Startup X: LinkedIn essentials for outreach
Two profile changes to boost discovery connection requests.
There are many modes of cold outreach, but one of the most pervasively used is the LinkedIn platform. Today, I’m going to cover two essentials you need before starting a cold conversation on that platform.
These are the equivalent of appearing fully dressed for an in-person networking event.
First, your goal: Make a connection. That’s it. That’s all. That means having the person accept the request.
If you fail at that, you never get to start your discovery process.
One thing many Average Entrepreneurs forget about LinkedIn and problem discovery sprints: You can change your LinkedIn profile, do the outreach, and then change it back. All of these can be changes that have the life of a discovery sprint.
Make your LinkedIn photo match your persona.
You’re not carving your face into marble, you’re uploading a photo. I have a photo where I looked like a young(er) startup founder, an investment banker and just a regular person. Figure out your outreach strategy and then match the photo to that.
While you’re at it. Make up a LinkedIn background banner that reflects your problem domain. Here I’ve had the world as my background for a long time. Maybe too long. (See the screenshot below.)
Write a great tagline for LinkedIn.
Again, to match your persona. Here is the one I used for Global Trade.
I could do better on the tagline. “Helping companies find international customers” is generic enough and can still stay in the problem space.
You have limited space — 120 characters!
When writing your tagline, I recommend following the advice of John Espirian. He publishes this visual framework on how to use the available 120 characters.
Check out his full post here to learn more.
Here, my interesting link is Global Trade Venture Builder, which should be enough to hook my prospects.
But this isn’t all that shows up on an invitation. Here are a few other things that influence whether or not someone accepts your connection request: Tagline, Shared Connections and Short Message.
Note first that everything is truncated. You must be brief and write to the character limits, which change based on the device your prospect is viewing.
Tagline we’ve covered above.
Shared connections. It’s worth building a few other ‘sure thing’ connections with a prospect, but this is either existing or not. In the early stage, I wouldn’t spend time on this, other than to know it’s a factor.
The message. Here you write for 200 characters for the free version of LinkedIn. You need to have a hook that causes someone to want to accept your connection request.
This one misses, since the language of the message is in Dutch. It’s worth taking the time to check your prospect’s profile language and consider a translation. This invite tells me it’s probably automated, based on my geography. Which is why it’s a month old and not accepted.
That’s the third, and last essential.
Write a great connection message:
Here are several samples of my current connection message for my outbound sprint. Straight from our Startup X discovery sprint.
