LinkedIn added Conversation Starters to their messaging platform, making contacting people you never speak to so easy, even a fifth grader can do it! Let’s get started:

Let’s say you’re a salesman and you want to contact someone you have never talked to before about buying your product. This is always a dilemma, right? Hmm… what should be my opening line? Well, LinkedIn has now made this easy by giving me handy conversation starters.

All I have to do is click the lightbulb. Great!! 🙂 And it’s not creepy or spammy at all! Every executive will love getting tons of these kinds of messages:

Click… Hi Suzi, I’ve noticed you’ve also connected with Mike Manuel. How did you…

Click… Hi Suzi, I noticed you have 10 connections at Google. Have you heard…

“With conversation starters, you can spend less time figuring out what to say, and more time having conversations that help you get ahead and reach your professional goals,” says Sammy Shreibati, LinkedIn Product Manager.

Sheesh… give me a break! Helpful. No. Spammy. Yes. Seriously, this is not an authentic way for salespeople to contact prospects, especially because it is built-in to LinkedIn messaging where decision makers can be guaranteed to receive multiple versions of these in their in-box.

All sales messages should be authentic, personalized to the prospect and provide some specific solution the marketer knows that the receiver of the message will relate to.

Here are some prospecting tips.