You may have the best product, the best service, and 1,001 things that you want to tell your clients about the the key benefits to working with you. But if you can’t tell them in under three sentences, then everything else is pointless.

Hey, how’s it going? Ryan Caswell here from B2B Leads, and today we’re gonna be talking all about how to. Perfect connection message on LinkedIn. So a connection message is the, the message that we send. As you reach out and request someone to become a connection, join your network, become a friend. If you’re familiar with Facebook, it’s similar to friending someone and allows you to message back and forth freely with them on the platform.

And obviously having a conversation is valuable cuz we need to be able to say more than three sentences to them. The thing is we need to be able. Communicate that value very quickly and concisely to get people to connect with us so that we can have that conversation and connection message is that first point of call for most people.

So let’s just jump straight into it. I’m sure a lot of you are probably familiar with LinkedIn and the connection message request, probably why you’re watching this video. But for those of you who aren’t, let’s just quickly go over what it actually looks like. So if we try and find someone. You click on Holly, you click on Connect, it says you can add a note to personalize your invitation to Holly, or you can just not send a note at all and send it.

Or you can add a note. And I can say as an example, Hey, I thought it’d be worth connecting for our meeting today. I mean, if we were meeting but if I was to copy that, you see it stops me at 300 characters here. So it’s really important that we write something in under 300 Charact. That does a needs to achieve a lot of things, and that’s what we’re gonna talk about in this video.

We’re gonna go of some examples that get really great connection rates. And talk about why people connect with you and what drives them to decide whether or not they trust you enough to connect or whether they decide to ignore you. So let’s jump back to some notes I’ve got here and go over what makes a good connection message and determines whether or not people are gonna connect with you.

So the first thing is understanding the limits of your connection message on LinkedIn. And the obvious one that we just touched on was that 300 character limit 300 characters does not give you a lot to say. A lot of people have a lot to say when it comes to their businesses, their value, and a lot of the work we do@b2bleads.com is, is really trying to condense all the value they provide, that, you know, you can provide all the credibility into the shortest possible amount of time because you have so little of people’s attention in the beginning.

And we need a way to get that quickly. So the next thing that determines how you’re gonna write your connection, This, of course. What do you want to achieve? Not all connection messages are the same, and connection rates aren’t always the the determining factor as to what kind of connection message you send.

So are you looking to grow your network and purely get connections so that more people will see your content? Do you just want to have a bigger network and just have more connections? Like literally, if you just want connections and you want a really high connection rate, just reach out to recruiters to connect with them.

You don’t even need a connection message. They’ll connect with you and you’ll get a really high connection rate, 50% plus easily. And you’ll grow your network super fast. But most people want connections for an actual reason and end purpose. So if it’s for sharing your content and bringing in those future inbound, Then you probably want a more passive connection message.

If it’s purely for sales, then connection rate isn’t always gonna be the best determining factor, cuz you can certainly sacrifice your connection rate with the right message, but it leads to booked calls faster. And we’ll talk a little bit about that today as well. So what are the different types of connection messages?

Broadly speaking, I say there’s a passive way you can connect with someone. It’s not too upfront, it’s not too sales. There’s the direct, more salesy approach. Sales seems to get a dirty word. Good sales isn’t about like bullying people into doing things. It’s about understanding the value you provide, what people actually need help with, and having a strong offer.

So when you reach out to people, it’s kind of a no-brainer to talk to you and it doesn’t even matter if you are pretty forward and direct. And the other is just a blank connection message. Like I said, you don’t even need to write anything and you can actually get pretty decent connection rates with a blank message, but you know, depends what you want to achieve.

Connection rate is just getting them into your network. And if you get them into the network the wrong way, you can actually set yourselves up for disappointment if you start like trying to sell them and pitch them. In fact, this is what most people do on LinkedIn. They do a really shit job of it and they piss off a lot of people.

And that’s what makes a lot of people think that LinkedIn lead generation doesn’t work because most people do a bad job of it. They connect under false pretenses, essentially tricking people to connect, and then they hit them with massive sales. If people don’t like it. Understandable. So in terms of writing a connection message, we need to understand what you want to achieve.

Let’s say for, for this purpose, we want to achieve, we wanna get sales, we want to find potential clients and get them into our network. It’s one of two ways we can do that directly outbound, getting them onto booked calls, or we can get them into our network, hope they see our content and come to us.

Let’s focus on outbound cuz most people don’t have the patience for content marketing and they’re interested in how to get people straight onto calls for the most. We want to take the least the shortest possible distance to get people to calls and sales if possible. So understanding why people connect.

One of the biggest things, and this is why we have a setup and strategy fee in now business and why we spend a lot of time in the beginning on the profile is because this really does a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Now, there’s some great videos, resources on my website. There’s a popup I think that comes up on how to write your profile.

There’s tons of videos. I’ve done so much on that. It’s so critical to get this right. Your profile and your presence on LinkedIn as you reach out to. It’s gonna do most of the heavy lifting for you as you reach out to connect with people. They’re gonna look at your profile, they’re gonna look at your face, and we’re dealing with people’s subconscious biases here.

If they don’t like the look of your face, they probably won’t connect with you. So make sure you have a good profile. Picture, professional, and open, friendly. Disarming you remember, we’re we’re reaching out to people who don’t know one trusts us yet, and you have a scally serious face. Like I said, we’re dealing with people’s subconscious biases and that might be enough to turn people off or feel like you are a mean person and they just shouldn’t talk to you.

So, Open, friendly, professional. Professional doesn’t mean like a goofy red tie and a white shirt. It means professionally taken, professional lighting sharp, looking good. You can wear a t-shirt. Doesn’t matter what matters is as long as it aligns with your company culture and messaging. Doesn’t matter what you wear.

Just make sure it’s friendly and professionally taken. And looks good. And then there’s everything else in your profile that needs to make sense and line up. So what else will determine whether people connect? Well, obviously the right audience. If you’re targeting people that have nothing to do with what you do, who you help, and don’t even go on LinkedIn, well, your connection rate’s gonna suck.

So there’s a lot of factors here that have like nothing to do with the connection message itself that are gonna drive a lot of your connection. So one of the easiest ways to increase your connection rate is go after people you know are active on LinkedIn. So Sales Navigator gives you some great functionality to find people that are actually active on the platform.

And so we know they’re there, and so you can drastically increase your connection rate by going after people we know who are there. Calling your audience out certainly helps, you know, Hey, John, I help plumbers achieve X, Y, and Z. It’s like, oh, well, I’m a plumber. It’s gonna come across a lot less general.

So knowing your audience, finding your audience, finding active members of your audience, and calling them out. Calling them out and calling out their specific problems is gonna help them connect you to value. And that brings me to my next point, and it’s really around like, once again, why are people gonna connect with you?

What need do they have? What values can you provide and what pain do they have that you can solve? That is very obvious that when you try to connect with them, they’re gonna want to connect with you cuz they see that you can do that and you can build trust, credibility, and like, or likability around this idea.

So if, if you have no market need or you don’t solve a specific problem, then it’s gonna be hard to get people to connect based on your value. You can probably have a more passive connection or a blank message and still get people to connect. But ultimately if there’s no pain, there’s no need in the.

It’s gonna be very hard to then drive that into a sale. So it’s really important that there’s an actual need that you’re addressing and that we’re getting people to connect with us based on value. I say this all the time, and fundamentally I think it’s really important, and it’s one of the reasons, like when we reach out to people on LinkedIn, we get very little if none of any pushback or like negative comments because when we connect with people, we’re very upfront about the reason for connecting and we put a lot of the focus on the value we provide. So over the years I’ve been doing this for about five years, there’s been lots of fancy AI and weird ways to like load people’s faces and images onto computer screens and do all sorts of funky.

All kind of interesting and weird ways to capture people’s attention. But ultimately, all that effort should really be put into your value proposition, your offer, because people don’t give a shit how their mail is delivered if there’s something good inside their mail, and that’s how you need to start thinking about your LinkedIn messaging.

Don’t worry about whether it’s automated, whether it’s this, whether it’s that. Just don’t trick people. Don’t treat people like they’re stupid and tell people the reason you want to. And the offer, the value you can provide. People will connect if they see value in. And once they, if they connect for that right reason, then it’s gonna be a lot easier to drive that conversation to where you want it to go.

So how do we build trust and credibility around the problem that we solve? I know this is all very high level and, and sort of not specific. We’ll go into some examples in a second, but how do we build these tris? Trust, credibility, and likability. Like I said, don’t underestimate the power of your face.

A good professional profile image. Background image. I know we’re talking a lot about the profile here, but it really does a lot of the heavy lifting. So make sure your profile’s on point, your website’s on point, and more than anything, you understand your offer, your core value proposition, how you help people and why they should trust you to do it.

And and try and get some credibility in that message. You know, name drop some big companies that you’ve worked with in the past or even. Examples of people and results that you’ve driven in the past. You’ve got very little space to do it. So I’ll share some examples below of some of our messages message that we’ve used to get like over 50% connection rate, taking out some of the information obviously for some of the clients, and just talk about how we can go about writing a message and how I like to do it.

So this is one of ours. This is a, we run passive direct. We do a whole bunch of different. We, we’ve, I’ve seen from one profile to the next, the exact same strategy, get completely different results just because there’s a different face behind the profile. So you’ve gotta really look at the data to understand what’s working, what’s not.

And this is gonna be really interesting, I think, for people who wanna understand it’s not all about the connection, right? So, hi John. I’m from a Aussie lead gen company. We help ID companies find new clients using LinkedIn. We host regular free training sessions, have a money back guarantee on our services.

So if it’s in. If you’re interested in legion ideas, an hour or later, so it’d be great to connect. So I’m gonna talk about what’s happening in this message cuz it at, at face value. It seems very short and simple and, and it’s like, okay, well if you just copy this, you might get worse than this. Or it might not actually work for you because it depends on what resources you have available to you, what credibility you have and who are you targeting.

Once again, Aussie lead gen company, this is when we’re. Clients in Australia, obviously we wouldn’t use this at all, targeting the states, so that helps build trust because it’s saying, Hey, we’re local, we’re close to home. Calling out the audience. Hey, we help it companies find new clients using LinkedIn.

Find new clients. That’s the pain point. That’s the solution. That’s what we help people do. Building trust and likability. We host regular free training events, free training sessions. We’re adding value and have a money back guarantee on our services, an offer, a strong offer, a risk mitigation. You know, if you were to work.

We’re confident in what we do. So if it’s interested now or later, because people will often put up walls and we need to address walls sooner than later now or later. This is a great way to get people to connect. If they’re not interested now, it’d be great to connect. I think that’s pretty much the max of the message and that’s a fairly, what I would say, a fairly passive message, and you get about 20 to 30% connection rate.

So if I was to compare it to a, a more direct message. Hi John. I’m currently working with Aussie. Once again, targeting the Aussie market, helping to build that trust, helping them generate more sales leads via LinkedIn. We like having an extra salesperson, but with better roi, we even have a money back guarantee, no questions asked.

Let me know if you have time for a chat over the next week. So this one will drastically drop the connection rate, but what we’ve found is that people jump onto calls much sooner and more people will. Who are interested, who otherwise would’ve not connected. Cuz they, they, they prefer that upfront approach.

So this one actually gets us more leads in this one, but this one gets us more connections. And I use this on my profile, but some of our sales guys use this one because I’m doing a lot of content marketing across mine and I’m happy to have the extra connection rates, even if it means a lower connection lower.

Because I know what pays off in the long run. Another passive message on a profile that got, once again, you could use this exact same one and get a better connection message rate or a lower connection rate. It depends on the profile, service, audience, all that sort of stuff. There’s a lot of things at play, but is it, you can feel good knowing that this structure is a really powerful way to generate those leads?

Hey John. I’m an experienced head hunter helping New York companies source, you know, top talent in marketing. For 10 years, I’ve specially fill filling roles with employees. And then that specific role that we’re looking for, that target market, you may not currently need help. So once again, addressing that, you may not need help in case they’re gonna put that wall up first or already covered, but thought it’d be good to connect.

So we just need to get our foot in the door. Really powerful strategy there. And then you can also just use a blank connection message. It’s actually a good way to get your connection right up, but I don’t recommend it for the most part because it doesn’t. Anything about you doesn’t prepare them for what’s coming next.

And if people can’t, if you can’t get people to connect with you based on your value, then you’ve got other issues you need to address, and that’s gonna be telling and helpful. So I hope that helps. If you want me to have a look at your connection messages or provide any suggestions, put them in the comments below.

Send me a message, reach out@b2bleads.com and yeah, I hope that was helpful. Another really great thing you can do, although it’s hard to squeeze in, is name Drop some of the big companies you’ve worked for or talk about spec. Specific results that you’ve got? One of the best connection messages I’ve, I’ve written lately was for, we’re going after local councils with very specific needs, a very specific problem that someone had solved 15 times over.

And it was a very. Big pain point. And so when we reached out to these people, they knew they had, we knew they had this pain point and we knew there wasn’t a lot of competition in the market, which also helps. And even though the audience isn’t particularly active, the ones who do see it like straight, straight away, they get it and they want to get onto a call.

So I hope that’s helpful. Very high level, a lot of it. But hope that helps you understand what kind of messages you need to write, how to write them, all that kind of stuff. So when you write a connection message, it’s gonna actually take you towards the sale, not just get you connection. Alright. That’s all for now.

I am Ryan Caswell from B2B leads.com and as always, have a great day cheers.