Why You Shouldn’t Connect and Pitch on Social Media
Why You Shouldn’t Connect and Pitch on Social Media
How to sell on social without pitching in your first DM
What is the Connect & Pitch approach?
Have you ever connected with someone on LinkedIn, without any previous contact, and immediately sent a pitch to their DMs?
If you have then you’ve used the Connect & Pitch approach. And, if you have used this approach then I don’t need to tell you just how ineffective it is. For anyone who hasn’t used it or is looking for a reason why not to use it, Connect & Pitch has a 0.6% success rate.
Why?
There’s a common example we use here on Growth Titans -
If you were at an in-person event, you wouldn’t walk up to someone and greet them by telling them what your business is and what you have to sell them, would you?
Of course not. You’d say hello, ask something about them, offer a little bit about yourself and ensure there was genuine interest before you even got close to anything resembling a pitch.
You should be taking the same approach with LinkedIn. In fact, with Social Selling, it’s completely possible to close a sale without sending a single pitch!
How to sell without pitch-slapping your prospects…
Selling on LinkedIn is not an excuse to forgo social niceties or forget your manners entirely, it’s a chance to connect with and find prospects from all over the world. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t still need to approach these prospects with the same decorum as you would in real life.
The difference is that you can get to know a lot about your prospects beforehand and strategies for what will be the most successful approach.
The way you’re going to do this is by…
- Checking out their profile to learn more about their business and interests
- Keeping an eye out for updates/milestones
- Liking their posts and leaving valuable comments
- Connecting with a polite message
This message that you send will not and should not be a pitch of any kind. In fact, try to avoid making the message all ‘me, me, me’ and use something you learned from their profile. Maybe you have a connection in common, a common hobby, perhaps they work in an industry or do something you’d like to learn more about.
Whatever you send as a greeting message, do not make it a pitch - I cannot stress this enough. And, yes, sending a paragraph-long explanation about what you do still counts as a pitch even if you started the message by asking how their day was going.
Even on LinkedIn, there is a certain DM etiquette you need to be aware of. But, why will being aware of this etiquette help you sell without pitching in the first DM? People don’t want to be sold to but they do want to buy - that’s why it takes multiple touchpoints (liking, commenting, connecting, etc.) before they’re open to a sale.
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