Many courses will tell you that at this stage, you’re ready to ‘connect’ with the people identified and in some cases that would be reasonable. However, a Request to Acceptance ratio of 30% is deemed to be pretty good with this approach.
With a little planning, a bit more reflection and a more proactive approach, you can reverse this and easily get 70%+ acceptances, but more importantly, these 70% are already engaging with you.
From the list that you have created, the first thing to do is to identify those people that are active within Linkedin and focus on those in the first instance. If the person hasn’t logged in for the last 6 months, it’s unlikely that they will see your messages so your approach will end up in the Linkedin black hole!
Sales Navigator makes this easy by providing a filter allowing you to identify those that have been active in the last 30 days. However, on the basic version, you can click through to each profile and scroll down to the section headed “Activity”
Click on the ‘See all activity’ link and you’ll get access to everything that they have posted, liked or commented upon.
If you find that they haven’t been active recently, put them to the bottom or your list and focus completely on those that have been most active.
More importantly, take a look at what they are interested in – what have they been sharing? What have they ‘liked’? Do their comments highlight a particular point of view?
Reflect on this a little and formulate ideas about how you can add to their discussions by adding a comment to one of their posts or sharing one of their posts whilst adding your point of view. Even when you ‘Like’ something that they have posted, they will get a notification through that will highlight that you have shown an interest in them.
In this way, you can be subtle in bringing yourself to their attention.
If, at the same time, you are ensuring that the things that you post/ comment upon support your core value proposition, they will subconsciously build up a picture of you as they click on your profile to understand who you are.
Don’t be too eager and comment upon everything that they do/ say – again reflect and ensure that every activity that you undertake adds to the perception that you’d like to build in the mind of your ideal client/ employer.
Keep a log of the interactions that you have within the Excel/ Google Sheet.