In this video, sales coach Ryan Dohrn explains how to turn LinkedIn connection requests into purposeful networking tools. He stresses that every request should convey a clear value proposition for the recipient, rather than being a generic “connect”. He shares a step‑by‑step example of how he used a conference attendee list and a virtual assistant to send personalized, value‑focused invitations, achieving a 90% acceptance rate. Dohrn then revises his earlier belief that you should only connect after a conversation, arguing that you can connect first if you can offer value. He advises salespeople to audit their CRM for prospects they aren’t yet connected with, and to actively follow, like, comment on, and share the posts of their connections and their companies to stay visible. Finally, he mentions the need to periodically prune irrelevant connections. The overall message is that LinkedIn is a powerful sales channel, and meaningful, value‑driven connections dramatically increase engagement and opportunity generation.
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What is going on, friends and fans? Ryan Dohrn here, your friendly neighborhood sales coach. This week we're talking about making LinkedIn connections meaningful. How many times in any given week do you get connection requests from people that either A, you know that they're salespeople, or B, you can just tell like, who is this person? I mean, I don't even— I don't think I know who they are. When I'm creating a connection request and you click the connect button, it gives you the opportunity to create some type of meaningful note to that individual. You want to be asking yourself this question when you do a connection request. What value would the person that you're requesting to connect to, what value will they get from connecting with you, from accepting your connection request? Now when I send out a connection request, the value they receive from me is I like to load up onto the internet sales advice, marketing advice, sales tips, those types of things. So it's a little bit easy for me to be able to create a value proposition within the connection requests that I'm placing online. So you have to think to yourself, what are the things that you could do in sales that potentially would cause someone to go, yeah, okay, it's worthwhile to connect with this person? Could it be a competitive advantage? Does your company have some type of market intelligence that might be beneficial to that individual? Is there a marketing advantage by being connected? Is there some peer-to-peer sharing that could potentially occur? When you're doing a LinkedIn connection, connection, don't just connect to connect. You want to make that connection request meaningful because a meaningful invite or a meaningful connection request is almost always going to be well received or more well received. Your likelihood of it actually going through is obviously much higher. So hopefully the takeaway today is recognize that you need to always be growing your network on LinkedIn, but when you do a connection request, make it meaningful. Now let me give you a second tip as it relates to LinkedIn connections, and I'm going to give you a personal example from me. So it wasn't but 2 weeks ago that I was in Baltimore for a conference, and they were able to give us all a copy of the attendee list, which was great. We knew who was there. What I did is I had my virtual assistant reach out to everybody that was at the conference and put together a meaningful connection request. So what she did is she would reach out, and I gave her the text that I want included: Great to see so many smiling faces back in action in Baltimore. Love to connect with you to share marketing advice and sales advice and things like that. And that connection request went out to over a couple hundred people. Well, I have 90-some percent of those people have said, yes, I'd like to create some type of connection with you. Now, some folks we were already connected to, so they LinkedIn messaged me and said, hey, we're already connected, but I'd love to engage with you about some sales training and things like that. So that's also a little bit of a tip. Now, the next tip I can give to you on connecting on LinkedIn is I used to say, don't connect with people until you've had a conversation with them. Well, now I'm realizing that was a little bit old thinking on my part. So now I try to connect with people that I feel I can bring some value to them. Now I'm in the sales business, I get that. I'm always trying to sell people, just like I'm trying to sell you as well today on my training services. Wait, wait. Recognize, friends, it's important for us to bring value to the conversation, but Look out there and figure out, hey, what do these connections really look like and how can I expand that network? The last idea that I would give you is looking through your CRM and making sure you're connected to people that are prospects. Make sure you're connected to people that are active with you. Make sure you're connected with people that you're hoping to do business with one day and maybe just things haven't worked out or whatever that circumstance is. Looking through the CRM and saying to yourself, wait, why are we not connected? Now, you want to connect with folks, you want to follow them, So you can like and share their, their posts that they put on LinkedIn. You also want to follow their company. The reason you want to follow people's company is as they're doing new releases, product updates, and things like that, you always want to make sure that you're mentioning those things, resharing them, reposting them, liking, commenting on if it's applicable. Make sure you're commenting on those because when you comment on somebody's post, LinkedIn is going to send them an email, and that email is going to say, Ryan Dorn commented on your post, join the conversation. But it's not going to say what I said. So what they need to do is click on it to actually see what it was that I said and then choose whether they want to engage in that conversation or not. Friends, I'm here to tell you right now, LinkedIn is by far one of the very best sales tools that's out there. If you're not embracing it, guess what? Your competition is embracing it. You don't want to get outsold, so get out there and get your connections strong. And also, don't forget, friends, Friends, sometimes you need to remove connections and prune that LinkedIn tree, and maybe that's another video for another time. Never forget, friends, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it, and they're not. We're not crazy. It's a great career. It'll feed your family for a lifetime. Love to come to your office. Love to speak at your national sales meeting. Friends, I'd love to pump your team up to great sales success. Reach out to me over at Ryan Dohrn.
