The Ultimate Guide to Succeed with LinkedIn Cold Messages

What is a LinkedIn cold message?

LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms for getting new clients. This is especially the case for B2B companies that use LinkedIn for marketing purposes.

Imagine Twitter marketing, but with almost exclusively B2B companies!

But to maximize its potential, you must know how to use it properly.

A cold message on LinkedIn is a message that you send to someone you don’t know, to start a conversation with one or many prospects.

Basically, it’s a way to reach out to new people that could be interested in your products or services, without being too sales-y.

To do this, you need to have a good understanding of who your target market is and what their needs are. Once you know this, you can start using a tool to prospect on LinkedIn and send them a personalized sales message.

Cold messaging is one of the most underestimated sales techniques to do LinkedIn lead generation. But when you do it the right way, it’s incredibly efficient.

Why should businesses use cold messaging on LinkedIn?

As we’ve just seen above, LinkedIn cold messages are simply a way to do traditional business by reaching out to someone the same way you would have done it by phone or email.

Except for the fact that it’s happening through LinkedIn.

There are several advantages to using this technique:

• You can reach out to high-quality prospects that you wouldn’t be able to connect with otherwise. To know more about contacting someone, you can check our post “How to reach out to someone on LinkedIn?
• You can reach out to an unlimited number of leads on your domain
• It’s a low-cost way to get new customers
• You can start building relationships with potential customers before you even have a product or service to sell
• You can nurture these relationships over time so that when you do have something to sell, they’ll be more likely to buy from you
• It’s also a great way to build brand awareness

This is a non-exhaustive list, but you got the idea: LinkedIn cold messaging is a direct way to get new B2B leads without spending a huge amount of money.

But it’s pretty time-consuming, though.

That’s why we created LaGrowthMachine. With our LinkedIn Automation tool, you can easily import lists of leads from any source, and build your LinkedIn prospecting sequence in advance to do the same things, in a few minutes instead of days or weeks.

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LinkedIn is the world's largest professional community. Your target is necessarily on this network. So what are you waiting for?

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How to write great LinkedIn cold messages?

Now that you know what a cold message on LinkedIn is, and why you should definitely do it, let’s find out how to build a proper strategy.

At LaGrowthMachine, we’re sending and reviewing hundreds of cold message campaigns. We’ve been building our very own homemade process to get the most out of it.

In the next part of this post, we’ll explain how you should proceed to improve your performance.

Step1: Make sure your profile is awesome

Your profile is your business card on LinkedIn.

When people receive your message, the first thing they do is check who you are, by clicking your profile.

That’s why it needs to be great! If you want to know more about how to optimize your profile, you can check out our post on LinkedIn Profile.

To ensure your profile is great, you should have a look at this specifically: 

• Make sure that your profile picture is of good quality and recent
• Your headline is interesting and reflects what you do
• The summary is well-written, error-free, and persuasive

Step 2: Build your target

The second step is to find the right people to contact. To do this, you need to have a very good understanding of your target market and their needs.

To do this you must:

• create your buyer persona
• analyze your target’s habits and behavior
• have a look at the volume, for forecasting purposes

How to create your buyer persona?

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It should be based on market research and real data about your existing customers.

Creating a buyer persona will help you understand your target market better and determine what their needs are. This way, you can create a more targeted sales message that resonates with them.

To create your buyer persona, you need to gather as much information as possible about your ideal customer. You can use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to collect this data.

Once you have all this information, you can start creating your persona.

How to analyze your target behavior?

Now that you know which people you want to target with your messages through LinkedIn, it’s time to analyze their behavior.

This way, you’ll be able to understand how they consume information and what their needs are.

To do this, you need to answer the following questions:

• What are the main challenges my persona is facing?
• What are their goals?
• What type of content do they consume regularly (Blogs, ebooks, webinars, etc.)?
• How active are they on social media?
• Which social media do they use?
• What is their job title?
• etc…

How to find the leads you want to target with LinkedIn?

You can use different methods to find potential prospects on LinkedIn, but the most efficient way is to use advanced search operators.

Advanced search operators are a set of words and symbols that you can add to your LinkedIn search queries to get more targeted results.

For example, if you want to find marketing directors in tech companies in France, you can type “marketing director” AND “tech company” location: France in the LinkedIn search bar.

You can also use Boolean operators such as OR, NOT, and “-” to make an even more precise search.

You can also use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to do that pretty easily and very accurately.

Once you’ve gone through these 3 sub-steps, you can start building your target list. You can do this directly with Excel or Google Sheets, or if you’re using Sales Navigator, there’s a great feature that allows you to create a list of leads by account or by people.

Step 3: Set up your sales objectives

The third step is to set up your sales objectives. This means that you need to determine what your goals are for each campaign.

Careful here. A good sales objective must be SMART:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

For example, a good sales objective for a LinkedIn cold message campaign could be to generate 10 qualified leads in 2 weeks.

At LaGrowthMachine, we recommend you proceed by doing sprint sessions: set your objective for a two-week period, and at the end of these two weeks, assess your results and adapt your strategy accordingly.

If you’re using our tool, you’ll have access to direct live reporting that will help you with tons of things about your performance.

Step 4: Write your sales message

This is the main part of the whole process.

At LaGrowthMachine, we tend to observe very different results between campaigns just because of copywriting skills.

The fourth step is to write your sales message. This is probably the most important part of the process, as it will be the foundation of your entire campaign.

Try to think about how people feel when receiving cold messages:

• These people don’t know you
• They probably don’t care about what you’re trying to sell
• They’ve most likely already received tons of messages from your competitor(s).

You need to stand out, and the best way to do so is by writing a personalized message.

To you, the best way to do that is by using the “pain point” strategy. This means that you need to find the main challenges your persona is facing and write a message addressing these challenges directly.

For example, if you’re selling a growth marketing automation tool, you could write a message like this:

As simple as that! Direct, smooth, and easy.

Another strategy that works well is the network strategy. If you’re introducing another person that you and your leads both know, that will break the ice much more easily.

For example:

See? No selling at all, but still a great way to start a conversation with someone who might be interested in what you’re selling.

Remember that people buy from people they like, so try to be as likable as possible in your messages.

The best way to do that is by being genuine and transparent. People can see through a fake message in less than 3 seconds, so don’t even try to be someone you’re not.

Be yourself, and focus on building a relationship with your leads before selling them anything.

If you’re using our tool, we can review all your campaigns from the technical setup to the copywriting of all your messages so that you won’t make any mistakes!

Step 5: Test & measure your results

Now that you’ve written your sales message, it’s time to test it!

You need to send your message to as many people as possible, and track the results carefully.

The best way to do that is by using our tool, as it will give you access to live reports of your results.

You’ll be able to see:

• How many people opened and clicked on your message
• How many answered (and didn’t answer)
• How many messages you’ve sent through your campaign

This way, you can adapt your strategy accordingly.

Bonus Step: Use an automation tool!

If you want to make your life easier, we advise you to use an automation tool like LaGrowthMachine.

It will allow you to do the exact same things we went on and on about throughout the article:

• Send messages to as many people as you want
• Track your results live
• Adapt your strategy on the go

The difference is, you’ll be able to scale your efforts by thousands of messages, and only in a few clicks. Which means much less time spent, and way better results.

In fact, we’re recording 3.5x more leads for people using our automation tool.

Conclusion

That’s it for our guide on how to write a cold message! We hope you found it helpful and that you’re now ready to start writing your own sales message.

Don’t forget to test different strategies, and always focus on building relationships with your leads.

And if you want to make things even easier, we advise you to use an automation tool like LaGrowthMachine. You won’t regret it!