Connecting with people on LinkedIn (Beginner version)

The hack

Send 20+ connection requests per day to potential buyers and start conversations.

Why it works

Almost all professionals have LinkedIn. The higher you are in the corporate ladder the more important it becomes. Even people who don't like using it, are forced to go there. Whether out of necessity to check the upcoming interview candidate or out of curiosity to see how your old college friends are doing.

There are differences in industries. Salespeople basically live there, while engineers can visit only once a week. But for anything B2B is worth it.

How to do it

There are three parts to a successful LinkedIn outreach:

Finding the right people
Maximizing acceptance rate
Starting a conversation

1. Finding the right people

Based on job titles and locations

The easiest way to do this is by using the LinkedIn default search and finding people based on job titles and locations. You can also filter industries, depending on your ideal customer profile. Try connecting with people in the same city to start with, the physical and network proximity helps.

Based on post likes

Another option that works great is writing to people who liked specific posts. Pick a podcaster, famous CEO, public speaker, or whoever is closest to your industry. Now look into their posts and find the one that’s most related to your product.

People who liked this post are familiar with the problem you solve (they might be even looking for a solution now). They are also a part of the tribe of followers. Imagine a person who follows Alex Horzmozi and then Lex Friedman. The first one is probably a self-employed or wanna-be self-employed business person, the second is probably a geek and a hacker. Yes, generalizations, but those can help you pre-filter the people who you want to reach.

Connection request

Once you find a relevant person, send them a connection request. Don’t add a message to the request.

For most people in managerial positions, it's impossible to track everyone they have ever interviewed, met at a conference, or seen at the tennis club.

If you send a plain connection they are much more likely to accept it, because they can’t put you in the right category. But if you send a message in the style of “We never met, but you need to check out my product” – don’t expect many people to accept.

2. Maximizing acceptance rate

The acceptance rate benchmark for cold connections ranges from 10% to 50%. Anything above 30% is great.

There are few things you can do to maximize your acceptance rate.

Make your profile as legit as possible. Read Make a killer LinkedIn profile to see how.
Connect with people who are active on LinkedIn. If you connect with people who are not, they won’t even see your request. Don’t bother sending invites to someone who has never posted.
Look at the number of connections. Avoid both extremes of the spectrum. People with over 10k followers receive an enormous amount of outreach. They are unlikely to connect and less likely to engage in any follow-up communication. People with too few followers might be the type of people who only connect to people they know. Don’t waste your invites on those people.

3. Start the conversation

Now the hardest part. Forget about sending a generic message about what you're building with a calendly link at the end.

Read this first for cold outreach copy hacks: 101 of cold email (beginner guide)

Your main advantage compared to everyone else trying to sell them in their LinkedIn inbox is authenticity. No one wants to ever talk to the annoying Salesforce sales rep. — you are different, so use it.

You're just getting started, building something brand new – that's interesting, they haven't seen that before. People generally want to help others, and if you play into the founder role it can work like magic.

After connection message

Imagine you're building a new tool to help sales managers manage their teams with AI. Here is an example message to send once one of the sales managers accepts your connection request.

Hey [name], thanks for the connection! You've some really impressive experience when it comes to scaling sales teams. How did you get from 3 to 50 in just a year? That must have been hell of a ride! Anyway, just paying respects where respect is due. Have an epic Tuesday!

Notice the quick note about them. You can take this from their profile bio, posts, or recent comments. Once you get into this, it takes just about 2 minutes skimming their profile, to write lines like that.

The main thing here is: praise or comment, but don't sell in the first message.

When the message is good enough people will start the conversation themselves. In other cases, they'll just reply with thanks. That's ok, since now any follow-up messages to this conversation will show up on the top of their LinkedIn inbox.

Second message

This is the part where you dig for gold. Ideally, try to wait at least 3 days before sending the second message.

First, it gives you more time for them to respond and second, you want to make the conversation seem sincere and not pre-planned.

The second message can look something like this.

[name], I was re-reading your profile and posts again and would love to get your expert oppinion. I am building a new sales management tool that helps you check how your team is doing quota-wise using AI. Can I send you a 2min video demo of how it works? I’ve am just finishing onboarding first 100 users, and would love to see if you’re a fit as well!

Or if you went with the liked post approach, you can start like this instead.

[name], I saw you liked/commented on the Alex Hormozi post about sales quotas…

Things to keep in mind:

Be honest and authentic: Share things like a number of customers, users, or anything else that a big company sales rep. can't do.
Make the pitch interesting for them: If they are a sales leader missing quota is always a hustle. Lead with a pain you are solving that they probably have.
Low commitment and specific time: Aim for something that's easy to say yes to. 15min is ok, 60min is too much. Next Friday is far away and people usually don't have a packed calendar. The exact time proposal often limits thinking on their part.

Follow up

After the second message, you'll probably want to wait another 3 days before sending a follow-up. LinkedIn is not like email. People don't go there every day so be patient.

Follow-ups can be just sending an emoji: 👋 or one sentence like this.

Hey [name], what do you think?

Weekly analytics

LinkedIn outreach is capped by the recommended connection limits. Going over those limits can get your account suspended for some time. So keep it save and keep it under 20 invites per day.

Daily invites sent: 20
Weekly Invites sent: 140
Weekly invites accepted (30% acceptance rate): 42
Weekly positive replies to the outreach (10% rate): 4

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