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There are so many people asking us to connect on LinkedIn, but not all of them are right for our network. The Social Sales Link team will discuss ways to handle random connection requests to ensure we aren’t missing opportunities.
Raw Transcript Below:
Welcome to #LinkedInLifeLive. I’m Bill McCormick here with the rest of the Social Sales Link team, Brynne Tillman, Sally Jo LaMont, and Bob Woods. And today we’re going to talk about who should you connect with on LinkedIn?
Brynne, I’m gonna throw it over to you. Who should they be connecting with on LinkedIn? How do we do this?
Brynne Tillman
There are really three kinds of connectors. There’s The LinkedIn Open Networker, that’s the lion, right? Right. But these are people that just will connect with everyone. To me, that’s like walking into a chamber of commerce or networking, meeting with a whole bunch of business cards walking around, say, Hi, I’m Brynne, I’ll take your card. Hi, I’m Brynne, I’ll take your card, then I go back to the office, and I put a big rubber band around them and put them in the corner of the desk. What kind of opportunities are you getting from that? Then there’s The Purist. The Purist is someone who will walk into that networking meeting. Let’s say I go in and I see Sally Jo on the other side of the room, and I make a beeline for Sally Jo. And we talk the whole time and we never meet anyone new peers only connect with people they know if they don’t expand their network and keep their minds open to other opportunities. And then there’s The Networker. And that’s kind of where we think everyone should fall part of this is be open to having conversations with people and determine whether or not they’re right. So Sally Jo, why don’t you talk about some of the options that folks have with their new connection requests?
Sally Jo
Yeah. So when you get connection requests, you have three options. The first one is just to accept it, which is without even looking at their profile. Some people do this. And that’s similar to what Brynne was saying, Let me collect all these business cards. Oh, look how many I have Isn’t that great? No, that doesn’t work. So you don’t accept everyone, we’ll get into more detail about that. But you can accept them, you can ignore them totally, which is also what bridges spoke about that doesn’t help anybody’s network, or you can reply to them without accepting. So I personally think it’s great to out there and make sure that you look at their profile. And hopefully they’ve given you a message of why they want to connect with you. And most folks don’t do that. But if you know them, and you familiar with them, and they’re in your sort of in your sphere, I say take the connection request and accept it.
Bob Woods
So once you’ve accepted, you send them what we call a welcome message that provides some value. So here’s a variation of mine: “[First name] Thanks so much for connecting with me on LinkedIn. If you’d like I could send you a link to some resources that can help you with your LinkedIn selling efforts. If you have any LinkedIn questions, in the meantime, please let me know I’m always happy to help.” At that point, If they reply back indicating interest in receiving the link to that, then you can circle back in a couple of days to see if your new connection has any comments, you’ll probably be able to continue the conversation on LinkedIn to the point where it would make sense to take it out of LinkedIn and on to a phone call or zoom session. Let’s say someone sent you an invite. But you know, there’s no message to it, you have no idea why they want to connect with you. Bill knows how to handle that situation.
Bill McCormick
Oh, good. Thanks, Bob. So yeah, people do this a lot. And there are many different reasons. There are actually people who teach out there in the LinkedIn training world not to send a connection request with a message. I don’t know why their numbers show something. But then also there are people that don’t know how to do it. And there’s also a different way of using the mobile app to do it. So LinkedIn itself can be confusing. So you’ll receive connection requests with no idea of what you should do with it. Like why does this person want to connect? Here’s a great idea. Let’s ask them. And yeah, you can actually do that because listen, you’re the Gatekeeper of your network, who you allow into your network and have a direct impact on the others that are in your network.
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