Hey, how’s it going? Ryan Caswell here from b2bleads. com. And today I want to talk a little bit around what to actually say to people once they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn.

So let’s jump straight into it. So what do you say to someone once they’ve connected with you on LinkedIn? Well, let’s break this down a little further. So there’s two ways in which people can connect with you. They could be the ones who have reached it out and sent you the invite. To connect with them, or you’ve reached out to them and you’ve sent the invite and and they’ve connected and accepted your connection request.

So if they’ve reached out to connect with you, of course, the first thing you need to do is actually look at their connection request. So you’ll find it in, if you’re on LinkedIn, my network, I’ve cleared out all my invites or accepted or declined the ones I don’t need. You’ll find it in there and they’ll either just say accept, or you’ll see a connection message if they’ve sent you a connection message.

So if you want to decide whether you want to connect with them or not, head to their profile, check out their profile and if it makes sense and they line up with your target market and you want them to be part of your network. Then accept that connection request. Now I found the most effective way to start a conversation with these people.

You don’t need to say anything too complicated is simply just, Hey, thanks for connecting John out of interest. What made you reach out to connect? So that’s it. It’s pretty. Straightforward. It’s pretty simple and it’s really effective way to drive the start a conversation, especially if they’re part of your target market.

Keep in mind, if it is like a really good prospect or potential client once you’ve sent that message, make sure you make a note. If you use a CRM or something to set a follow up date, to just check if they actually have replied. LinkedIn inbox, and it’s really hard to navigate and manage your inbox.

Once you’ve got a lot of volume, just make sure you have a way to track and make sure that you followed them up. If you don’t hear back from them, something as simple as, Hey, just checking back in. I’d like to connect and engage with people in my network. One or two follow ups is all you need. After that, if they’re not going to engage, then move on essentially.

Do follow up if you don’t hear back from them and they’re a good prospect. Now, most of you are probably more concerned with when you reach out to someone and they connect, what do you actually say? Now, there’s no one clear answer for this. I’ve seen some approaches work for some people and some offers and some businesses whilst that approach doesn’t work for someone else.

But once you’ve got connection, you do want to start trying to drive that conversation towards a phone call most likely, or to some sort of call to action to learn more about you and your business and actually get them to eventually become prospects, calls and clients. So there’s three types of ways that you can start the conversation.

You have a passive approach, which is before I jump into the three different approaches, what I will say is there’s some core rules. That you need to follow in your connection message your post connection message once someone has connected and three rules You should always follow, include one call to action.

Don’t give them a thousand things. Short, three to five sentences max. Probably going to go over three rules once I get into this. No links. Don’t dump links on people for a few reasons. Mainly because if you just send someone a link… What we’re trying to do here is drive engagement, because when we know who’s engaged and interested and willing to actually answer us and talk to us, then we know who to focus on, follow up on, and spend more time nurturing.

That’s really important here. So one call to action, don’t give them three choices. When you give people too many choices, they take none. Short, keep it very short, and no links. And if you haven’t done so in your connection message, which you should have by at by this point, you’re really trying to identify The problem that you solve and build credibility around this, but you should have done that to some degree in your connection message and your profile of it’s set up correctly should be doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you as well.

So once someone has connected, there’s really three key ways in which you can start to drive that conversation. You can have a direct approach which is very much like if, depending on what you’ve said in that first connection message, it’s like, Hey just to give a bit more context. This is what we do.

This is what we specialize in. We’ve worked with these clients. We’ve driven these results. Do you want to jump on a call and learn a bit more about what we do? So it’s a bit more direct. So I probably wouldn’t, like I said, I wouldn’t include a link to your booking. calendar cause it’s easier to say yes than it is to actually follow a link.

And if they say yes, then you can send the link and then get them to book and follow them up. If they don’t book, that’s important. This is where a lot of people lose money and leave money on the table. So you’ve got the more direct approach, which is always the preferred option if we can be direct, but we need a good offer and value proposition in order to be direct.

The other way is a more passive approach. Hey, this is what we do. Is this something you’re interested in? Do you want some more information? Would you like a resource resources? I tend to push for later messages. We’re really trying to understand engagement, drive engagement. And see if it’s something that they’re interested in, because then that allows us to propose a call or propose sending more information, which can then lead to the call as well.

We don’t want to send too much, you know, we don’t want to propose on the first date if it doesn’t make sense to, sometimes it does. The more direct approach can be good, but it doesn’t work for everyone and that’s why split testing is really powerful. Cause it allows you to actually work out which approach is more effective and more cost effective.

And the other one is probing or qualifying questions. So you might be reaching out to a market, let’s say that you don’t necessarily know they have a specific software, some sort of specific ERP or CRM that you work in. So you could ask the question, Hey, curious to know if you work with this software or this this SAS product.

And what your thoughts are on it, though. Generally, I probably wouldn’t ask what their thoughts are because. As soon as you ask you too much of your prospect at this point in time, they generally provide no answer. Try and keep your responses and your call to action as simple as possible. Yes, no, well, that’s pretty much it.

If you can make it as simple as possible as that and get that first bite of engagement, it tends to snowball into something more valuable later. But don’t ask for too much too soon. So, I’ve got some other videos on more like the entire message sequence and how to structure it, but this is just a more overarching theoretical approach to how you’re going to structure those messages.

It’s hard to say too much on what to say to them without knowing what that connection message is because the whole message sequence needs to work together and how you respond really depends on that entire sequence. It’s really, they all. Kind of connect together, but these are just the core rules you need to follow in order to work out what your best approach is going to be.

So check out the channel. There is definitely some on the message sequences to use and and some good examples as well of ones we’ve seen basically, yeah, build million dollar businesses. So hope that helps as always Ryan Caswell from b2bleads. com. Any questions, put them in the comments below and have a great day.

Cheers.