How to start conversations on LinkedIn without being SPAMMY.

(How to use ‘Who viewed my profile’ to generate sales activity).

If you want to start good conversations ON LINE you are going to have to know how to successfully reach out to people who you don’t know (your 2nd & 3rd Connections) in order to get that conversation started.

Most people fail at this because they are sending really ‘spammy’ messages and this is turning their prospects and clients away OR they simply don’t have the confidence to send a clear, positive and compelling message in order to start the ball rolling, so they don't send anything at all.

Prefer to watch rather than read? – Here is the 7min VLOG.

To start conversations, some sales theorists advocate we wait, watch and we listen (socially) for specific trigger events and then take action at just the right moment. Waiting for things like the appointment of a new CFO or perhaps a new CEO. A popular trigger event example is the notification of a cash raising for the business that we are targeting. And, whilst I agree these are good trigger events and they do indeed provide rich opportunities to start a conversation, they are not very regular events and are somewhat unpredictable. In fact, research says, you might be waiting a very long time for the current CEO to move on. The Australian Financial Review says CEO's typically stay 5.5 years in a role (2016 data). I know some of us have long sales cycles but WOW! Waiting 5.5 years just to try and start a conversation seems like a long-shot and not very repeatable to me.

So what else might we look to in order to find an opportunity to start a conversation that was a more regular or everyday type of activity?

Well, here’s one of my favourite strategies.

Who viewed your profile.

You see, ‘Who viewed your profile’ is a great tool to reach out and start a conversation, assuming you know how to do it. The trick is do it without looking and sounding like a stalker, we do this by making your prospect feel that by engaging in a conversation with you it is going to be a safe choice, by that I mean it is unlikely to generate a whole bunch of new SPAM messages and Inmails that they really don’t want (Just like this one below, there was no way I was going to accept this connection request, imagine the follow up messages).

The overarching concept is, as I’ve been telling my Digital & Social selling clients for years, is to treat their online interactions just like you would’ve treated a phone call a few years ago.

When I was a partner in an installation business in 2000, I had to employ 2 people just to answer the phones, we had lots of incoming phone calls and I remember being annoyed at how much capacity this was taking away from us from ‘doing our real work’ of course, I'd love to have hundreds of inbound phone calls these days, it is completely unheard of for most businesses. Because, as we know, today, people typically do their research and their 'pre-buying' online, where years ago they called us up to ask questions. So I say why not treat our social activity much like we would’ve treated a ringing phone just a few years ago. Assume it’s an opportunity to reach out and start a conversation about whatever, this provides all of us an opportunity to try and take the conversation further, you just have to have the skills and confidence to be able to do it and I’m hoping that this will provide you with some skills and confidence in this area.

Why does it work? Clearly, If someone has viewed your profile then you must have been interesting to them in some way, perhaps because of one of their connections has liked or commented on one of your activities, perhaps they liked your recent article and wanted a closer look, in reality it really doesn’t matter why they are looking other than something has driven them to you.

Now there are a bunch of ways you can GET people to view your profile and I won’t go into that detail here, we will keep that for another piece. What I will concentrate on, is what to do when you have some of your perfect prospects viewing your profile. Remember, our primary focus is reaching out to connect with those who are our perfect customers. So if you have 100 people view your profile you will only need to send just a few messages, therefore we can afford to take the time to make each one nice and personal.

Now that they have ‘viewed your profile’ reaching out right NOW is the best way to start a conversation. Let’s just pause for a minute, I’m not suggesting that you will get a 100% success rate in reach outs to conversations, but if you compare your success rate using this type of social strategies to other cold outreaches, I’ll guarantee you are getting a much better result if you use these strategies, especially if you rehearse them and refine them as they develop.

So how do I reach out in this instance?

Once I have a perfect prospect ‘viewing my profile’ I usually wait no more than a day or two and send them a version of this type of message.

I always adjust the text to make sure it fits the target market, luckily for me I’m really only interested in connecting with sellers, the more senior the better, and those immediately impacting sales people’s behaviour, so the content I share is nearly always of some use to these groups.

You will note this has a much stronger customer focus than the usual “I want to add you to my professional network” I mean whoever thought that line up at LinkedIn should be given an extended holiday. There is absolutely no benefit for the receiver in that standard template response (DON’T USE THAT ONE).

Most people will accept a request like this and what I also like about it is it tells them straight up that you’re (I am) going to be sharing content and sending stuff back and forth via LinkedIn. Laying this out nice and early means if they are uncomfortable with that, they won’t connect and I won’t have lots people in my LinkedIn network who are not going to be responsive.

For those interested in persuasion, here’s my thought process on this particular strategy. I’ve used consistency here highlighting that he has viewed my profile and it would be consistent to connect (he knows he has viewed my profile and he knows I know) I’ve used the term ‘senior seller’ as a little bit of a compliment, which is a liking strategy and ‘Sydney’ to try and reinforce the we are both in Sydney play also called proximity.

Then, once I’ve connected with Tom, in a week or so I usually send an article or an infographic or something similar which is both relevant to his role, is unexpected, has some perceived value to him and I say.

“Hey Tom,

Thanks for the add, great to have you in the network, I always like to share something with my new connections, because you’re leading a team there at XXXXX, I thought you might find it this infographic useful with planning some future sales meetings. Lots of other Sales managers have told me it worked well for them, I hope you find it valuable too.

Good luck and don’t be a stranger.

Best Mark M”

So again another reach out, leading with RECIPROCITY, an influence strategy, yet not asking for a meeting or, even worse – “here’s my automatic availability tool, find yourself 15mins and I’ll get on a call with you”. These self select meeting tactics are for those people who have no other focus than booking meetings for themselves. I would always avoid these. You have to stand out from the rest, DON’T think like a marketer and try to ‘scale’ your interactivity, it doesn't work. I've tried it. Try to build relationships and start conversations of value – value for both parties not just you.

BTW – I hate those calendly things. I genuinely think they are rude. What they suggest to me is. “… if you want a meeting with me – go in and find a time that suits me and then select that”. In my opinion, the art of booking a first meeting is intrinsically part of the meeting. It allows you to find out things like, how organised are they? how flexible are they? Did they send an agenda? How quickly can they adjust their diary to suit? Are they a morning or afternoon person? – (more on this another time).

The last part of my “who viewed your profile” strategy is simply to reach out again in a few days’ time to see if what you shared was valuable or helpful. As I said earlier, not everyone will engage and that’s OK, but if you stop think about yourself as the receiver in this example, a connection request, followed by some content BOTH without an ask or a meeting request, chances are you’ll feel obliged to at least reply and then that’s how the conversations starts.

If you’re building enough relationships in this sort of way, with this mindset, across both social as well as other channels, then you will always have people asking you for a chat or engaging with you.

FOOTNOTE: If you have regular LinkedIn.com you will be limited to only looking at the last 5 people who viewed your profile and I actually think that is OK by me. In order to offset this challenge just make sure you check "who viewed your profile" twice a day. It won’t take long and if you start to get 100’s and 100’s of views per day then you’re probably becoming a prime candidate for upgrading your LinkedIn account to a more premium version such as SalesNAV. All good things cost money. Smart software is certainly no exception. (I’m a big fan of SalesNAV, buy it. However I do think you can operate at 50% of social capacity without it, if you’re smart).

Found this to be useful? Please share amongst your connections, like or comment. It's how the social media thingo works. If we are all only passive viewers, eventually the content will stop. I know I'd hate that.

?As well as being a sales execution coach and trainer to Australia's corporate sector. Mark is the #1 ranked Linkedin Social Seller in Australia. Contact Mark via Inmail message or [email protected] for a discussion around sales growth, coaching, social media, golf, cycling, AFL and sales effectiveness.