LinkedIn remains an unrivaled tool for facilitating sales, growing your business and connecting with your target audience. Arguably no other platform can boast such a vast network of professionals, millions of active users, and opportunities to take the lead in diverse industries. 

It’s an invaluable platform that allows businesses to connect directly with potential clients and build meaningful relationships. But how can you leverage all the unique possibilities on LinkedIn to build an effective sales pipeline? 

This article will guide you through the process of building a solid sales pipeline on LinkedIn that will continually bring desired results.

Let’s dive in.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

Let’s start by understanding what a sales pipeline actually is. A sales pipeline is a breakdown of the stages of the selling process that a sales rep will complete, from prospecting all the way to closing and customer retention.

It’s like a guidebook for sales teams to follow to stay on track. A sales pipeline with individual sales steps allows you to better gauge the success of each stage and identify areas that need attention. Essentially, it’s a way to manage your sales opportunities and ensure that your efforts are focused and organized.

Sales Pipeline ≠ Sales Funnel

Sales pipeline and sales funnel are terms that get thrown around a lot, which often leads to some confusion.

A sales funnel refers to the journey a prospect takes from product awareness to making a purchase, focusing on the customer’s perspective. The sales pipeline, on the other hand, is more about the internal processes and stages managed by the sales team. 

Put simply, a sales pipeline is sales rep-focused, while a sales funnel is customer journey-focused. Both are incredibly important protocols to develop for your sales team, and both in unison yield a well-rounded approach to selling. 

A Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your LinkedIn Sales Pipeline

Before diving into building a sales plan on LinkedIn, it’s recommended to implement proper planning and evaluate your current selling procedures.

• Evaluate your existing sales processes to identify gaps and areas for improvement. Analyze your current prospecting methods, lead qualification criteria, outreach strategies, and follow-up procedures.

Examining what you already do via other channels will help you determine how LinkedIn can complement and enhance your current processes.

Now, once you’ve reviewed your existing sales pipeline, consider each sales pipeline stage and examine how it can be executed via LinkedIn.

Stage 1 – Prospecting

LinkedIn is a true goldmine for prospecting. It offers many diverse features to fine-tune your search and identify potential leads.

More specifically, here’s how you can take advantage of LinkedIn to easily find high-quality prospects:

• Use LinkedIn search filters to target specific criteria: industries, job titles, company sizes, geographic location, etc.
• Consider upgrading to the Sales Navigator plan, which offers more advanced search options for hyper-targeted prospecting.
• Join relevant LinkedIn groups and connect with members.
• Prospect by post likes and comments: look for influencers/ authority figures in your niche, scroll through their posts, and compile everyone who liked and commented into a list. Then reach out to these prospects. 

Here is how your automated outreach campaign may look like:

Try it out now and see your sales soar!

Stage 2 – Qualifying Leads

Once you have identified potential leads, the next step is to qualify them based on specific criteria. This step is especially important for saving time and resources, since only a fraction of your initial leads are going to be qualified and have the potential to become paying customers. 

Before you can qualify a lead, you need to determine the important factors you’ll be checking the lead for. Take note of questions about the lead that will tell you if they’re worth pursuing. Regardless of what you’re selling, there are general questions you can systematize and complete based on the specifics of your business: 

– Is their position relevant to your product or service? Do they have the decision-making power to purchase your solution?

– Does the company size align with your target market?

– Are they in a geographical area you can serve?

– Do they have the budget for your product?

– Is the company expanding, and does it have potential needs that your product can address?

– Does the lead fit your ideal customer profile?

… to name a few key indicators. Then, once you have this criteria laid out, you can continue qualifying your LinkedIn leads.

One option is to manually check for these points. This can be done by just reviewing the lead’s LinkedIn profile and researching their company, industry, what they do, etc. on your own. While this is doable, it’s only manageable if you have few leads and a smaller sales team. This approach is not scalable; the other option would be to use a CRM and implement the criteria you’ve outlined while setting up the appropriate filter. 

Alternatively, you can use the Sales Navigator Persona Tool to craft your buyer personas. This will give you peace of mind that the leads coming in from your campaign fit the description of your desired customers.

Once you’re looking to engage with leads on a more personal level, consider outreach via InMails — a paid messaging option that allows you to contact people outside your 1st degree connections. Make your message stand out and have a thought-out plan for outreach. This step should allow you to determine whether a lead is suited for potential purchase and subsequently arrange a meeting to discuss your solution or get to closing the deal directly.

Stage 3 – Reaching Out

Personalization is key when reaching out to potential leads on LinkedIn. Send connection requests with a personalized message that mentions something specific about their profile or recent activity. This can be attending an event, post engagement, recently shared posts, the prospect’s niche, etc; which are all things that can be gleaned from the prospect’s LinkedIn page.

You can even use generative AI tools to craft personalized connection requests, as discussed in our article here. 

You can also always use our best practices to increase reply rates and improve your outreach.

Making message personalization a priority increases your acceptance rate and opens the door for further communication. This is especially true if you’re using InMails and reaching out to people outside of your connection — you need to prove your value and align with the lead as best as you can. 

Stage 4 – Value Proposition

Once you have established a connection, the next step is to present your actual value proposition. At this point the lead should have accepted your message and showed signs they’re open to being introduced to your solution.

Highlight the benefits of your product or service in a way that addresses the specific needs and pain points of the prospect. Share relevant content, case studies, or testimonials that demonstrate how your solution can provide value. The key is to focus on the prospect’s needs and show how your offering can help them achieve their goals.

Stage 5 – Closing

At this stage, you need to highlight the unique value of your solution and present it compellingly. Emphasize the benefits and outcomes the prospect will gain from choosing your product or service. Consider offering incentives such as a free resource, discount, or trial to encourage commitment. 

This part of the communication can take place on a sales call; the important thing is to clearly state the value of your product and demonstrate what results it can yield for your prospect.

Stage 6 – Following Up & Retention

Following up with leads who didn’t respond initially is crucial. A cold lead isn’t a lost lead forever. 

Here are some strategies to “revive” cold leads:

– Send Reminders: Periodically remind them of your previous communications and offers. Drop a “Hey, it’s been a while”, and have your follow-up sequences on hand.

– Share Valuable Content: Send them informative articles, case studies, or industry reports that might interest them.

– Ask for Feedback: Sometimes all it takes is just to ask. Inquire directly if there were any reasons they did not respond or if they need more information.

– Reconnect with New Offers: Introduce new products, services, or discounts that might reignite their interest.

– Personalize Follow-Ups: Reference any specific interests or needs they previously mentioned to show that you remember and value them and their business professionally.

If you want to retain a customer whose email address you’ve already collected, consider adding them to a mailing list with relevant offers, high-quality content and exclusive proposals. 

You can also continue engaging with the customer on LinkedIn and sharing curated content or hot deals. Additionally, you can ask the customer for referrals and endorsements in exchange for discounts and free trials.

Luckily, Closely opens up a wealth of opportunities to fine-tune your current sales processes and manage your lead lists effectively. Read more about how to employ the best outreach strategies using one of the most powerful sales tools!

Pro Tips for Effective Selling on LinkedIn

Build Trust in Your Niche

Building trust is a long-term investment. Once you have a brand and authority, professionals in your niche are more likely to trust you and what you stand for, not  just as an impersonal company trying to sell.

This is why you should focus on a strategy that builds relationships between you and your customers. You can go about it in multiple ways:

• Create and share informative content that provides genuine value to your audience. 
• Engage in social selling by interacting with prospects, answering questions, and participating in discussions. 
• Give your solution to influencers in your niche and ask them to review your product. That way, customers start to associate your product with an actual person, making them more inclined to engage with it.

Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

When a potential customer becomes interested in what you’re offering, naturally they will want to look through your company page and see what it’s all about. Your LinkedIn page is the first thing these engaged leads see, so you need to make sure it’s professional and conducive to selling.

In other words, you need to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

Here are some specific changes you can make to better capture leads with your business profile:

– Headline: Create a compelling and clear headline that reflects your role and value proposition.

– Profile Photo: Use a high-quality, professional photo.

– Banner Image: Use an engaging and relevant banner image that supports your brand.

– Summary: Write a concise summary that highlights your expertise, achievements, and what you can offer potential clients. Be clear on your value proposition. 

– Experience: Detail your work experience in the industry with a focus on achievements and results. Ideally you would include completing testimonials from other clients.

– Skills and Endorsements: List relevant skills and endorsements from colleagues and clients.

– Recommendations: Request recommendations from satisfied clients to build credibility.

– Contact Information: Ensure your contact details are up to date and easily accessible.

Zero In on Your Target Audience

Define your target audience to the smallest detail. It may sound simple enough, but just polishing off your ideal customer profile will allow your team to better allocate resources, target the leads that actually matter, and spend less time qualifying, and more time actually selling.

Create buyer personas that outline their demographics, pain points, and goals. There is no exhaustive list for this, and the more specific you are, the better.

Some criteria and questions to consider include:

– Demographics: What is their age, gender, and location?

– Job Role: What positions do they hold, and what are their responsibilities?

– Company Size: What is the employee count in their company? 

– Industry: What industries do they operate in?

– Pain Points: What challenges and problems are they facing that your product or service can solve?

– Goals: What are their professional goals and objectives?

– Buying Behavior: How do they typically make purchasing decisions?

– Influencers: Who influences their decisions? Are there key figures or publications they follow?

– Content Consumption: What type of content do they consume and engage with most frequently? Long-form, short-form, infographics, articles, blog posts?

Track Success

You can’t know whether your efforts are successful if you haven’t defined objective metrics to track performance. 

Set up specific metrics that reflect the success of your LinkedIn sales strategies. These can include engagement rates, connection acceptance rates, and conversion rates. 

Use LinkedIn analytics to gain insights into the performance of your posts and campaigns. Regularly review and adjust your strategies based on these metrics to ensure continuous improvement. 

These are some of the key metrics you can track:

– Connection Acceptance Rate: Accepted messages/ all messages *100%

– Engagement Rate: Track likes, comments, shares on your posts and content.

– Conversion Rate: The percentage of connections that turn into leads or customers.

– Response Rate: The percentage of messages sent that receive a reply.

– Lead Quality: The relevance and potential value of the leads. This can be done through lead qualifying via a CRM or with an additional lead scoring system specific to your team and the focus of your company.

Conclusion

Building a sales pipeline on LinkedIn mainly requires the knowledge of specific LinkedIn features and how they fall into the individual stages of selling. If you’re already familiar with LinkedIn’s selling tools and their functionality, outlining a pipeline becomes pretty straightforward with a step-by-step plan.

Essentially, you can adapt your selling process on other channels and implement tools like Sales Navigator and Lead Gen Forms to capture leads on LinkedIn. Since it’s such a diverse platform with access to millions of professionals with varied needs and interests, taking full advantage of LinkedIn to build the trust of an audience and get your solution in front of people is a golden opportunity in these conditions.

Remember the key components of your sales process, share high-quality content, foster connections with your leads and have a clear value proposition – and you’ll be good to go on LinkedIn!

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