Standing Out in a Sea of Sameness: Crafting Meaningful Messages for Lasting Client Relationships

Hi [insert name here]! 

Hope you're doing well.

It seems like you’re interested in fostering genuine relationships with your prospective clients. I've been working on a new article for recruiters to help them manage and scale their business opportunities and would love to connect. 

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If this sounds interesting to you, check out my article below! 

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Best, 

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I’ll bet you a version of that exact message is sitting in your LinkedIn inbox right now, but it’s suggesting some new CRM, or AI tech, or pushing a prospective employee — and I’ll also bet you’ve deleted three hundred more like it. Yes, though it’s proven that cold messaging on LinkedIn does yield responses (about three times higher than other methods like cold email), like most things, it only works if it’s done right. 

Though it can feel easy to cast a wide net and use a copy and pasted message template, that’s just the problem: it’s easy. People, especially potential clients, aren’t dumb. Chances are, they’ve written a form email or two and can spot one from a mile away. Using poorly-targeted, mass, or overly-tactical messaging can lead to some pretty bad backlash and sour someone on you permanently. After all, there’s a reason that the popular forum Reddit has a Recruiting Hell thread that’s amassed 652 thousand members (that’s the entire population of Grand Rapids and then some) and one of the hottest topics is identifying and subsequently roasting spammers. 

Sending out mass messaging makes your potential client feel like they’re just a number you’re trying to reach that day. It’s easy to tell when someone’s not spending energy on you, and people tend to reflect the energy they’re met with. But that begs the question: how do you do it right? Here are three tips that will take your messages from spam to specific:

1. Keep Your Friends Close, and Their Friends Closer. Instead of going for people who aren’t immediate connections, look at the people close to you and use them as a springboard. What needs do they have? Who’s in their network? Can what you’re offering fill a niche that they have? And if not them personally, is there someone in their network they can introduce you to? Just because the messages you’re going to send need to require more effort doesn’t mean you can’t find other ways to maximize your productivity. 

2. Harness the Power of Thoughtfulness. When it comes to crafting your message, what makes a message feel thoughtful? Easy, put yourself in your potential clients’ shoes. What would make you respond? Think about the preferences and behaviors of your ideal clients when crafting outreach messages. At the very least, consider that you’d be more likely to respond if you felt like someone had done their research on you and sent a message that felt tailored to you. In fact, this experiment from Medium identified the hoard of messages that developers have to wade though, and that doesn’t account for how same-sounding all of them felt (for example, the word “opportunity” showed up nearly 1,000 times). So, do your research. Check out their profile, see what they want and what matters to them. Do they have a personal website? Have they been on a podcast lately? All of this is part of your research. Is it going to take longer than typing out something generic? Yes. But in the same way that people recognize laziness, they also recognize effort. 

3. Think Long Term. While there’s something to be said about getting right to the point, it can also feel extremely cold, impersonal, and blunt. On average, people respond to cold messages after being followed-up with anywhere between 4 and 9 times. That’s a lot of space to work with. Additionally, if someone doesn’t need your services now, they might need them in the future, and if they’ve had a pleasant conversation with you (as opposed to being hammered by multiple sales pitches), they’ll likely be open to coming back to you later. Remember, while you might get some initial quick responses, it’s a marathon, not a sprint.

At the end of the day, regardless of what you’re selling, there’s no way to manufacture human connection. A formula or template or a certain combo of words that’s guaranteed to get you leads doesn’t exist, but hard work, research, and intentionality do. Though it’s an old adage, it’s stuck around for a reason: quality will beat out quality, every single time. 

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