LinkedIn Cold Outreach Playbook for early-stage startups

Cold outreach is an asymmetric transaction between the sender and the recipient. The sender wants to grab attention, and the recipient does not want to be sold to. How do you balance this dynamic?

Cold outreach is often frowned upon and considered an annoyance. There are valid reasons for this. If you’ve heard about the 95-5 rule, 95% of your target audience is not in the market for the solution you are selling. Further, a survey conducted by Bain and Google found that 90% of B2B buyers choose a solution that was on their shortlist before starting the buying process. So the odds are stacked heavily against the seller doing the cold outreach, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that it can be annoying for the recipient.

However, if you are an early-stage startup, cold outreach is one of the most natural and inexpensive channels to get your product/solution in front of your target audience. So how can you do it well? Here are some learnings from having done it terribly and well over the last several years.

The Cold Outreach Spectrum

Not all cold outreach is the same. There are two parameters that determine the nature of cold outreach - Scale (how many people you are reaching out to) and Personalization (how tailored your message is to each recipient). The dream scenario is to be able to hyper-personalize at scale, which is extremely hard. So you try to hit some balance between scale and personalization.

Here are a few tips on what has worked well for me.

The Channel

The scale you want to reach is a big factor in determining the channel for the cold outreach. Larger organizations have the resources to get access to business email addresses through services such as ZoomInfo and Apollo, which enables outreach at a scale of tens of thousands of prospects each week. However, this level of scale makes it impossible to personalize the outreach beyond using the first name of the person and their company name. There are less expensive solutions such as Seamless.ai, which can get you to a few thousand prospects a week if not more. The challenge however with email outreach is that without brand awareness, and a well-warmed-up domain for sending emails, most outreach will either get ignored or end up in spam.

On the other hand, LinkedIn is a great channel for early cold outreach. Automation of LinkedIn outreach is not recommended by LinkedIn and can also get you in trouble. So manual outreach is the way to go, and InMail works better than connection requests. Subscription to Sales Navigator is a must if you want to segment and narrow down your target to a manageable size. Secondly, you do not need to worry about deliverability on LinkedIn, and you get some level of credibility based on your presence on LinkedIn, provided you’ve maintained a basic profile hygiene - up-to-date experience, a decent headshot, plenty of connections, and more recently the verified profile badge.

Creating an audience

Sales Navigator is by far the best segmentation tool for cold outreach. The number and types of filters it offers outshines anything that tools such as ZoomInfo or Apollo can do. The basic ones are no-brainers - Job title/function, Company size, Industry, Location, etc. But here are a few that will help you create a more focused and manageable list,

1. Best path in - Lets you filter by the degree of your connection or membership in a group. I’ve found 2nd-degree connections to be the most responsive

2. Changed jobs - Depending on the solution you are offering, this can be a great filter for timing. If someone is new in a role, they might be more likely to explore solutions they can bring to their new team

3. Posted on LinkedIn - This lets you target people who are active on the platform, further improving the chances of your message getting read

Personalization

The level of personalization depends on the size of your audience and your bandwidth while juggling myriad other tasks as a founder or as a part of a small team. Here are some elements that I use to personalize.

1. Job title / Persona - Typically for B2B solutions, there is more than one buyer persona within an org. For example, a hiring solution may require buy-in from the hiring team, its VP/CXO, HR, and finance. If you’ve identified the decision-maker personas, craft a unique message for each with the benefits your solution offers them. While this feels very intuitive, I see so many cold messages that regurgitate the company’s homepage messaging, which is typically broad.

2. Industry - If you have some clients already, targeting other companies in the same industry works better when you mention the name of your client in the outreach. So if you have a handful of clients from different industries, create/customize one message for each industry

3. Company Size - Pain points and value propositions can be very different for companies of different sizes. Segmenting by company size and customizing the message for each can further improve message relevance.

Even with just these 3 personalization parameters, you can essentially craft between 8 and 27 unique messages, assuming each parameter results in 2 to 3 segments. It will take some initial work, but once you have it, it is totally fine to copy/paste and change the name of the recipient - the balance between hyper-personalization and scale.

Extra Points - If you notice something worth including in the message based on the recipient’s LinkedIn profile, take a few extra seconds and do it. Make sure to pick something that’s relevant to the message such as “I see that you are a startup mentor…”, not vague such as “We seem to know a lot of the same people.”

Dos and Don’ts in the Outreach

Dos:

1. Respect the recipient’s time. You are asking them to take an action without them knowing you or having engaged with you previously. This should be reflected in your message.

2. If you can do it elegantly, acknowledge that this is cold outreach. There is nothing better than setting the expectation upfront.

3. Keep the message authentic. Clearly state why you are reaching out and why you think it is relevant to the recipient. Briefly state the problem and solution and leave them with a straightforward call to action.

4. Keep it reasonably short. Do not spell out every feature of your solution. You can build the complete value proposition over a 2-3 message sequence progressively.

Don’ts

1. Do not be misleading in your first message. Typically I get connection requests with something innocuous like “I’d like to expand my network….”. And as soon as I accept, the next message comes with a request for a meeting to sell something to me. It instantly erodes the sender’s authenticity and trustworthiness.

2. Do not use vague, or unbelievable metrics to show credibility - e.g., “We can double your meeting bookings”. This has two problems. One, you are assuming that the prospect is experiencing a certain challenge, whereas they might not be. Secondly, it indirectly questions the prospect’s ability to do their job well. A better approach is to say the same thing in a way that’s more empathetic and authentic. “We have a unique approach to improving meeting booking rate. Some of our clients have seen up to 2X improvement despite starting out with fairly well-optimized conversion flows.” In this sentence, you are acknowledging that the prospect is likely doing all things right already, but you have something that makes it better.

3. Don’t ask for a meeting in the first email. Instead, ask if this is relevant for them and if they’d like to explore further.

4. Do not make your second message a follow-up/reminder. “Wondering if you had had a chance to see my last message”, “Checking in one more time…”. These do not add any value. It is not like you are a team where you are waiting on the other person to deliver something that helps you get your job done. Instead, build on the story from the first message. Share a case study, go deeper into the solution, or try targeting a different pain point than before, which may resonate better.

Cold outreach does not need to be annoying, or complicated. Once you determine the right scale and your ability to personalize as much as you reasonably can, just execute and refine. You will still piss people off. You may get angry responses from some prospects, but that’s okay. Don’t ignore these though. Send a polite response that you’ll keep them off your list and move on.