4 Guidelines for LinkedIn Networking

LinkedIn can be a terrific place to develop contacts for your business.  Whether you are using it to cultivate your target market or to form alliances with other businesses, LinkedIn can play a key role in your marketing, networking, and sales plan.  That said, the tendency to be overly aggressive is rampant on LinkedIn.  Today, I want to share some guidelines for LinkedIn networking that you might consider if you are using this as a marketing channel for your business.

I’ll start with my point of view.  I’m an introvert.  Sitting down for coffee is usually not something I am willing to do with a complete stranger.  Phone conversations are also precious to me.  I have a fundamental belief that relationship building matters, and it doesn’t usually happen overnight.  This is a core element of most of the ways that I teach or advise on marketing strategy.

So, understanding all of this, let me itemize for you the typical steps I see about 90% of the time when strangers try to connect with me on LinkedIn:

1. I receive an invitation to connect. A pitch may or may not be included in the invitation.
2. Upon accepting the invitation, it may be followed up with a friendly comment or an article that isn’t related to something I need right now. This step happens sometimes.
3. I receive a message where they tell me exactly what they do and to let me know they are a resource.
4. They ask me to coffee if they are local. They ask me to schedule a call if they are not local.  Sometimes steps 3 and 4 are combined.

Around the time I first started my business, I took some of those coffees.  In none of the cases was the person I sat across from interested in anything about me.  One time, we were such a mismatch of services that I actually had to awkwardly ask why we were sitting down for coffee.  Regardless of how coffee went, they never followed up.  (To be fair, I didn’t either in these situations).

This style of networking may work for some people.  For those people it is probably all about volume.  But, what if we all thought to approach LinkedIn networking with a little more strategy and a lot more patience?

What if we all thought to approach LinkedIn networking with a little more strategy and a lot more patience? #LinkedIn #smallbusiness #business #networking #smb
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I now have a predisposition to assume that new LinkedIn contacts will hard sell to me right away.  Hard selling and rushing ahead seems to be a cultural norm on LinkedIn, but not something that actually syncs up with the typical decision making process of most personality types.  Because of this, I personally lean away from doing new networking directly through LinkedIn.  Instead, I use it as a platform for research (read here for more ideas on this!)

Hard selling and rushing ahead seems to be a cultural norm on LinkedIn. #LinkedIn #smallbusiness #business #smallbiz #smb #networking
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When it comes to LinkedIn networking, here are four guidelines I propose to see if we can make the experience better for everyone.

1. Have a longer on-ramp. Much longer.  It sometimes takes me years to cultivate a good relationship online, so I would never assume that one message will do the trick in a forum like this.
2. Research new contacts before you propose taking the conversation to the next level. Even if you are doing outreach in volume, the moment you see an engaged conversation forming, look them up.  Find out exactly what they do so you can not only know what the parallels may be – but so you can actually refer to them in conversation.
3. Remember that they want to know what’s in it for them. Just because you are selling something doesn’t mean a stranger cares about it.  Make it clear what the value is for them.  And the “value” for them is not a deal you are offering, a bonus package you receive for making sales, etc.  It is about knowing that they will walk away from having coffee with you feeling like it was time well spent, and what that means to them.
4. Know your next steps. For all the people who have contacted me and then didn’t follow up after we met, I know that follow up wasn’t part of their plan.  There was no marketing funnel, goal, or process for tracking our conversation in the long-term.  Unfortunately, that is probably the most effective phase of the process.

On other social media platforms, there is more education that it could take hundreds of touch points to build the relationship you want.  Somehow, the culture of LinkedIn networking has steered away from that concept.

I believe that if you find a way to use LinkedIn that falls outside of this rhythm and culture of moving too quickly, you can get noticed.  If you can build a strategy that takes a longer approach, you can occupy the vacuum being created by all the people who are going in for the kill immediately.

With so many people taking an aggressive stance in LinkedIn networking, you can stand out by simply slowing down to build relationships.

Interested in more ideas for building partnerships on LinkedIn? Check out this Marketing Tip of the Week on “Why the Words ‘Mutually Beneficial’ Lead to Better Business Relationships.”

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