How To Start Non-Spammy Direct Message Conversations

very powerful way for you to get clients and to build relationships and to meet new people. But there's a right way and a wrong way. And today Tracy is with us to talk about how to do this in a non-spammy way. So I'm excited to do— to talk about the specific to LinkedIn, because Tracy, your, your specialty really is all about the LinkedIn platform predominantly, correct?

Yeah, it is. Um, although I've been doing marketing for, I don't know, 40 years, LinkedIn has been my specialty for about the last 6.

Is that right? And what prompted you to want to specialize mostly in LinkedIn?

The honest answer is I got fed up with Facebook and I just decided to give LinkedIn a go. So I did a couple of training courses and took the best of those and put it with my existing process I've been using for 25-odd years. And it worked for me. So I thought if it works for me, it should work for my clients. And so I gave it a go, and it did, and here I am 6 years later.

I love it. What a great story. I think you, you and me and maybe other people are a little bit frustrated, not maybe not just with Facebook, with some of the other platforms. And I have to tell you that for me, especially this, the, in this moment in time in 2023, I really feel like LinkedIn is my main platform. And that wasn't always true in the past. I had been more Facebook, maybe Instagram and others. But I don't know, there's a special thing going on in LinkedIn, and I'm really jazzed about it.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just believe that you should go deep on, on one platform rather than try and cover off every single platform, because we can't be in all different places, you know, at the same time. And, you know, these— each of these platforms have got They seem simple on the surface, just post and go, but that's not how it works. That's not where the real magic happens.

Yeah, I agree. Well, let's talk about where the real magic happens, right? The, the real magic often is happening in the DMs. It really is going down in the DMs. So let's talk about that because we all have been subject to spammy email or spammy messages where we get those messages where we go, ah, that's a hard no. So let's just talk about what— why are we seeing so many people still doing these, these spammy messages? Do they work? Is that why people are doing them?

Um, this again, a simple answer to this is over the last, say, 4 or 5 years, there's been a lot of automation tools that have been launched, and non-savvy people are just thinking, hey, this is, this is going to make me some money. I can send a million messages a day and I can get a load of new clients. And that's what people are doing, and that's why you see so many messages in your inbox. And now it's also translating into emails. So those emails that you see in your inbox that are just, um, you know, in like courier-type face with you know, nothing, just plain text, they're generally generated by automation. So I think these automation tools have got a lot to answer for. And does it work? Maybe, but who wants to be that person? Are you going to the right— are you reaching the right people? No, you're going to have to send a heck of a lot of messages to get probably a 1% response, whereas if you really have a good strategy on LinkedIn, you could probably get more— 30, 40% response rate, conversion rate. Yeah, it's a big difference. And, and I don't really want to be that person. I believe in authenticity and building relationships.

I do too. And I want to make it— I just want to be upfront and confess something. Is that okay? Go for it. To confess this to you, confess this to the audience who are watching the video, listening to the audio, or watching the video, yeah, listening to the audio. In, I don't remember what year this was, it might have been early 2020 or 2021, I hired a lead generation company to do some automated messages on LinkedIn. Great person, great great, great people. It was, it was fantastic. And, and there was a process of going through crafting that cold outreach message in such a way that would still be in my voice. And I felt very confident about that. We went through the process. It did sound like my voice, but it was a cold messaging automated tool that was going to send these things out. So I bought into this and I said, okay, well, let's, let's give it a try. And it, I would say after about a month or so, I just wasn't feeling it. I just knew instinctively that this was not the right direction. And I pulled the plug on that and said, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm actually going to go about this in a, in a more authentic way going forward. Here's the bad part. In the process of that month, a lot of those automated messages went out to a whole bunch of people, and they're stuck in the message thread now, and I can't delete them. So I recently had an incident where I met someone who I really wanted to build a relationship with and meet and impress, and I went back and realized, oh no, he was sent one of those automated messages back in early 2020. I can't delete it. So now I'm going to try and continue this conversation with him. He can go back to the beginning and go, why would you have sent that out?

I, you know, and again, my confession is, is I've done the same thing, you know, and I, you know, I did. And when I see the messages that I used to send, I'm, you know, I am embarrassed, you know. I, you know, they're not bad, but they're bad by today's standards because things have changed. When I started 6 years ago, the inbox was the place to get new clients. You know, I'd connect with somebody, I would, um, I would start a conversation, they'd ask me, you know, what it was that I did, they'd say, can we have a call, we— I'd get a sale. But now, you know, it isn't like that. And I think, you know, and then the automation came in. So obviously I tried it. I try everything myself before I ever recommend it to a client. So yes, I tried it myself. And but, you know, time has moved on again where I, you know, I'm refining my, my everything that I do, actually, you know. So what I would write today is not necessarily what I would have written even last year. So don't beat yourself up about it. It's absolutely fine.

Well, thank you. Thank you for counseling me through that, because it took some counseling to, you know, I was embarrassed and I thought, why did I do that? And I think that's really where we get to is Why does anyone do that? It's because we want clients. We want to find a way to be able to do this at scale.

Okay.

And so, it comes from a good place, right? It comes from a place of wanting to serve more people and feeling really confident about what you do and the type of transformation you can provide to other people. But there's sometimes a right way and a wrong way to do it. And I think a lot of it has to do with your own beliefs, your own values, and what you believe to be the right way of doing it. So I want to transition into the how can we start non-spammy direct message conversations? What are some strategies and some best practices that we ought to know about before we start sending DMs in LinkedIn?

Okay, so, so just to sort of set the scene a little bit is that if you can imagine you've got a regular networking event and you go into the networking event and you go, hey everybody, it's Tracy Burnett here, I got this thing to buy, are you interested? Everybody think you're totally mad and think, who is this person? Just, you know, I've never seen her in this meeting before. Whereas if you went in and you went up to people and shook their hand and asked their name or what they did and showed interest in them, then that is a totally different scenario. And That is, I think, is where the magic is, is in building relationships. So obviously initially, if you're sending out a connection request message, you probably haven't got any, they don't know anything about you. But one thing you could do, for example, I have a spotlighting list, a hit list of people that, you know, I come across in my daily travels around LinkedIn. And I think that, you know, they fit my ideal client, profile. And so they go on my list and I'll, I'll check them out and I'll look at their posts, I'll comment on some of their posts over a short period. They then become accustomed to seeing my name, and then I will send them a connection request saying, hey, I've been really enjoying your content. And they know that I'm telling the truth, they know that I'm a real person. And it's not, you know, that, that approach obviously isn't— you can't do that at scale unless you've got your own LinkedIn all day, or you've got somebody doing it for you, but that is just so much more effective. And so you send the connection request, 9 times out of 10 they're going to accept. You send a thank you message and then some, some follow-up messages. But it's— if you keep that thought of the networking event in mind, would you say in a networking event? If you wouldn't, don't, don't say it in a LinkedIn message. So I suppose the approach that I'm pushing is a very personal, um, personal approach. And, you know, I always— I'm always polite. I always try and make everything really pertinent to that person, obviously really professional. And we could even take it back a stage further, that, you know, if we again use our networking event, um, idea, that you wouldn't— if you were selling to CEOs, you wouldn't go to a networking event that had, I don't know, sales assistants, for example. So don't approach people that aren't your target audience. Always approach people that, you know, you know that they're spot on in your target. And you can take it back even further, actually. You know, so many people say, I can work with anybody, or I work with all CEOs across the world, or all C-suite. And they're never gonna be the same. So the first job always for effective messaging is to be really clear about who your audience is. And so then you understand the person, you understand their pains, they understand their issues, their challenges, their life. You understand a little bit more about, you know, the direction that their goals and dreams are going in. And so it's much easier again, if you're in a networking event, you know everybody's a CEO in, you know, I don't know, the retail business, that you, you pretty much know where your conversation is going to go or the sorts of things that you can talk about. Um, so that's partly what I mean about being pertinent.

Um, the thing I love about LinkedIn too is that there, if someone has completed their profile appropriately, You can learn a lot about that person on their profile to identify whether they are your ideal person and that you want to start a conversation with them from the start. I wonder what your best advice is as far as actually starting that conversation from the perspective of the words to say, because it's so important to know, like, what, what are the words that we really should start with? I'll give you an example that for us in Scalable Business Accelerator, when we're talking about podcasting, for example, and looking for stages and podcasts to speak on. We often talk about personalize that outreach as much as you can. You can use a templated process to some degree, but you do want to do some research and personalize that pitch. Do we take the same approach when it comes to LinkedIn messaging? And that is under, like, maybe commenting specifically on an, on a piece of, of content that they've posted or the activity feed on their LinkedIn. And really drawing that out and specifying a specific thing that they said or an insight that they shared or a video that they shared.

Yeah, you can say, I love how you thought through that, you know, challenge, or, you know, I loved your post on, and then maybe give your opinion and ask a question. So it's always good in messaging. A little bit of a rule that I always use is to always end on a question because you're trying to get a conversation going. You do that in real life. You talk to them about, about them, and then you'd ask, you know, and then you'd ask another question. You know, you take the focus off yourself and totally onto the person. So you can ask a question about, you know, their opinion, their views, their thoughts on a particular question that you have. Or, you know, if they're an expert in something, you can ask them, you know, you can say, look, you know, you're the expert in this, could you please 'Answer this' in brackets, 'simple question.' Don't, don't make anything complicated, but, you know, try and, you know, try and keep it very, very friendly, and, and you be the one asking the questions. But a little caveat to that is, is that if you're asking questions, keep it very— keep the question simple and, and make it easy for them to respond, because people don't have time. So if they're going through their inbox, they want to see a short message They want to see a succinct message. They want— they don't want a block of text. They want it spread out so it looks easy to, easy to read. And then the, you know, you don't want to question— sometimes a really good question— I— it's not a really good question, it's a really bad question that I get often is, what are your goals and dreams for this year?

I mean, I know, I know.

Hello?

No, I get those messages too, and I think, well, how much time do you have?

Yeah, but why should I tell you anyway? Because I don't know you.

And more importantly, how much time do I have? Not enough time to answer that question.

Absolutely. So keep it, keep it simple. Ask, ask their opinion, you know, make them put yourself in their shoes. And I think in marketing communication generally, whatever it is, we're all about sort of, you know, about what we do and who we are, and That's not it at all. It's all the focus should be on them, even your profile, you know. And I think when you think where LinkedIn has come from, profiles pretty much used to be resumes, you know, there's still a little bit of that lingering. But, you know, we want to talk to them because as soon as they land on your profile, you want them to know, yes, this is for me, or this person's for me. Yes, they understand my market, or yes, they understand my business or myself, or this, that this is— this page has something of interest to me. Whereas if you're just talking about yourself, then that's not always going to happen.

I want to ask you if you have a, a cadence or a schedule or a number of messages that you recommend that people carve out. Let's say, for example, you know that you want to make X number of new connections this month. You're going to need to send this many direct messages and block that out and do 2 per day for the next week. What is a cadence, or do you subscribe to the idea of a regular cadence of sending messages out in order to get the results you're after?

Yeah, I mean, if you're— most of your marketing is done through the inbox, then you really do need to know what your figures are. So you almost turn that question on its head, you know. How many, how many new clients do you need? How many sales calls do you have to have to get that number of new clients? How many initial calls might you have to have to get to the sales call? How many, you know, conversations do you need to get started? So, and, and from that will come the, you know, and what's your conversion rate as well? And from that will come the number of connections you need to make. And so If then it says you need to make a million a month, a million connections a month, that's obviously not possible. So there's— you need to adjust something along the line. So that's either, either not relying on the inbox for all your clients and maybe going down a content route or getting clients from somewhere else, or changing your product so you can double the price, or changing your market a bit so they'll pay more. So there's So many little tweaks you can do because you need to make marketing time efficient, cost efficient, um, and, and to ensure that it gets you the result. So I always start off with a kind of, what's your goal? What do you know? What do you want to achieve this year? Let's work backwards from that. And if they've got any, um, stats in place so they can tell me certain things, and I can use those, and we can work everything back to what we what we need to start doing. Does that make sense?

Yes.

Yeah, yeah, I love—

I definitely subscribe to the idea of the reverse engineering. Start with the end in mind and then work backwards from that and say to yourself, okay, well, if this is the goal, how will I go about achieving that? And there will be tweaks that you'll have to make likely along the way. Yes. But the thing that I hear from you today is that you can use and should use the inbox, the direct messaging capability on LinkedIn and other platforms as well. But do it in an authentic way, in an authentic voice. Do it by really not being spammy. Don't, you know, the automations, it's not likely going to result in what you want it to result in. It's more advantageous to really truly connect with people on a genuine level.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, keep, you know, do keep going. Don't, you know, always follow up, um, keep on going. Because I think a lot of people think, oh, I'm not going to message them again because they might think I'm, I'm being too pushy. Um, but if, you know, it's, it's the way you do it. Don't just say, hey, I'm just following up on my last message, Or the other classic line is, I'm just pushing this to the top of your inbox. Well, maybe I don't want it pushed to the top of my inbox. So it could be you send something that says, you know, hey, I just read this article about X, Y, or Z, and I thought of you. Would you like me to send you the link? Or I read this article and it was about this, and my opinion on that is this. Would you like to see the article? So it's, again, I always think that networking event sort of scenario in the back of your mind just really does, um, you know, really does work for me.

Yeah, I love that you painted that picture because I think we can all relate to the networking event. We, we've all been to those places and we would never likely conduct ourselves in direct messages the way we do at a networking event, or, and vice versa, right? So it's making that work together and saying to myself, like, would I approach someone like this? Would I say these words? Is this how I would start a conversation if I was shaking hands with someone right now at a conference in San Diego? No, I probably wouldn't. So therefore I'm not going to do it here either.

Yeah, and if you're new to the game, write, write out some messages and sleep on it and come back to them the next day. Yeah, I, I, it's, it's just that sleep on it is just, is, is so good really, because you know, you have— I don't know about you, but I have a feeling often, oh, that's not the right message. And if I get any sort of sense that I don't like the message or it's not, not quite right, then I don't— just don't send it. I'll leave something till the next day.

You just know it. You just sort of know it inside of you and you go, oh, I'm not sure that really sounds like me. Yeah, this is, this is great. I love the tips that you've shared, and, and I, I do believe in the power of LinkedIn. I think there's just a quality group of people there, and there's, there's so much to be said for it as a platform to make connections. And I'd love for us to— I'd love for you to share how people can take your quiz. Tell us about the quiz on your website.

Okay, so you can find out whether you're a LinkedIn ninja or a LinkedIn learner. You just answer some questions, and then I give you a response depending on what your score is, and I give loads of advice and tips in about 2 or 3 emails following that. That, you know, I'm very practical, straight, straight-talking sort of person, so there's no fluff, and, you know, none of your time is wasted. It's something you can, you know, to put into action straight away. So, um, yeah, I think you've got the link there, tracyburnett.com.

Yeah, and Tracy with an E.

T-R-A-C-E-Y. Yeah, if you go on to the home page, um, there's a video on the right-hand side, and on the left-hand side there's a link that you can use.

Awesome, I love that. And the last thing I would ask you, what is a tip, tool, tactic, or technique that's really helping you to market yourself and to market your— is it, is it all LinkedIn, or are there other tools and things that you're doing that are really helping you to market yourself these days?

Well, me personally, I really just do use LinkedIn I think probably the biggest tip, which if I go back 30 years when I started my business, I didn't— well, actually when I started online, which is about 20 years ago, I followed these gurus that say I can get you 10 clients in 10 minutes and adopted the advice that they gave and that's never going to work because it's not you. The chances are it never worked for them. It might have worked for one of their clients and that's about it. And it's all geared to getting money in their pockets. And I spent a lot of money and a lot of time going down that route, and so have my clients. And I think there's nothing more compelling than somebody being themselves and being true to themselves and being authentic. And that will win you the right type of clients, because we all want to work with clients that we love. It's like getting married, we want to marry the right person, and the same goes for clients. If you've ever had a client that you're not a match with, it's like awful getting through that work.

Yes, yes. Oh, Tracy, this is fun. I really appreciate you coming on Cash In On Camera today and sharing these insights. It's been really helpful, I think, for me, for our audience who are watching the video and listening to the audio as well. We really appreciate you taking the time to come in and share these tips on how to start non-spammy direct message conversations.

Do—

this is hand-to-hand combat in some ways, right? Like, let's just look at this from the standpoint of building genuine connections with people and putting in the effort that is required to do that, and it will be fruitful for you in the long run. I really think that's true.

And it is a long game. You know, it does happen where somebody says, oh, hi, I want— in fact, it happened to me last week. I connected with somebody. I hadn't met them at a networking event, but actually we'd been in the same room. I just said, hey, I know you were, I know you were there. Let's connect on LinkedIn. He said, you know, let's have a chat. Want to know more about what you do. So it can be that easy. But, you know, you do have to stick with it. You know, you need to be in it for the long haul. There's no, no easy answer.

No, this is great. Well, thank you so much. And one last word, um, for those who are watching the video right now, if you want to connect, uh, with me, we have a QR code on the screen that you can put your camera onto to connect with me, find out where I'm speaking, find out how you can connect with me and some of the workshops that we have coming up. So feel free to, to do that as well. If you are listening on audio, you can go to any of my social platforms @CherylPlouffe and you'll find the link in the bio to find the same route to to where, what we're up to here at Cashing on Camera and Scalable Business. Thank you, Tracy, for being here today. We really appreciate your insights.

Absolute pleasure. See you soon.