7 Seconds - Live or die!
Let's Not bring Our Cold Outreach Playbooks To Linkedin
7 Seconds
That’s all you got at the beginning of a cold call.
It’s the time you have to make the other side give you another 30 seconds. Or maybe 60. And those will buy you another 5 minutes. Maybe.
We all have lived, worked and cold called by that rule. (Or variations of it.)
We all have engineered, trained and focused on that 7 seconds. The perfect tone. The perfect opener. The hook. The energy level.
And we did this with email as well. The perfect subject line. Not more than exactly 54 words. Use this script. Use that playbook.
Cold Outbound is transactional
See, if you have only 7 seconds or 54 words, or one hook line - then you need to cut to the chase. You can’t be chattering around. You have to laser focus on the problem and possible solution.
You have to be transactional. Very transactional.
You can’t afford to be social.
And that’s a problem.
Social Selling is personal
If you bring your cold outbound playbook to Linkedin, prepare for disappointment more often than you will get appointments.
Because you will disappoint most people.
You will disappoint all new contacts, when you pitch slap them right after they accepted your connection request.
You will disappoint your management with poor results.
You will disappoint yourself, after you realized that you have built a network of burned contacts.
So what now?
While in cold outbound the right message is everything, in Social Selling talking to the right person is all that matters.
You can literally strike up a conversation around anything. The weather, football, baseball…or any business topic you like, as long as you are speaking to the right person.
At some point (if you have shown genuine interest in the person and their business) the person will ask:
So, tell me Steven, what is that you do?
Well, thanks for asking! Let me tell you…
If the person you are talking to is the right persona, with the right ICP (ideal customer profile) and has a problem you are able to fix, you will have a qualified sales conversation and a solid opportunity in the books. Guaranteed.
But, but - how does that scale?
That’s my learning: It doesn’t.
And that’s a good thing, because I doesn’t have to.
The fabulous Jen Allen-Knuth has recently published a great Linkedin post, about how “at scale” is the term, that was the downfall of SaaS. And I would argue of everything sales in the last decade.
Look, if 8 out of 10 cold calls end in a “f*%ck you!” then you need to make hundreds of calls to fill your calendar.
But my working day has only 8 hours (Who am I kidding? I am a founder: it has 12 hours or more… 😂). But back to the point: I can only take around half a dozen meetings a day.
But if all of them are with the right person, with the right ICP and the right problem - then why would I need 90 more? Or 900?
So the question is not how can I reach more people.
(And the answer certainly is not “with AI generated personalized brute forced mass messaging”.)
The question is: How can I reach enough of the right people?