LinkedIn is the best place to build relationships with other business owners. So if your business sells to other businesses (and not direct to consumers), your existing clients and prospective clients probably have a LinkedIn account. And a LinkedIn inbox is different from an email inbox.
It’s like you have a personal inbox with the person that you are connected to.
On the plus side, it’s much more likely that you will get a response, on the minus side, it’s easy to send too many messages, which looks a bit like spam.
But, you can get great results, provided that you follow these simple guidelines.
To get started, we recommend that you upgrade to LinkedIn sales navigator – and there’s a free 30-day trial so you can try before you buy.
Targeting Your Audience
You need to be really precise in selecting the audience that you wish to connect with.
We have found value in choosing a target audience size somewhere between 100 and 2,500, and the smaller your audience and the greater the affinity you have with them, the better the connection rate you can expect.
You’ll want to give some thought to…
- Geography
- Relationship
- Company
- Industry
- Company Headcount
- Seniority Level
- Function
- Title
Creating Your Connection Message
With your connection message you’ll want to make sure that you’re relevant and speaking directly to the current situation and experience of the person with whom you wish to strike up a conversation.
There’s a limit of 300 characters so you’ll need to be as succinct and to the point as you can – while focusing on the present situation and problem that your potential client is facing (or the goal that you can help them achieve) and being as “business conversational” in tone as you can.
LinkedIn have also recently introduced a limit of 100 connection requests per week, although that will not be a problem practically provided that your targeting is precise enough.
And be prepared – not everyone will connect with you – don’t be discouraged!
We benchmark on a 10% connection rate, and we typically get between 13% and 55%, depending on the audience size and the affinity you have with the person that you are communicating with.
So, once you have a new connection, what’s next?
Educate and Nurture to a Conversation
Resist the temptation to immediately send a pitch – that simply doesn’t work and may even result in the person disconnecting from you – which kind of defeats the whole object of the exercise.
Instead make sure that you invest some time in posts and articles to build your credibility and demonstrate that you understand your prospective client’s problem and that you have a solution, and send a short direct message to your new 1st connections inviting them to read your latest post or article.
And, once you have done some nurturing, maybe one or two articles or posts, start a conversation with an open question.
We often utilise the question…
“What’s your biggest challenge in digital marketing?” for example.
So, what questions do you have around getting more connections and conversations on LinkedIn?
If you want to have a chat about how to make LinkedIn work for you and your business…
