you have valuable mutual connections with your lead, who can maybe introduce you to them. Just like in real life, it is always usually way easier to start a conversation with strangers when a mutual friend introduces you. So if you happen to have a mutual connection with your prospects, then you can try to ask them to introduce you or at least give you a personal tip that may be handy. This way, you will have a better foundation for establishing a more successful connection, which in turn may impact the effectiveness of your LinkedIn cold outreach message.
● Bonus Tip: Get Help with the Advanced Search Feature
The last thing you can do to narrow down your LinkedIn outreach target is to find relevant connections through the advanced search feature. Of course, this is simply an alternative paid option to the other tools and features that are available for free to everyone. That said if you decide to use this feature, then you will get a variety of additional search filters that can help you find people in a certain industry, company, job title, location, and much more. Keep in mind that your search results might not be less than expected at first, but once you start building your community, your search results will grow with it.
Find Information on Your Potential Leads
Once you have found your potential lead, the most important thing that you should do before contacting your potential leads is to learn a little bit about them. If the person is active on LinkedIn, then go ahead and check some of their recent posts to learn more about their interests and activities. Fortunately for you and for everyone who is trying to do LinkedIn outreach, the platform offers quite a lot of information on its users, which can significantly help when connecting to your potential prospects. Starting from an educational background and biography to previous work experiences and recommendations you can find a bunch of information that can be used for establishing a friendlier and more successful conversion both for you and for your leads.
Besides that, doing research on your leads and getting to know them before contacting them can also be very beneficial for finding common ground between you two. In other words, you might find some mutual interests, connections, or any other similarities which might turn out to be a deal-breaker in your business deal. Once you find common ground between you and the person you are going to contact, use that information to write a strong and yet personalized outreach message, that will make them pay attention and answer back. Also, keep in mind that the same personalized approach should be used for each and every new lead. If you use this tip in the right way, then soon you will be seeing a major improvement in your LinkedIn cold outreach message writing skills and results.
Guide to Writing a Successful LinkedIn Cold Outreach Message
Now that we have covered all the key things that you should do before contacting your leads it is the perfect time to focus on writing an effective LinkedIn cold outreach message that will guarantee a successful outreach experience and become a firm foundation for future business deals. To make everything simple and easy for you, we have created a guide with 5 effective tips on writing a powerful LinkedIn cold outreach message. Let’s check them out, shall we?
Tip 1: Keep It Concise
So the 1st step in writing a LinkedIn cold outreach message is to keep it short and concise. Know that if you are choosing to send a message instead of an email, then it should be brief and easy to read. Focus on writing short but to the point with a maximum of 2-3 sentences and consider leaving a space so that it will be visually more organized and easier to read. Besides that, let’s remember that although professional, LinkedIn is still considered to be a social network, so writing a whole essay will not make any good. Instead, it might even be annoying for the reader. So keep that in mind when writing your outreach message.
Step 2: Your Message Personalized & Friendly
We know that the name ‘cold outreach message’ may imply being straightforward and to the point, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you should have a cold tone of voice. Yes, it can be challenging to make a short message both persuasive, and friendly at the same time but making it soulless and abrupt will only make it worse. Just try to be friendly and add warmth to your tone of voice. Of course, it is worth mentioning that you should also keep in mind your corporate tone of voice, as well as the target audience you are outreaching to.
Moreover, to add soulfulness to your message, you need to make it a little bit personalized. As mentioned earlier, it is always helpful to use the information on your prospect’s profile in your cold outreach message in order to make it more personalized. It wouldn’t interfere to also include a small compliment or a friendly sentence just to add humanism to the message before moving further with sales.
Tip 3: Give Them a Reason to Reply
The next important tip you need to know is that if you want to make your LinkedIn cold outreach message effective, you need to give your lead a valuable reason to answer back. What we mean by this, is that you need to include some sort of question or a sentence that will make them respond to your message and keep the conversation going. As such, it can be a question about your mutual connection, job experience, or something similar. Similarly, you can also include some kind of point in your message, which will trigger their curiosity and make them pay attention to the message. Whatever you choose to do, make sure to keep in the range of professional friendliness.
Tip 4: Don’t be too ‘Salesy’
Yes, it might be very contradicting to say “don’t be too salesy” when writing a LinkedIn cold outreach message, but asking directly for sale in the first message will make everything worse. Remember that regardless of what type of outreach you are going for, building a connection is the key. As you introduce yourself, start a conversation with your lead, try to focus on making a connection, and building trust. Simply build up the conversation and try to find the pain points of your prospect. It will give you a valuable foundation for changing the subject towards solving their problem, showing them how you can help, and this is finally the point when you can start going into the actual sales process. But until that, try to keep the conversation active without being too pushy.
Tip 5: Follow up Your Leads
So the last but definitely not least tip on our list to follow back.
Naturally, when you are writing to plenty of people at the same time, you may lose track of all the messages and forget to follow up with them. This is actually a common thing that happens with many people, but if you don’t want to lose your potential prospects, it’s important to get back to them if they are not answering right away. Just write back to them and see how they are doing. This simple action can sometimes be deal-breaking for many professionals, both in positive and negative ways. Imagine for yourself, just like you are writing to a bunch of people at the same time, your lead might get a similar number of messages every day, so it is completely understandable that they can miss a message or two. But if you follow them back on a regular basis, you might end up getting a successful business deal.
Depending on the scale of your outreach, we would recommend going with a CRM solution. However, anything from an excel spreadsheet, Trello, CRMs and anything in between will do. Create your sales funnel and get on it.
Let’s sum up
With that being said, as you can see, a lot goes into the process of doing successful LinkedIn cold outreach. From deciding how to approach your leads and finding common ground for the conversation to writing the perfect LinkedIn cold outreach message, it takes a lot of effort and skills to master this whole process. However, if you keep practicing your writing skills, build a growing network and be consistent with all these tips and tricks, then soon you will become a pro at LinkedIn cold outreach.