LinkedIn Cold Outreach Messaging: Research-Backed Response Strategies

[00:00:00]how to craft the perfect message on linkedin and actually get people to respond to you hi my name is chris casolino and i am the co-founder and head of services at uptown creation a b2b marketing and business development company so what i'm going to be talking about today is going through the three principles that i utilize for all of our clients as well as our internal accounts to actually get responses when we send messages out on linkedin as well as going through some of the best practices for messaging on linkedin so there's also three different ways that you can send messages so i'll go through the three principles that i use for individual messages as well as the three different types of messages you can send out on linkedin for free so to start off i think the best thing to do is to go into my inbox and show you some of the bad messages and the things that you want to avoid so realizing that everybody on linkedin is being bombarded by messages on a daily basis so your goal when you're sending a message is not to give them paragraphs of information it is to get them to respond and to get them to read past the first line because chances are if somebody sees something that is a pattern that they've seen in other messages they're done reading so if you aren't able to break the patterns that people are seeing you're never going to get them to even read even if it's a really genuine message to start off with so some of the dirty phrases that i tell everybody to avoid are avoiding phrases like thanks for connecting thanks for adding me to your network i'd love to explore mutually beneficial ways we can help each other things like that are in so many bottled messages that i receive as well as other founders other c-level executives other people who receive a lot of messages know exactly what i'm talking about so you need to avoid these dirty words like the plague i would also encourage you to avoid sending lengthy messages anything over 500 characters is going to be less likely to get responded to and not to say that you can't send something over 500 characters but trying to make it short sweet and to the point is going to be really effective and later in this video i'm going to share the method that tim ferriss actually uses which i think is a really really really good template especially when you're first starting out to give you a place to start refining some messaging so if we look at the messages on my screen right now you know i hope this email finds you well i came across uptown creation as i was searching through linkedin and i left such a strong impression on me that i had to reach out so rule number one to avoid avoid being overly vague like i know that this guy didn't actually find uptown creation from searching through linkedin but he words it like this so it can be sent out to a bunch of different people um and then he goes straight into the pitch are you interested in overseeing and enhancing your software's technical quality while improving your team's productivity like that's a mouthful for me and i don't even know what that means so i'm never gonna read even that far into the message and most people aren't and this is actually like an ad that somebody's spending money paid on which is kind of wild so going to a similar in mail message where it has the title not a terrible title not overly creative but then going in and reading they go to into the results aspect most people like this is something to say for the demo call save your results save that hard pitch for the demo call just try to get people on a call in the first place like he's pitching a demo call but he's telling me all the things that he's probably gonna repeat on that demo call anyways and then here's another one appreciate the connection chris let me know your thoughts on an intro as your schedule permit so again like asking something not giving anything some other principles to really avoid is what i call the value vomit so don't just throw pdfs at people where you're assuming the problems that you have what you really want to do in the messaging is let people uncover their own problems and let them want to speak to you about those problems so now i'll go into the right way to send messages and the principles that i employ for myself and my other clients it's how i've scheduled you know podcast episodes with people like mark randolph the netflix co-founder and gotten him to respond to me and direct me to his publicist versus going the other way from the ground up that's the power of linkedin is being able to you know bypass any gatekeepers so with that being said the message template that i follow when i'm thinking about it is step one you need to address the elephant in the room so you're reaching out to somebody cold how do you address this in a creative manner so you know maybe this is saying i saw we knew some of the same people you know i saw that you made a post on gary vaynerchuk's post the other day you know i've had people reach out to me saying things like that and i immediately responded because you know yeah i did leave a comment on garyvee's post they actually saw what i said and it meant enough to them that they reached out other people will lead with you know facts that they would only know about me by looking at my profile so knowing that i'm a pharmacist knowing this video that i posted your pharmd's not going to make you rich knowing that i'm into personal branding connecting with me in some way like that that addresses the elephant in the room addresses why you're cold outreaching so phrases like i saw we knew a few mutual people those phrases can work but trying to make it even more genuine and authentic than that step two is make your pitch and tell your story why should somebody want to speak to you but don't go so in depth that you bore them and you give them facts that they don't need to make that decision you know you don't need to say what your service is in three different ways you don't need to make your pitch in three different ways you just need to get to the point as quick as possible and then third having a call to action so whether that call to action is a question or whether it's hey here's a link to schedule a chat with me if you'd be open to it that call to action is really important because that's the only way that you're going to be able to follow up with a message and actually have a reason to do that follow-up so the three steps are address the elephant in the room why are you reaching out to somebody cold two make your pitch and tell your story why should they care about you and three a call to action so to put more template to this because i know people love templates even though i hate them um this is a post that i made a couple months ago talking about tim ferriss's strategy for cold outreach so dear so-and-so i know you're really busy and that you get a lot of emails and messages so this will only take 60 seconds to read so he's addressing the elephant in the room and giving a forward-pacing statement like this is all that this is going to be then he's saying here's where you can say who you are add one or two lines that establish your credibility and that's it then after you establish that credibility and introduce yourself here's where you ask a very specific question so you can play around with what this might be because if you go too hard with a pitch and a pitchy question you're not going to get responses but if you're able to ask something that you're genuinely curious about and just build that rapport and trust with somebody chances are they will be more likely to respond and then the end i think is beautiful as well i totally understand if you're too busy to respond but even a one or two line reply would really make my day all the best chris so i have this posted on my linkedin if you're interested in looking at it all you have to do is go to my posts and then scroll down a little bit and you'll see it right there you can also google tim ferriss's strategy and i'll include something in the description as well but i think that this is a beautiful way to start your cold outreach without appearing like everybody else in the inbox so what you're trying to avoid is as somebody scrolling through their inbox how do you make yourself not look like the hope your wednesday's going well hello how are you how do you look interesting enough to get somebody to click in so these ways of messaging people are going to work for any cold outreach so this works for cold dms on instagram cold dms on linkedin cold emails everything like that but i promised i would go over the three different ways to send out messages on linkedin and so the first way is to connect with somebody and now that you're connected with them sending them a message after they connect i highly recommend never including a message in the connection request unless it is very tailored to that person like hey chris i saw your youtube videos i'd love to connect with you on linkedin that's something i'm going to respond to but pretty much anything else is going to be indicative of somebody using a bot so the second way that you're able to send messages is through in mails so i'll go into just a basic search so i can show you what an email will look like so you'll use an inmail credit and you'll be able to type in a headline so this is really the biggest difference as well as you'll only have one message to send to people so you want to get even more to the point usually since in males you only can send one then if somebody responds you can continue the conversation something that i've tested and works really well though for the intro line is just putting somebody's name at that this has been really good and really effective in getting people to open in mail at least so just putting somebody's name and keeping it simple i think makes it stand out a lot more than the long titles that a lot of people put in and then the body of the message is the same but having the call to action probably be pitching a call is a good way to do it since you only get a single message to send to somebody so that's inmails so the first way to send a message is connecting with somebody once your first degree connection you can message that person for the rest of eternity the second way is going to be through inmails which you'll get credits on as well as you can send them to open profiles i'll make a video about open profiles in the future the third way though is events and groups so for example when linkedin was doing an event called linkedin spark which was like a sales event there were 20 some thousand connections or 21 000 26 000 sorry attendees that if you mark yourself as attending this event you have the opportunity to send messages to these people this is a really good way if you're trying to get volume out and you know you can send you know up to 20 to 50 messages a day this way as long as you're not being overly spammy so the caveat with this type of messaging is that with the first type of messaging connection requests that i talked about you want to be conversational but tell them enough about yourself that they know where the conversation's going same thing with inmails with events and groups this is where you can be a little bit more vague and short and conversational so for example with this event what i was reaching out to people is saying hey i know this is random but i saw that you're going to the linkedin spark event about virtual sales and i was just wondering what methods you're using on linkedin and online in general just to start conversations and avoid super hard pitching in cold outreach what tactics for reaching out to people and starting conversations have been working for you so you're asking that question and you're going to get somebody to engage with you back then and then from there you can take that conversation any direction that you want as long as you're reaching out to somebody with a title or a personality that you think will benefit either you or you can benefit them in some way shape or form it's not good to go into relationships in general in life expecting something so if you can go into every conversation really just trying to provide value to somebody or learn something from them that's when you're going to be the most successful is just starting those super genuine conversations a bonus tip for you is if you're sending out connection requests a really good way to up the rate of acceptance is to engage with some of their content before sending a connection request so if you go in and you know you comment on somebody's post or you like their post or do both for two days before you send a connection request that person is going to be that much more likely to accept that connection request when you send it because they're definitely going to get the notification because chances are their linkedin is pretty small they might only have 400 people in their network and they might get five likes on a post so your like and comment on two posts in a row is really going to stand out and chances are they'll connect with you and then you can spark a conversation after that hopefully this was a helpful video let me know what questions you have in the comments connect with me on linkedin and put in the message that you found me through youtube just so i know that and feel free to like and subscribe to this video if this was helpful thank you