Digital Business: Lazy LinkedIn Requests

Question: We have been asking our sales team to shoot to make 3-5 new strategic connections on LinkedIn each week.  Any recommendations to assure that their connection requests are accepted?

While there is never a sure fire way to guarantee that someone will accept your LinkedIn request, there is one thing that I have been recommending for half a decade now to people who want to have more success connecting on LinkedIn.

Ready for it?

Don’t. Be. Lazy!!!

Okay, what do I mean by that? This morning I woke up to 4 LinkedIn requests from 4 people that I didn’t know and that I’m pretty sure I never met.  Of the four, 3 of them just clicked the connect button and sent completely generic requests (I’d like to connect with you…).  The one that didn’t sent a note that said, “Thank you for considering my connection request.  I just finished reading your 2 of your articles on Social Media Today and I really like what you have to say about the future of digital marketing.  As a professional marketer I would like to connect so we can keep in touch.”

If you had to guess, how long did that request take to write?  My estimate would be somewhere around 2-3 minutes (5 tops).  And guess which one I accepted?  You got it, the one that took two minutes to tell me why they wanted to connect.

For sales people seeking to connect (or anyone for that matter) on LinkedIn, I can’t begin to tell you how important it is not to undervalue a little personalization.  This works amazingly well whereas the generic invite says to me that someone isn’t that interested and is probably either trying to collect connections or spam me some offer I don’t want.

Note: The only time I say it is okay to not personalize a connection request is when it is someone you absolutely know and they know you.  A colleague or friend.  Even in these cases I usually add a few words, but this is the ONLY exception.

Using LinkedIn is an awesome tool to connect to potential clients and customers, but connecting needs to be done with more thought in order to translate into something meaningful in the long run.  Happy Connecting?

What are your tips and tricks to getting people (especially those you don’t know) to accept your LinkedIn Connections?

 
This post was originally featured in the BraodSuite Mailbag and can be found here.

Author: Daniel Newman

Daniel Newman is the Principal Analyst of Futurum Research and the CEO of Broadsuite Media Group. Living his life at the intersection of people and technology, Daniel works with the world’s largest technology brands exploring Digital Transformation and how it is influencing the enterprise. From Big Data to IoT to Cloud Computing, Newman makes the connections between business, people and tech that are required for companies to benefit most from their technology projects, which leads to his ideas regularly being cited in CIO.Com, CIO Review and hundreds of other sites across the world. A 5x Best Selling Author including his most recent “Building Dragons: Digital Transformation in the Experience Economy,” Daniel is also a Forbes, Entrepreneur and Huffington Post Contributor. MBA and Graduate Adjunct Professor, Daniel Newman is a Chicago Native and his speaking takes him around the world each year as he shares his vision of the role technology will play in our future.