better ways to inside sales effort on linkedin

Even though I run sales for an IT services company, I get approached on LinkedIn by dozens of companies every week. The same continues on my professional emails.
Some are selling me their sales improvement programs (very few), some of them are trying to hire me for a software engineering position in Australia, some are inviting me to their HR podcast and some of them are trying to see if I will be interested in taking a PHP training course which can quickly teach me some intricate details of the language.

As you can tell, the majority of these outreaches are irrelevant to me.



Initially, I used to think that maybe my LinkedIn profiles and other social profiles are emitting the wrong signals. In more techie terms, there could be keywords on my profile which may be leading to wrong outreaches.

However, That is not the case!

Then, will such outreaches really qualify to be called effective inside Sales, business development effort?

Why would you be selling ice to the eskimo?

Over a period of time, I have learned that this is just the bombardment of the same message to hundreds of people, and they are probably working on economies of scale.

It won't matter if the person if I am their potential consumer, as long as a certain %ge of conversion (more than 1%) continues on the number of emails they send, the tactic is considered to be working.
a broken clock is also right twice a day! you see what I am saying.

However, here is the problem with this approach:

1. Services liked LinkedIn, chat programs, email services are becoming smarter and smarter. which means this approach of "bombarding" a message will organically get killed eventually.
2. such notes are noise to the receiver. hence, the receiver over time also becomes smart and can identify such useless outreaches by looking at the subject, etc.
3. Since they can categorize these outreaches quickly, the reaction & the response is universal- deleting the note even without reading 2 lines of the message, sometimes without even opening.
4. Finally, this may not bother a lot of people, but this way you are closing doors for other professionals who are putting in the effort and really reaching out to the right people.

A good outreach will always constitute:

1. Researching the audience. knowing that segment well
2. Researching the audience needs and their challenges
3. Research specifically on the company you are targetting
4. Research specifically on the person you are targetting
5. Custom messaging which caters to #3 and #4 above

of course, It is time taking and a lot of work. But is there is no way around it?

A good outreach will not guarantee conversion.

however, it will mean:

1. you will reach lesser and right people
2. you will think more from a problem-solving point of view
3. better chance your email will get read. may be responded as well
4. your response rates will improve.

What are your thoughts!