How to Get People To Trust You on Linkedin
A rant from about not leading with value when connecting with people.
I’ve been getting a lot more of LinkedIn connection requests lately. Normally that would be a good thing, however it seems like 8 out 10 of them are using the same sales gimmick.
They try to make it seem as if they actually did research on who I was and the clients I serve.
Here’s a LinkedIn message I got the other day…
I saw your profile and would love to connect. I seriously I love helping people in the marketing and advertising industry yourself generate leads. I noticed you were apart of 7venrings Media I Realtor. I work with many people just like you.Let me know how I can be of assistance.
To your success!
So and so
This is a great template to use if you just want to play the numbers game and see who bites, but awful if you’re actually trying to develop trust.
Let’s highlight a few of the glaring problems with this approach.
Terrible Voice and tone
Trust is the most valuable currency online. Your voice and tone play a significant role in making a positive first impression with potential customers.
At the end of the day, people want to do business with people that they like or trust and this message doesn’t make me want to do either one.
I’m a natural skeptic when it comes to people I don’t know reaching out to me, but that doesn’t mean that wall of separation can’t come down.
There is a GINORMOUS difference between a salesy mass message approach and a human-centric one.
This message is more about the sender than the reciever
Did you notice how many times the sender used “I” in this short message?
It was only 5 sentences long and there were 6 instances where they mentioned themselves.
The bottom line is this… No one cares about what we think is important.
All we, your potential customer, care about is, how do you make our lives better?
We want to know if you can make us (or save us) more money, make us healthier, or make us happy. If your messaging doesn’t directly speak to one of those things there’s a great chance it’s getting ignored or deleted.
I would be way more willing to reach out to the sender if I felt like they had my best interests at heart.
Being a valuable resource is the best way to earn someone’s attention.
It doesn’t take a lot of time to lose the attention of your audience, so the quicker you can give them something they want the better.
Hubspot is a company that I highly respect and one of the greatest examples of building trust by providing value on the front-end.
Educating and making their potential customers better marketers and sellers isn’t just something they say they do, it’s actually a huge part of their business.
There are companies who try to valuable information behind closed doors and make it hard for their customers to have access to it. Hubspot has a massive content library that’s well organized and readily available to their audience.
What’s the result? They’re easily one of the largest and most influential companies in the digital marketing space.
If you’re in doubt about how to engage and get the attention of future customers just ask yourself, “ What am I offering them that will make them better?“
Reads like a bot wrote the message
Did you notice the, “I noticed you were apart of 7venrings Media I Realtor. I work with many people just like you” line?
I was turned off exactly at that point because I knew with 100 percent certainty that they just notice I was apart of 7venrings Media I Realtor. For one thing, it doesn’t even make sense contextually. The writer clearly copied and pasted that into a template or had a bot crawl my LinkedIn profile.
Again, when you’re engaging with people for the first time, they are more than likely going to be skeptical that you can help them.
Remember, the people on the other side of the screen are humans, and people don’t normally speak like that. It sounds like something the Coneheads wrote when they first came to Earth.
Here’s a more human-centric approach
Here’s a LinkedIn message that would’ve gotten my attention:
Hi Arthur,
Thank you for adding me to your network! If I can be of any assistance to you, please do not hesitate to reach out.
Best,
So and so
PS: Here’s a blog [LINK] I wrote about 3 ways you can grow your agency. Let me know if you have any questions about it 🙂
It’s short, simple, and to the point. It does all the same things the original message was attempting to do…
- Not selly
- Offers their help without any strings attached
- Provided a link to something that is relevant to me
Got a question about this article?
Send me your questions and I’ll get back to you.