Why sending crappy cold LinkedIn approaches is a naff idea that just annoys people and is shitty short-term thinking
Like a lot of people, I like to start my mornings with a nice refreshing doomscroll. Usually, I begin with BBC News for a pandemic update, then pop over to Instagram to soak up some guilt-laden inadequacy, then it’s onto Twitter for a morning argument, and finishing up with LinkedIn to procrastinate more professionally.
It’s a fairly well-rounded way to delve into the day and invariably often ends with me checking my LinkedIn messages. Even though I know that this is an activity I will not enjoy, I find that I can’t stop myself from clicking that little notification bubble. Perhaps I should work on my impulse control, or, better yet, maybe the idea that crappy cold LinkedIn message approaches are ever productive should be so thoroughly lambasted that people finally stop sending them to me.
It could just be me, but most of the unsolicited sales and marketing messages I receive are so misplaced that it feels like their only purpose is to annoy. And for a pitch to not immediately fall flat, whatever products or services it is you’re selling, you should generally try to avoid pissing off your prospects.
What’s particularly frustrating is that we see the same obvious mistakes time and time again.
You haven’t bothered to take the time to read my profile.
If you’re opening a dialogue on LinkedIn and pitching an opportunity related to a company I left two years ago, or sometimes even from an industry I’m not even a part of, I’m not going to feel all that special. If you’re not making your prospects feel seen, you’re unlikely to get anywhere.
You don’t call me by my name
By launching straight into the body of your message without the preamble of addressing me, I know I’m just one in a long line of prospects you’re contacting. I’m a paltry notch on your proverbial sales bedpost. I’m not feeling the love, so I’m not likely to bite.
Not taking the trouble to follow up
Feel free to cement the impression that I’m lost in a crowd of prospects by having zero follow-through and disappearing straight back into the void. If I didn’t know your company’s name before, I’m the spiteful sort of person who may now take the time to memorise it so I can mentally blacklist it.
What this boils down to is this:
If you can’t be bothered to put the effort in, why should your potential clients?
How many glanced-at LinkedIn messages are stacked up in your inbox right now? And what is it that bands them all together into one amorphous virtual blob? It’s not just the content, which is often interchangeable and generic - it’s the thinking behind the message.
Unsolicited LinkedIn messaging is part of a wider issue of short-term thinking. Once upon a time, cold calling was the bread and butter of sales, but the world has moved on. Clients and customers have come to expect more. There’s still a time and place for cold messaging, and short-term campaigns more widely, but you have to ace it to get anywhere. Doing it well generally means incorporating good short-term thinking into a long-game strategy. Do it poorly, and each message is a waste of time and money, as well as a great way to promote general distrust in your brand. Ultimately, even if you do successfully reach your target audience, irritating them with a crappy opening message could easily alienate them out of any potential future relationship.
Outbound lead generation is hard. Shockingly, making the process crap doesn’t make it easier.
If you throw enough shit around, some of it will land on your customers. For whatever reason, cheating putting the work into legitimate lead generation seems to have become de rigueur. It’s apparently okay now to fling your badly thought out marketing scheme in the general direction of where you think your customers might be hiding and hope for the best. But, in reality, those messages are functioning as a great way to disgruntle a big chunk of your potential client pool. If you were aiming to deliberately disgruntle, then great! You’ve succeeded! If you were aiming to generate anything resembling a warm lead, then you’ve screwed it up already.
There is, of course, the chance that your message will land in exactly the right inbox, and the person receiving it will have had the perfect amount of caffeine and sugar and good sleep to buoy them up enough to give you the time of day. The more likely outcome is that your message won’t even be acknowledged enough for someone to bother to press the ‘not interested’ button LinkedIn has so handily provided.
Properly prospecting for leads can feel a lot like traversing a dark room littered with Lego pieces and upturned plugs. And you have a suspicion that the cat has eaten your new bowl of lavender potpourri and thrown it up somewhere. It’s slow going, occasionally painful, often tedious. Sometimes, you think you’ve found the perfect client, but it turns out to be a pile of cat sick. But, to get to the glorious land of long-lasting client relationships, you need to begin with good quality leads. To generate good leads, we need to walk that road.
Better things you could be doing with your time
I know it’s easy for me to say that lazy cold message approaches are a bad idea. I’m shooting down the easy option without giving you the magic solution that will solve all your problems. The fact is, there is no one solution. There’s no single thing you can do to ensure success. Controversial, I know. So, to make reading this worth your time, I’ve thought of three ways you could approach a prospect that would be a better use of your time than blasting that generic message out to 1,000 uninterested and irrelevant professionals.
Rent a blimp. I feel like blimps were a viable marketing strategy not so long ago. I’m adamant it’s not just my rose-tinted glasses making me remember a childhood sky chock full of blimps. What has happened to all the blimps?? I have a hunch they’ll be making a comeback soon.
Tap into the ongoing sourdough craze by creating your very own yeast mother to send out to prospects! What potential client wouldn’t be converted by the power of a campaign in the form of a branded microorganism?
Stand on the street and shriek your sales pitches to the world. Shrieking is a guaranteed way to attract attention. If you’re sending LinkedIn messages out without taking a moment to understand your audience, I’d be willing to bet you’ll reach about the same number of warm leads by loudly spewing your spiel out of your front door. (As an added bonus, this tactic will allow you to release any pent-up rage you might be holding on to.)
Or, and this is a big or, you could find a way to turn up the clarity of your copy, craft an effective long-term strategy and let the clients come to you.
(Hint: I’m really good at helping you do that.)
