I don’t know if you’re on LinkedIn, but you probably get this all the time: somebody connects with you and then immediately messages you.

Some of the people are just straightforward and say, “Hey, nice to meet you, looking forward to get to know you.” And that’s the right way to do it. But the other way is what I like to call ‘Connect and Pitch’. This is when they connect with you and immediately they jump on messenger and try to sell you their stuff. The reason they do that, is because they’ve been taught that type of prospecting the methodology. I’m here to tell you it’s wrong and it doesn’t work.

The Connect & Pitch of the Week

So when someone hits me up with the ‘Connect and Pitch’, I copy it and change the names to protect the not-so-innocent, and put it on Facebook. I don’t want to shame anybody on LinkedIn, so I share it on Facebook with a graphic named Connect and Pitch of the Week. And here’s the latest winner.

I posted, “Kiddos, don’t be this guy.”

“Thanks for connecting Brian, noticed you’re in the IT field, which I’m not, and wanted to reach out to you to personally introduce myself. My area of expertise is helping IT executives reach their financial goals so they can enhance their lifestyle, better support their families without worrying about any last minute things before it’s too late, with my four step process trademark. I’m curious, Brian, do you need any help with this? Either way it’s still good we’re connected. Warmly, blah, blah, blah.”

So I respond back, “Hey, blah, blah blah. I notice that you’re in the financial field so I wanted to reach out to you and introduce myself. My area of expertise is helping financial executives learn how to use LinkedIn to prospect better so they can enhance their lifestyle and better support their families without worrying about it at the last minute before it’s too late, my innovative LinkedIn strategy trademark…..”

So that, my friends, is my response to the Connect and Pitch.

Cold Calling Much?

The thing about a Connect and Pitch is that they are using an old technique; it’s basically online cold calling. Sooner or later, will get a bite and somebody that will respond back and say, “Oh, tell me more.” But the problem is you have to go through a thousand people before you’ll find somebody who will actually do anything.

So what do you have to lose, right? You connect with people. If somebody responds, great; if they don’t, and most of the time I just ignore them, but every once in a while I like to have a little fun. Of course, I never hear back from those people.

In sales, we call it cold calling. In advertising, we call it spray and pray. What you do is you take a mailer and you put it in everybody’s mailbox and you hope that somebody at that time needs what you’re selling, whether it’s lawn mowing, or furnace repair or roof repair, whatever. It’s the same thing that door-to-door salesman do, but in advertising, you’re going to get a very small percentage of people that will actually communicate back with you, and that’s what you expect.

Social… Media…

But doing this on a social media platform such as LinkedIn is probably just flat out wrong. Why? Because social media’s exactly that.

Number one, it is social. It’s meant to be a relational thing. This is not a place for you to post your advertising.

The second thing is media. What kind of information are you providing?

He’s not providing any information. He didn’t offer, “Hey, you know the market’s going up, the market’s going down. This is what I do.” He’s trying to sell me on his special strategy. Yeah.. like THAT’S going to work.

So this, my friends, is one of the reasons why, if you’re going to use social media, it’s content marketing that works. It’s all in the numbers.

Advertising… It’s In The Numbers

When advertising, if you send out a thousand mailers, you’ll get about a 1% to 2% response, which means that you’ll maybe get 10 to 20 people that will actually respond. Out of those 10 or 20 people, you’re going to get about a 10% return, so you might sell one. So if you send it out to 10,000 people, you might get 10… that’s the game. And that works in advertising, but it doesn’t work as well in relationship building. And that’s what we’re here to talk about.

The bottom line with this is don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want done to you. It’s the golden rule, right? Do unto others as you’d want done unto you. So when it comes to cold calling, or when it comes to prospecting, here’s the deal.

  • When you contact a prospect, you’re a salesman. When a prospect contacts you, you’re an expert.

So which would you rather be? A salesperson or an expert? And that’s what content marketing does for us. Here’s something I’d like you to think about.

  • I would rather spend 10 minutes with 10 people who already know me then spend 10 seconds with 10,000 people who don’t.

But that’s the difference between building relationships and spray and pray, or connect and pitch. The bottom line is, it takes time to build trust, to build influence, but once you do, people start to realize you know what you’re talking about.

Getting To Know You

Maybe it would have been different if that guy would have come back and said, “Hey, you know, I’ve got some incredible insight about the market that a lot of people don’t know about, and I want to share it with you because I know Freddy and Freddy knows you.”

If there’s some kind of connection, I might be more interested. But you have to have a reason to want to connect with that person and give them a reason that it’s beneficial for them to spend their time on what you’re saying.

It takes time to build that new like and trust. Plus, if you give them information that comes from somebody else who you really know, like, and trust, you become an expert. Because if Freddy likes it, why wouldn’t you like it? So there’s a trusted connection.

The other thing you have to think about is when you’re creating content, you want to create content that’s an asset that you can use over, and over, and over again. What you want to do is unlock your knowledge vault and share your wealth with the world.

So we’re not here to just pitch marketing messages. We’re here to educate, to give people a good reason to want to pay attention. And you know what happens if you do that, eventually you become the expert and they contact you.

It’s In The Numbers (Part Deux)

The last piece of this puzzle is having measured results. And what I mean by that, I have something I call the Marketing Trifecta. It’s in my book, The Bacon System, and the Marketing Trifecta is three things.

Number one is having a killer website, a place that has great information. It could be your blogs, or your podcasts, and whatever else.

The next thing is Google Analytics. Being able to measure how people are getting to your website and what they are doing when they get there.

The last piece is having content. This content on your website is used to seed it by putting out great information that people can read, consume, and they end up back on your website to read it. So you can use social media to post that content, draw people back into your website, and hopefully get them on your email list, get them to listen to your podcast, take some sort of action.

People listen to my podcasts and read my blogs. Not everybody calls me up, but every once in a while I get that phone call. “I listened to the podcast, it struck me. I want to talk to you more.” You become the expert when you share your knowledge with others. Inside of Google Analytics, the average website usually gets about one to two minutes and two to three pages worth of traffic. And that’s for an average visitor on many different websites. But if you’re putting really good content, I’ve seen times like five, six, 10 minutes on a website, because not only did they like that article, but they dig deeper to look for more information, and they spend maybe three to five minutes.

Final Thoughts

The key thing is by sharing your best stuff, by being a resource, you become the expert. I want to leave you with this. If you spend time with 10 people who know you, it may take longer to get results, but the results will last longer.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/