A way to improve introduction emails

A friend of mine, Alex¹ the agency owner, recently introduced me on LinkedIn to a friend of his, Bob the business owner. We work in similar engineering fields and live in the same city, so the connection could prove valuable to both. The introduction was fairly standard:

Hi Bartosz and Bob,

I thought you might want to exchange your experience in this and that.

Regards, Joe.

Mine and probably most people’s reflex is to start introducing themselves by giving a personal pitch of sorts. It could, in essence, look like this:

Hi Bob,

Nice to meet you. I can see that you work with this and that, which I have been doing as well for N years now. You might want to take a look at one of my recent projects/website/portfolio/you-name-it, which is very similar to what your company tries to achieve.

I’d love to meet/call you sometime next week for a quick chat. Does Tuesday 9am sound good to you?

Regards, Bartosz.

Now, this looks like a fairly standard introduction message. However, in my opinion, it’s only marginally better than a standard connection request message that LinkedIn provides. After reading it, Bob could just answer with a short “Fine” or “Let’s do it”. There’s not much more in terms of positive features, though. Notice how I’ve made it all about me: I can see, I have been doing, my projects, I’d love to. It clearly shows I haven’t done my homework to learn all I can about Bob from his publicly accessible profile(s). Following the path of least resistance instead, I just looked at my mental persona, filtered it through what I thought were Bob’s interests and started typing. Surely, there must be a better way!

Let’s turn the tables and start thinking in terms of what Bob would like to read. I suggest a process like this:

1. He has a business to run and that’s most likely his main concern.

2. Focus on that then. How can I learn more about his business?

3. Go back to Bob’s profile and find more sources to learn about it.

4. Pick one common topic and deliver one piece of information that could be valuable for Bob.

5. Plant a hook at the end of the message to get the conversation going.

In this case, it was the company’s website and LinkedIn profile. Spending no more than 10 minutes I was able to come up with one thread that was common to us and that could be of value to my new contact. It was a startup, the founder of which I’d met a couple of weeks earlier. I knew that in the future they planned on using a technology that Bob’s company was providing. In my opinion, a better message would look like this:

Hi Bob,

I am pleased to meet you. I was reading about your company and I thought I would mention The Startup (www.doXcheaper.com).

It is an early-stage startup built in our city by Cecil. He and his team have developed a cheap way to do X. I know they plan on using a tech you provide in the future.

Have you heard about them?

Let’s break it down and see what’s in it for Bob.

1. Right off the bat, I say I’d been reading about his company. The technology that Bob provides wasn’t mentioned anywhere on his LinkedIn page, so it’s clear I must have spent some time to discover that fact.

2. Next, The Startup comes up, together with the reason why Bob might be interested in their existence - they might need his services/products.

3. If Bob wants to contact The Startup, he knows the name of an insider - Cecil, which, while not as good as an email address itself, still allows to derive it pretty easily.

4. Finally, there’s a question to open the conversation.

Of course this whole approach is just a blind guess. Bob might have already heard about Cecil’s endeavour or they might just not be the right client for Bob. That’s not the point though. The point here is that I offer unsolicited potential value. Also, I enter the conversation as a facilitator, not a seller - even if my aim is to try to sell Bob something.

How likely is Bob to respond having seen this message compared to the previous one? Let me know what you think about this in the comments below.