How to Get Your First 10 Customers with LinkedIn Outreach (Without Being Cringe)

0:00I am Colleen. I am a Ruby on Rails developer turned startup founder. I've started several businesses. Some have been successful. One was very publicly shut down on a podcast maybe you've heard of heard of. But what I've learned on the startup journey is that you have to talk to your customers. It is the number one most important thing. Okay, so let's talk about where to find

0:27these customers. The world is noisy, attention spans are short, and distribution is king. You have to talk to your customers. We all know this, but how do you do it? Well, the easiest way to get started is on LinkedIn. Why LinkedIn? Because I said so. That's right. I'm going to mom the out of

0:51you today. It is the social network we love to hate. And even though we all hate it, mysteriously, we are all there. Twitter is a dumpster fire. Who knows what's happening with Blue Sky? Who knows what's happening with Meta? LinkedIn is the place to be right now for B2B sales. I'm a developer founder like most of you are, and until about a

1:16year ago, LinkedIn just gave me the ick. But it's the new channel. It's the place to be. So what are we talking about today? We're talking about cold outreach. This is it. You find people, you talk to people, you sell the people things. That is what we are doing. But before you can do cold outreach,

1:38you've got to hit the basics. Banner, about section, headline, picture. This feels like the super boring stuff, and it's incredibly hard to get founders to do this, but you really have to do it. It won't take It won't take long, I promise. And why do you have to do it? Because when you send a connection request on LinkedIn, what people see is that little those words

1:59under your name. That's what people see. That's the number one way they're going to determine if they're going to connect with you or or not. Um so, we're going to talk about outreach, but to get your outreach to work, you have to have decent LinkedIn profile. So, the next thing you need to do is you

2:16need to start posting on LinkedIn. We don't want the scraping gods to ban us when we start our cold outreach. So, we want LinkedIn to know that we are real people. And there's a ton of strategy. Leanna just gave an hour talk on content strategy that can go into this. But, if you're new to content, don't overthink

2:35it. What um what I teach is there's three buckets with content. It's education, trust factor, and customer success. So, every week pick one thing from one bucket and post about it. But, all of the carefully thought-out posting in the world isn't going to work if the only people that you are connected to on LinkedIn are your old college buddies. It is really important that you have the right people connected to you and seeing your content that you

3:06are posting on LinkedIn. So, let's talk about connecting to those people. How do you find those people? Well, you have to build a list. And there's everyone's in a different stage here, right? Some people are idea validation, some people are customer acquisition, some people are are beyond that and they're just brand building. But, you have to build a list. And this is a Sales Navigator screenshot. And um you know, you can build a list with LinkedIn's native search, but you know, we came to play, so shell out the 100 bucks for Sales Nav,

3:41and um build your list using Sales Nav. And two things I really want to point out here are there's this best path in over on the right that a lot of people miss. And what you can do is you can actually build a list that is connections off of famous LinkedIn influencers. So, if you are in a particular space, you can find influencers in your space, and then build a list of people that are connected to that person. And the other thing I always tell people is always toggle on posted on LinkedIn because you don't want your cold outreach going to

4:14people who never log on to LinkedIn. Okay, now you are ready to do your cold outreach. But, don't be that guy. Um using AI I'm sure you all You're all probably sitting there thinking, "Oh my god, Colleen, I get so much crappy AI-generated on LinkedIn. This is terrible." That's how That's why it's easy to stand out, right? Like, you see like

4:40this, and you're like, "What is this?" Um So, AI tools to do the content outreach is a terrible idea. Don't waste your money on those tools cuz you will just be like everyone else. Be a human. Again, everything Leanna was just saying, um don't use AI to write your cold outreach. I love AI. I had a whole

5:01business built on AI. But, this is not the place for AI. AI can help you outline. It can help you copy edit. It can help you do all kinds of things, but don't let it write your messages for you. Okay, so what do we do? We are going to send a connection request. We've built that great list. We put some thought into it. We're going to send these people something they may actually find useful. Keep it short and to the point, and we're trying to start conversations. I really want to talk

5:29about number two. Sending people something that might actually be useful. This is really important. Don't just send them something they could Google or, you know, LLM really quickly. You need to put effort into providing your ICP something that they want. One of the founders, for example, one of the founders we work with, um, he is targeting SEO agencies. So, he scraped, he wrote a program to scrape 100 job boards to pull all of these SEO job listings to see what the salary differentiator was based on their level of AI expertise. So, that is like a custom special thing people in the SEO space are really into cuz they want to

6:08know how to make more money. We had another founder who was targeting real estate agents. So, he built a LinkedIn carousel with five sales tips you might not know that you might not know. Like one, for example, was before you cold call someone, text them with your name cuz then when you cold call them, your name pops up instead of probable spam and they're more likely to answer. So, you really this number two really you need to take some time and you really

6:35need to build something that's useful. That is the key to getting people to respond to your messages. Um, okay, so here's a cold DM I sent to about 1,000 people that led to a lot of really great conversations. And the one thing I didn't say about Sales Nav is when you're building a list, you want your list to be like 700 to 1,200 people. You do not want a list of 100,000 people. Like you're doing it wrong if your list is huge. You are not

7:00niche down enough. Um, so this is an interesting one because this is one I sent about a year ago and you'll notice in here I use a a word I would not use now that sounds like it's AI generated. Can anyone guess? Streamline. I would definitely not use streamline in a cold outbound message anymore. Um, so this one worked I think because it was short and then I was providing marketing managers these SQL queries to help them build reports they were

7:28already building by hand. Um, and then Lee and I didn't even plan this, but another thing that works is light flattery and light appeal to ego and that is my next slide. This is really long. You might look at this and be like, "Oh my gosh, this is so long." But this one worked really,

7:45really well. Um and I think it was because I'm reaching out to you, you're a product leader in the space. I'd love to hear what you think of this idea. At this time, I was going through a pivot. So everything I'm saying in here is true. And if there are any um very sharp eyes in here, that last paragraph is pulled from a common resource people often Anyone? Know where I got that last

8:10paragraph from? I You can't answer. Yes. Literally pulled the last paragraph from Jason Cohen's LinkedIn outreach he talked about like 10 years ago. Um still works really well. People loved this. And no one I mean, I got on several calls with product managers after I sent this DM. Completely cold. And no one asked to be

8:35paid, but they loved that I offered. They were like, "Oh, well, usually my hourly rate is this, but this is so interesting." So even if they had wanted to be paid, I would have paid them. But this kind of thing can work really, really well. And um I added this slide a little late because we're working with one founder who's having all of these great conversations, these cold conversations on LinkedIn, and he's like, "No one's buying my product." Like, "Well, you Well, you have to tell them you have a product, right? This is The goal is obviously to make the sale at some point." So all of the relationship

9:07building and the trust building is really good, but you do eventually have to remember to ask for the sale. And so we're doing this cold outreach to build trust, to build the relationship, and you should be able to identify their pain points. If your product's a good fit, you you have to tell them, right? You have to say, "Hey, sign up" or whatever. Um and one of the things we find that works really well is you do it with a special offer. So it could be like white glove onboarding with with founder, um whatever. But you need some kind of special offer for this person to

9:39encourage them to sign up. And if it's not, just don't. Like, it doesn't you know, we're not we're trying to find well, depends on where you are, but some people most people are trying to find some semblance of product market fit. So, um, you know, if they're not your right customer, they're not your right

9:54customer. And you'll find that different audiences respond differently to cold outreach. So, in my experience, marketers, product people, SEO people respond. If you're targeting developers, good luck. Um, [laughter] see me after, that's a whole different strategy. But, um, here's the whole thing. Okay, so let's talk about the whole cycle of what we're going to do for LinkedIn outreach is we're going to update our LinkedIn profile, define an ICP, create a resource, that's where you're going to spend most of your time, connect with them, that's easy, we're going to automate that, share the resource, easy, except you want to get the language right in that cold outbound,

10:32um, start a conversation and hopefully sell them something. And what I really think everyone's going to love in here, if you haven't done LinkedIn outreach or started it, you can set it up as a system. So, this is something like we're all like we're all looking for systems, right? We're all trying to optimize our time as much as possible. What's great is you can just set this up and it runs for you. So, one of the things I think a lot of people get stuck into is like, what is the best tool for the job? It's like it doesn't matter, you just need to pick one, right? We're all being inundated

11:05with new tools, new scrapers, I'm sure you all, you know, get get these all the time. So, just pick one. Like, it does it don't overthink it. Um, I use LinkedIn Sales Nav. If you don't want to pay for LinkedIn Sales Nav, you can use LinkedIn free search, um, and then I recommend PhantomBuster or Expandi to automate the outreach. And LinkedIn is going to cap you at the number of messages you can send per day. So, it's better to get this set up sooner rather than later cuz to go through a list of a thousand

11:32people is going to take a while. And um one more quick tip is if you have an existing customer base and you are new to LinkedIn and you are just trying to get into LinkedIn, um first of all, connect with all of your existing customers. Second, as soon as someone signs up for your product, you should find them on LinkedIn and connect with them on LinkedIn. We are seeing great success with that. It It makes the It moves the conversation from onboarding emails to like casual chat

11:59with the founder on LinkedIn. So, um that's it. I expect everyone to set this up tonight. I will see you at the airport tomorrow. If you can show me your LinkedIn outbound, I will buy you a cup of coffee. And if you need any help, Leanne and I run SaaS marketing gym. This is what AI is good for, guys, doing pictures of Leanne and Colleen as claymation in a

12:21chocolate box, not cold outreach. [laughter] Thank you. [applause]