Strategy 4 Saturday Blog (<4 minute read)

Congratulations

Before we get started…my hearty congratulations to Seattle Seahawks fans who avenged the Super Bowl XLIX interception loss by dismantling my hometown favorite team, the New England Patriots. If you did not read the article, take a look here. 

Over 600 Connection Requests 

Over the past couple weeks I have reviewed 600 requests for connection on LinkedIn. I wanted to share my experience, the requests that I actually responded to, and the requests that I ignored.

If you use LinkedIn for sales and marketing purposes, I hope you find this information useful for the next time you reach out to a prospect. If you are interested, I can write about the demographics in a future blog article.

Your Title Matters 

I am 20 times more likely to accept your invitation if you are a founder or a CEO, compared to a sales person, business development, or someone else of that nature.

The only time I accepted an invitation from a sales person is for a specific product or service that I was looking for, or if I knew the person who was reaching out.

Your Description Matters

This goes along with your title. The first challenge is if you are on mobile you may not be able to read the full description. So, make sure that it is viewable on a mobile device, or in the short part of an invitation. The chances of me looking deeply into your profile, to accept your connection, are slim to none, if I don’t know who you are. When possible put in your role first and then tell me what to do. For example, Business Owner | Coach |  I help owners get more freedom in their life.

Now that doesn’t mean I’m going to accept it, but at least I know where you’re coming from.

Being Different  

It is often recommended to write a note when you are trying to get an invitation accepted. However, I’ve learned from my process that the description of what you are doing is far more important.

Most of the outreach were canned responses most likely recommended from other marketing coaches, Hubspot, LinkedIn experts, or LinkedIn AI. This is common to see; but it does not get my attention.

However, if you wrote something genuinely unique, or something specific that I needed, then I was much more likely to accept your invitation. 

Please note, it is easy to tell when somebody’s using ChatGPT to say something like “Oh I enjoyed the latest episode of your last podcast…Or I loved your latest post on LinkedIn about…Blah blah, blah blah blah.” I know in most of the cases, AI was writing the response. Please be genuine. 

Be human. 

Nevertheless, if you could find something unique, truly interesting, or a great message, I am much more likely to see it. 

What really doesn’t work for me? 

This is a relatively common request. Hey, can we meet for 15 minutes tomorrow? I would really like to talk with you.

With all due respect to the request, if I accepted all 600 invitations and met with everyone for only 15 minutes per day, that would be 150 hours of meetings. As an example, if we generated $500 per hour in revenue, that is equivalent to $75,000. Time is valuable, not free. 

So, if I was to accept every invitation, the earliest we’d be able to connect would be four weeks out and I would be out $75,000.

And that, of course, excludes the 20,000+ other people with whom I am connected with, which adds another 5,000 hours. If I met with everyone in my LinkedIn connections, for only 15 minutes per meeting, that would be equivalent to 2 1/2 years of meetings. That is equivalent to $2.5 million.

Needless to say, please don’t be offended if I don’t accept your request to meet for 15 minutes. It’s just not possible to meet with everyone AND support our clients to increase the value of THEIR business. 

Our bias will always be supporting our clients and followers. The reason why we write blogs, product content on LinkedIn, and record podcasts is to make a positive impact on those who are NOT our clients. Most of what we do is to GIVE to others to make our impact on the world. Our goal is to support over 10,000 businesses over the next decade. Less than 10% of those will be able to attend one of our 40 Strategy Growth workshops. Therefore, the remaining 90% will be applying our content and knowledge DIY. 

They say in outbound marketing, that one percent of the total population of your market is potentially looking to buy your service today. From my experience, I can only speak to 1% to 5% of the people who reach out. 

Therefore, even if you have the 1% chance of being something that we want to buy today, I am still weeks out before getting an opportunity to meet with you. (Unless, we really need it now!)

40 Strategy LinkedIn Outreach

In our marketing outreach, to connect with more business owners and CEOs, to attend our 40 Strategy Growth workshops, where we limit to 40 business owners in attendance, we have a lot of work to do.

Let’s do the math, 40 business owner attendees ÷ 1% of success is equal to 4,000 outbound connections.

So, when we get the opportunity to have a business owner or CEO come to our workshop, we find it a blessing. It is an extraordinary opportunity to not only connect and create value. You are literally part of the 1%. We appreciate you and we know you will appreciate the experience.

From our perspective, this is definitely worth the investment. 

In a few years, we will have up to 12 in-person workshop events for 40 people, which is equal to 480 people, which is still only equal to 480 / 1% = 48,000 outbound connections annually.

Here is the good news, if we get a referral to come to our event, we have over a 50% close rate. If 50% of our leads are from referral, we can significantly cut our outbound efforts. 

So here are my thoughts if you are trying to get connected with somebody, to be a future prospect on LinkedIn, recognize that it is a numbers game combined with adding value, and being genuine.

Genuine LinkedIn Marketing Action Plan

If you are a CEO or a business owner, I am looking to talk with you. Please reach out accordingly.

• Be very clear about what your purpose is in the title and description of who you are.
• Ideally, make an authentic or genuine connection from a referral, I am 50x more likely to accept.
• Create a truly authentic or genuine inquiry, I am 20x more likely to accept.

If you’re doing outbound marketing on LinkedIn, I recommend the following:

1. Volume is important. You will have success but it is still a numbers game. 
2. Be consistent and don’t lose heart. Business owners are busy. Continuing to reach out multiple times to the same person is acceptable. Keep reaching out, do it with value, and try not to make it sound like a HubSpot sale sequence.
3. Be genuine in your responses. Whether it is our blogs, LinkedIn posts, or respective connections, we are much much more likely to connect with you if you are creating value for our network. Once we get to know who you are, you are much more likely to be connected with us.
4. Find connections through referral, whenever possible. It speeds up the process of trust.
5. Be human. Our souls need this more than ever. Don’t sound like AI. 

When you post and comment on our LinkedIn content regularly, we are far more likely to meet and connect with you. 

Thank you in advance. We truly appreciate it.

Of course, this is just one person’s perspective, but it is real, it is authentic, and I hope you enjoyed it. 

Wishing you the very best making authentic connections that will yield a real genuine difference on LinkedIn.