Every day, your prospects are assaulted by a digital firehose of generic, AI-generated emails and connection requests. It’s an incessant barrage of noise, and as a survival mechanism, your buyers have learned to ignore it. 

The world is learning to ignore you, and that presents a profound challenge. How do you capture attention in a world that is instinctively tuning you out?

The answer isn’t to yell louder; it’s to be more human.

You have a choice. You can either keep adding to the noise and get ignored, or you can leverage the most powerful tool in sales: authenticity. 

Persistence has always been a powerful ally to help top sales performers break through. But as my book The LinkedIn Edge puts it: “persistence without differentiation just adds to the noise.” 

Your messages must be targeted, personal, and powerful enough to compel a response.

1. Stop Being Vague and Get Targeted

When you’re prospecting to a large segment, it’s not practical to spend hours researching every single person on your list. Your job is to be efficient and effective. 

This is where targeted messaging comes in. It’s a one-to-many approach that works because you’re crafting messages that resonate with the majority of the prospects on your targeted list.

The key is to leverage the goldmine of information right at your fingertips. Instead of guessing, use LinkedIn to tap into industry trends, hiring signals, and geographical shifts. 

Go to LinkedIn’s search filters and industry groups to see what professionals in your target segment are actively discussing. Pay attention to the comments on popular posts—this is where people openly share frustrations, challenges, and opinions that reveal their most pressing business concerns. Find the patterns, and then build your message around them. 

This approach ensures your message is timely, relevant, and lands with your target audience.

2. Master The Art of Making People Feel Important

When you’re trying to engage a high-level decision-maker on LinkedIn, a generic, targeted message is a massive turn-off. It’s sales malpractice. Executives are busy, and they know when you haven’t put in the work. When you send a copy-and-paste message, you’re telling them you don’t care, you’re lazy, and they’re unimportant.

To break through, you must prove you’ve done your homework. Your prospect needs to feel a human connection, to sense that you understand their unique situation. 

Before you write a single word, step into their shoes and ask, “How do they feel? What are they worried about?” “What would make them feel important?”

Your job is to find the emotional reference points—the stress, the anxiety—and acknowledge them in your message. Look at their profile, their company page, and their posts. Look for key signals in their content and comments. This is your chance to show them you know them.

3. Stop Relying on AI for Personalization

AI is powerful, but don’t use it as a crutch. You can use AI to do some of the heavy lifting for you, like speed up research, organize data, and suggest insights. But AI does a poor job of crafting truly personalized messages. 

More often than not, AI personalization is a shallow facade of personal facts scraped from the internet. It combines a couple of tidbits with gratuitous, sometimes cringe-worthy, flattery that executives easily see right through.

This is where you, the human, must put your heart, intuition, and intellect into crafting the perfect message. Your prospect knows when you’ve taken the time to write a message that relates to their unique situation. That’s your bread-and-butter.

4. Speak Their Language

If you want to get through to your prospect, you have to speak their language. Language is powerful. Travel anywhere in the world and attempt to speak another culture’s language, and people will pull you in and embrace you—just for trying. 

The same is true in sales. The human similarity bias prompts us to believe that people who are like us are more trustworthy. Speaking your prospect’s language makes your prospecting message sound familiar, safe, comfortable—and most importantly—memorable.

Their language includes company jargon, acronyms, industry terms, and their emotional hot buttons. LinkedIn is a window into what your prospect is thinking and feeling. It’s a network where prospects teach you their unique language in real time.

Pay attention to how they describe themselves on their profile and in their posts and comments. Look for clues that reveal their pain, problems, values, and professional identity. This is the ultimate key to differentiation and your path to a win.

The Wake-up Call

The world of sales is learning to ignore you. Don’t let your pipeline run on empty because you’re adding to the noise. 

The time for excuses is over. 

Start using LinkedIn Direct Messages as a system to fill your pipeline with new business. 

Go get to work.

The definitive playbook for mastering the world’s most powerful professional network is here. Buy The LinkedIn Edge today on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Contact us for team bulk orders.