The first sentence of the LinkedIn message was not dissimilar to the majority of emails and LI messages I get.
David, my team and I would love to get the chance to learn more about your company.
The author started with the concept she had been taught, “Make it about the customer, tell them how you want to learn more about them, their strategies, and challenges.” I write and advise clients about this, myself. Until we understand the customer and what they are trying to achieve, we don’t have a basis in engaging them in deeper conversations. Of course, this individual has never looked at my LinkedIn profile, which might be a place to start learning about me. As far as I can tell, she has never looked at our website, which would also give her more insight in “learning about your company.”
I wasn’t surprised with the next sentences:
Let’s jump on a quick 10 minute chat with our director so he can walk you through our system in detail to guarantee to save you 10 hours of time per week, while putting processes in place for you to properly automate, delegate, and eliminate headaches out of your life and business.
It’s not a sales call, it’s pure value for you to check out and see if it’s a fit. What do you say?
Just like 98% of the outreaches I get, the goal has nothing to do with learning about my company, my goals, and challenges. The only focus is on them and telling me about their offerings. And without knowing anything about me or my company, or even about the tools we leverage to maximize our personal productivity, she is making an outlandish and, undoubtedly, unsupported claim to save a huge amount of my time.
Of course, I’m not naive enough to believe those claims, but it does make one wonder why so many believe we are that naive.
And as you expect, this is not an exception. It’s just an example. I could have chosen anyone of another 50 emails/LI messages I deleted this morning that were constructed using similar templates. The first sentence feigns interest in me/my company, the rest is all about them with exaggerated claims of results though they know nothing about us.
What is simply stunning to me is how many continue to do this kind of outreach with the expectation they can successfully engage people. Again, 98% of what I see in any channel follows the same patterns. How can anyone using LinkedIn even consider this kind of outreach, without taking at least 45 seconds to scan my profile. There are dozens of tools that can provide great insight about me and my company. But people aren’t using them.
Even tools like ChatGPT can give great insight. As an experiment, it took me two and a half minutes to ask two questions and get answers: “Can you give me a brief profile of Dave Brock and Partners In EXCELLENCE?” It gave a profile, not terribly insightful, but anything is better than nothing.
The response to my next question was fascinating: “What would he be most interested in talking about if I were to ask for a conversation.” It came back with 8 areas and insights about why I might be interested in the conversation. My first reaction was, “Well those are very general, not very specific….” But then as I looked at the areas and the guidance ChatGPT offered, I realized, that asking for a conversation in any of those areas would have provoked a response from me. It might have been, “What are you looking to understand….” Or, “Can you be a little more specific….” But I realized ChatGPT had nailed some areas that would have provoked a response.
As an example, two areas were, Business Innovation and Transformation and Sales and Leadership. I spend the majority of my working life looking at these areas and would be interested in conversations about these topics.
One was quite funny, but at the same time really interesting. ChatGPT suggested that I might be interested in The Role Of Theoretical Physics In Business. At first I laughed, then as I read ChatGPT’s reasoning, I realized that would be a fascinating conversation.
I am continually amazed. True personalization has become so simple and easy. It takes virtually no time and can have a massive impact in generating at least a response. And every “guru” in the world talks both about the necessity and how to do just enough to drive responses.
Yet 98% of the outreaches I get have none of that.
One would think the massive failures we see in outreach would cause people to start trying new things. One would expect the data suggesting 1000-1400 outreaches needed for one meeting would cause people to think, “There must be a better way…..”
But they don’t. We see committed to continued failure at even greater scale.
I wonder what I may be missing. Why do we remain so committed to strategies that are proven to fail? Why doesn’t anyone change?
I just don’t get it. Perhaps someone could enlighten me.
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