How To Write Cold Messages That Get Responses
Growing Your Network to Improve Your Career Prospects, Opportunities and Salary
We know that cold messaging matters. After all, if you don’t message people every once in a while, you’re just hoping the right person bumps into you. That’s less of a strategy and more of a wish! And for an ambitious career changer like you, not good enough.
So how do you write cold messages that get responses? How do you write your message in such a way that people are actually excited to hear from you? That’s the topic of today’s post.
Yesterday on Twitter, a new friend of mine was asking for advice on how to reach high impact individuals for her new product. She is in the process of building a program to help aspiring directors and VPs in tech companies fulfill their dreams of being a big executive. In order to do this, she knows she has to grow her network of both current professionals and aspiring professionals.
But in the past here strategy hasn’t quite worked. She’s often spent a lot of time trying to connect with people who just flat out didn’t respond, causing her problems with growing her business. She wanted to know if there was a way to better connect with people through a better cold messaging strategy.
Fortunately, cold messaging and networking is one of my super powers. I’ve enjoyed trying to reach people I have no business speaking to and growing my network one real relationship at a time. I’ve been lucky to get a pretty great routine for find people who matter in a new industry and getting time on their calendar.
So today I’m going to share with you some of my favorite tactics on how to cold message experts and potential customers in a new industry to get results.
Use LinkedIn First as an Information Gathering Tool, Then A Target Identification Tool
My friend had the following questions:
I would be focusing on LinkedIn. So my reach is limited with the 1st degree connections. (2nd and 3rd are capped by LinkedIn with inmails). How do I grow my connections?
So, platforms like LinkedIn want you to only connect with people you ‘really’ know. This is a holdover from 2008 when I first joined the platform, trying to limit your network to only ‘real’ connections.
But the truth is that LinkedIn is a network for meeting NEW people, especially in the post-pandemic world. Probably 90% of the people who connect with me today do so because they saw a piece of content I created or heard me talk at an event. I accept every one, and I know that’s common.
If you don’t have enough 1st level contact, then get more 1st level contacts! Unless you’re connected with 100 random people each day, every day, you’re likely not going to do any damage to your platform. The value you get from having a wider view of the world is well worth it.
Then, once you get a wider view, you cant start to match people to the persona’s you’re looking for, whether it’s business leaders, technical executives, development talent or any number of things.
So, if you are moving into a new industry, here’s how I would use LinkedIn:
Identify the Highly Networked LinkedIn Members or LIONs (LinkedIn Open Networkers) to start connecting with. If you don’t have a lot of connections today, connecting with these folks is the fastest way to open up your extended network to see more profiles. 100 LIONs will open up tens of thousands of connections.
In your network, find people who fit the personas you’re looking for. The best way to do this is generally by searching for their role title. In this case, ‘director’, ‘manager’ and other names would be effective, but there may be more. Start to create a spreadsheet of folks you want to connect with on LinkedIn for future processing.
Also check posts on LinkedIn for people talking about your field. If there is a person with really great content on LinkedIn, connect with them or follow them to get them in the feed. Often the folks responding in the comments are great future contacts, and much easier to casually chat with.
You Can Connect With Anyone You Want, So Long As You’re Providing Value
The next question asked by my friend is this:
Should I be cold DMing M2s about what challenges they're facing? Or should I be asking to connect to Directors, and ask them for suggestions on how to grow etc.?
So, when you are networking, the best strategy for connecting is not ‘either or’, but both. Networking, ultimately, is a numbers game and at times unpredictable. I often have an easier time reaching out to the CEO of companies rather than middle managers inside of companies. This is not intuitive, but it’s the truth I found only by experimenting.
So in this case, the questions isn’t ‘who’ you should connect with, but ‘how’ you should connect with them. In general, people will network with random people for one of four reasons. This includes:
To grow their network. Most people suck at networking and know they need to do it more. So when someone gives them an opportunity to meet with someone relevant to their career, they’ll do it and be thankful.
To learn something new. If you’re providing some new information or a new way of solving a problem, people will take the meeting to learn about what you offer.
To grow their brand and their influence. Influence marketing is the best way to grow your wealth and career, but it’s hard to build. If you can offer a way for people to grow their influence, they’ll often meet to see what you have to offer.
To have fun. Yes, some people just really get a jolt out of meeting with someone new and having an engaging discussion. If you seem cool and have even a half reasonable reason for meeting, some people will take it for fun (this is me!).
In my friends case, there are two personas she cares about:
M2 Executives (VPs, etc.)
Current Manager and Directors
These are two very different groups, and my friend would be interacting with them in different ways (one would be a potential partner, on would be a potential customer).
When reaching out, I would emphasize the following aspects of her value:
For M2’s, emphasize the branding and influence that can come with partnering with an education platform. M2’s want a place they can share their experience and get credit for it. If there’s speaking or marketing opportunities, emphasize that as well. I would also emphasize the networking aspect, as connecting with this platform might give them a brand new stream of potentials executives to fill their pipeline.
For current directors and aspiring M2’s, I would emphasize the learning and specialize knowledge that comes with the program. Because the platform is for building a career as a technical executive, there would be useful nuggets of information that they could learn in order to grow their career. For any aspiring executive, this would be very welcome information.
But, we can’t just know the value, we have to communicate it, which gets us to our final piece of tactic:
Structure Your Cold Messages To Get To ‘Yes’
My friend asked this final question. I’m going to post her cold message in it’s entirety so you can view her strategy for messaging.
What I've tried in the past: I sent the following message to some acquaintances who were my 1st degree connections. Only 1 replied out of 5.
Hello!
Hope you remember me from <big event>, we often crossed paths in the hallways - when that was a thing =) I was a developer at <company>. I see you have moved from <org A> to <org B>. Sounds exciting!
I am reaching out to you to get some of your perspective on tech careers. I have left <org C> early this year and have been exploring setting up a coaching business. I am doing some research for this and wondering about how people can excel at their tech careers. You came to my mind as I was looking for people to speak to in my network. I always thought you were inspiring whenever I saw you speak or interact in <organization> meetings and Teams chats.
I would love to chat with you about your approach to your career, what you've done to really excel and what you are going for in the future. Basically, I would love to connect with your wisdom and I would be grateful for any thoughts you have to offer.
Would you be interested to chat for 20 minutes next week? I would love to have a virtual coffee/snacks with you :)
So, there’s a couple of good things going on here:
The ask is clear and brief. In the end it asks for 20 minutes of time which is quite reasonable.
There’s a good attempt to connect with the individual by joining on shared experiences, which is great for connecting.
There is an explanation of why they should meet and why they could get value.
However, there’s one fatal flaw, what I estimate is reasonable for a 50% decrease in responses: the message is long.
Most people today are in a state of information overload. I run into this all the time. Even though my DM’s are open and I LOVE connecting with folks, if I see a long message, I’ll leave it on unread and get to it later. Sometimes that never happens.
In a world overloaded with data, being condense and to the point is the most thoughtful thing you can do. So, if I were re-writing this message, I would do it as follows:
Hey <first name>,
I hope you are doing well. We met briefly after chatting at <big event> and I walked away being fascinated by your career and drive.
I’m currently in the process of building a program to teach aspiring executives how to become a great executive. If you have some time, I’d love to get your feedback and experience to improve my program.
Do you have 30 minutes for a brief meeting next week to chat?
Thank you,
This version accomplishes in 77 words what the previous message did in 200. There’s also a couple of simple changes that were made in order to increase response rates:
There are no long paragraphs of information, making it easier to scan and understand what it being said.
The ask is right at the end on its own line. This makes it easy to know what is expected of them.
There’s enough connection points to show why the person should be interested and connect.
We’re leaning into branding and influence, as we’re asking them to help us build the program.
When I have sent messages like this to folks, my response rate depending on the group can be as high as 50%. I’m currently looking to talk to Web3 developers and have already booked five meetings using a similar strategy.
Even better, keeping messages short means you can even include them as part of the ‘notes’ of your connection request. I’ve connected with people and then messaged, or added the message as part of the acceptance request. Experiment to see what works for you.
Your Action Steps
If you’re looking to improve your cold messages, do the following things:
Use LinkedIn as a platform to expand your ‘highly networked’ connections in order to see who you want to meet with. Connect with 100 of these folks to get the largest view of your new industry, then zero in on individuals you want to connect with.
Understand who your target persona is and structure your value to them. This will help you make a highly compelling message, even with only a brief amount of time to connect with them.
Keep your cold messages brief. You should not have more than five lines at the most when cold messaging someone. Have the ask as it’s own line at the bottom, and keep the rest of the message on point to what value you’re providing.
Cold messaging is one of the best skills I’ve picked up and has helped my career in so many ways. I hope you can do good stuff with this yourself!