While working this week with a large company, we asked their entire sales team about their success rates in cold outreach to potential clients on LinkedIn. Here’s what we found:
More than 80% of the sales team struggles to achieve a 50% success rate with connection requests. This is a concerning statistic.
Why are our success rates so low?
The answer to this question is not simple; it encompasses various aspects: factors intrinsic to the person sending the request and external factors on the potential client’s side.
Intrinsic factors:
- An unsuitable profile picture that doesn’t inspire trust.
- A job title that doesn’t encourage acceptance: “They’re just going to try to sell me something,” “What they sell isn’t relevant to me,” or “They’re not in my industry.”
- A connection message that’s off-putting or cringeworthy: “Get away from me.”
External factors:
- The recipient sees the request at a bad time (they’re busy).
- They don’t understand what you’re saying.
- They don’t see any value in connecting with you.
- Or simply… they don’t know you! Period.
We need to analyze all these aspects methodically to address them: improving profiles and also tackling external factors to find ways to increase the conversion rate.
On the other hand, when we asked the question: “How many of you include a note in your connection request message?” we got the following results:
Nearly half of the sales team sends connection requests without a message. Interestingly:
Connection requests without a message achieve a 50% acceptance rate.
Therefore, one of the first “quick fixes” to implement is:
- Quick fix: If your acceptance rate is below 50%, send connection requests without a message. If your rate is above 50%, keep doing what you’re doing.
- Next, we’ll conduct a detailed analysis to aim for an acceptance rate above 50%—towards 70%, which could be the target.
We cannot afford acceptance rates below 50%.
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