The Ultimate LinkedIn Messaging Guide

CHAPTER 11THE SEVEN‐FIGURE LINKEDIN MESSAGE

Here is the whole story of how a single individual LinkedIn message opened the door to one of the biggest sales in my career.

I will go into as much detail as I can as the processes completed before and after the message are equally as important as the message itself.

Setting the scene

Whilst working for a large IT company in the UK, my team mainly sold IT training packages to SMEs (small to medium‐sized employers). When selling to SMEs, it's often very easy to reach decision‐makers via cold calling—well, it certainly used to be back then—as there aren't as many people or layers in the business.

We would go in and present a variety of training packages valued between £3,000 and £18,000. The sales process often took around 1–2 months from prospecting through to closing.

Most of the time, we would first cold‐call to find the decision‐maker and aim to either email information over or book a meeting straight off the call.

During the meeting, we would then run through needs, listen and learn about the prospect. After that, we would go back, put together a proposal and call or meet them again to run through it.

It was a highly competitive market; we had a lot of competitors, some bigger and some cheaper than us. A lot of our success came down to either being the first to contact the prospect or our ability to build stronger relationships.

Following some really rapid growth, and as the top‐performing person in sales, I was tasked with ...