Doubling DM Reply Rate

I’ve spoken at length about sending cold outbound on LinkedIn.

The issue is that the techniques that I used back in 2018 are now common practice, and people are sick of it.

Here’s a new technique for doubling your reply rate.

I got this idea yesterday from Finn (check out his profile) and applied it immediately.

Overnight, I doubled my reply rate when reaching out to people on LinkedIn.

1. Connect with other people after they’ve viewed your profile (Full tactics on how to get people to your profile and connect with you)

2. Download the LinkedIn mobile app

3. Once you’ve had someone message, send them a voice message that takes < 30 seconds to listen to and includes the person’s name you are messaging

   

   Screenshot of sending a voice note to a DM

4. Overnight, I’ve had four people who hadn’t replied to me via text shoot me back a reply after sending a voice note

My suspicion is that very few people are making the effort to send a voice note, which is why the cut-through is so much higher.

Super simple, and you can bang 20 of these out every other day for a total of 15 minutes of your time.

We all know personalised advertising works better than generic messaging.

Start sending voice notes to cut through the sea of text.

Numbers vs Ideas

I've spent the past week negotiating the product scope of a funding pitch with an engineer.

We've been arguing "features" but what has been revealed over-time is our fundamentally different world views.

As engineers, they are very data-driven and have made their case for features based on available data.

"This regression on competitors shows that the gap in the market is xyz"

The problem with this type of analysis is that it's very good at predicting the world as we know it. 

As data looks backwards and projects forward.

But it restricts you to the world as we know it.

Software that does something 20% more efficiently or a hat that looks 10% different.

However, these iterative ideas fail to imagine a different world.

The car and the iPhone spawned entirely new industries.

It's not that one approach or the other is particularly better.

But they are very different.

And you probably want to know which approach you're taking before making decisions about your approach.

Or, in our case, agree on an approach before spending hours discussing it.

VCs, for example, love iterative ideas. Which suggests they are the smarter approach if your main goal is creating a financial return.

However, if you wish to see the world in some fundamentally new way, then you need to leave the numbers behind, at least momentarily, and get comfortable with a world that numbers can't see.