Planning to sell your products or services via social media? Let me tell you, LinkedIn is the best place to do so, especially if you’re running a B2B firm and trying to make outbound sales. Similarly, if you are searching for professionals in a particular work industry, LinkedIn is the solution.
But do you know how to utilize the platform for outbound sales tactics in the right way? In today’s read, we will show you how to maximize its effects and the best LinkedIn outbound sales tactics so that you can make the most out of LinkedIn.
We will cover:
- Difference between Inbound vs. Outbound Sales
- Best LinkedIn Outbound Sales Strategies
- What to use in the LinkedIn Outbound Sales Messages
So, are you ready to conquer LinkedIn?
Let’s go:
Differences between inbound and outbound sales:
Let’s check out what are outbound sales and the differences between inbound and outbound sales?
Outbound sales mean you will reach out to your business leads and prospects on LinkedIn rather than they come to you.
On the other hand, inbound sales include all the leads that come to you. Typically, because they like what you do and your content. In other words, the leads believe that you can solve their problems.
Every business had various kinds of products and services. And both inbound and outbound sales have their benefits and drawbacks.
But in this read, we will focus on the outbound sales generation on LinkedIn and how to do it efficiently.
When doing outbound sales on LinkedIn for lead generation, you need to:
Send a connection request – This is the first thing to do. Whenever you want to reach out to someone, you need to send them a connection request on LinkedIn.
However, to ensure that your request gets answered, we advise you to add a note describing how you know them and why you want to connect with them. But keep the notes up to 300 characters.
Use advanced LinkedIn Boolean search – Through this feature, you can combine keywords with the search operators to find more relevant prospects on LinkedIn. You can use AND, NOT, OR search filters to reach out to a specific target audience.
Import an address book – This is perfect if you are new on the platform and want to connect with those you know already. To import your address book, look for the Setting & Privacy tab under the Account section and go to ‘Account Preferences and Syncing Options’, and from here, you can sync your contacts.
Use phone contacts – Another thing you can do to connect with people you already know is to import your phone contacts. Go to ‘My Network’ and select ‘Continue,’ and you will see all the suggestions to import your phone contacts.
Pay Attention to LinkedIn’s recommendation list – This is handy. To do it, go to ‘My Network’ and look for the ‘People you may know with similar roles’ options. If you have a well-optimized LinkedIn profile, you will get more relevant results.
Join relevant LinkedIn groups – LinkedIn groups are useful when you want to expand your network. By joining relevant groups on LinkedIn, you can connect with people who actually are your target audience.
Use third-party tools for LinkedIn automation – There are many tools that you can use to automate the whole process. These tools are handy and help you in generating healthy business leads. If done adequately, LinkedIn automation can save your efforts and time while getting you business leads.
Best LinkedIn Outbound Sales Tactics
After testing many outbound sales tactics and hacks, we concluded that the best outbound sales results include these ingredients:
Your offer and offerings – You need to consider your services and products. Have you validated them before offering to your leads? Did they produce any results? If yes, you can move on to the next ingredient.
Your targeting – Ensure that you are targeting and reaching out to the relevant audience? Do you know your target prospects? After that, make sure you are using the appropriate language when engaging with them. Lastly, make sure that your offer is relevant and as per your targeting.
Now let’s check out some of our test outbound sales tactics, starting with:
Provide Value upfront:
If you want to gain someone’s trust, the ideal way is to provide great value or offer for free.
This sales tactic work flawlessly if you already have a lead magnet or a lucrative free offer for your leads.
Before diving into the tactic, we will advise you to research thoroughly about our target audience and draft something that they will love and appreciate. In short, while creating your LinkedIn outreach strategy, keep your target audience in mind.
Only then, reach out to your new prospects and use that offer as a lead magnet. Here are some points to consider:
Target the right and relevant people via LinkedIn Sales Navigator:
As you know how valuable LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be for your business, but do you know you can import the sales navigator data into other tools to use it more efficiently.
Here is how you do it:
After outlining your target market, you can easily integrate LinkedIn Sales Navigator with CRM or other prospecting platforms to nurture your business leads. Once correctly integrated with your CRM, LinkedIn Sales Navigator also keeps you updated with various information and activities of your target prospects.
Apart from it, syncing your CRM will enhance the speed and precision of your outbound sales campaigns by automatically importing the contacts.
Furthermore, you can also create a custom audience on any other social media platform to retarget them with ads on that network.
This can be a really effective campaign, and soon you will start getting warm leads from LinkedIn and other social media platforms.
Use LinkedIn’s shared experiences filter.
When it’s about interacting with anonymous users or those who you have never heard of you – being able to identify common interests can help you a lot.
The common interests and experiences are a social bridge to connect with them on a personal level. Plus, it can be a perfect ice-breaker that will calm the awkwardness when outreaching them.
Luckily, LinkedIn’s “Shared Experiences” features can help you in this regard. The feature is handy and allows you to find leads that have similar interests or professional experiences.
The function also saves your precious time by providing you with the specific information you need to start a conversation with prospects.
Personalization and dynamic placeholders:
You cannot eliminate this factor from your LinkedIn outreach or sales campaign.
Mostly, people only use the first name and last name in the messages, and it is only surface-level personalization, nothing more than that.
Advertisers on LinkedIn can easily detect a traditional or cheesy sales template at a glance. Hence include a pinch of personalization in your messages.
Here is how you can use personalize your LinkedIn outbound sales campaigns without much effort.
You can use any of the dynamic placeholder tags in your outreach campaigns. Similarly, you can also use or mention something particular about your prospects in your messages.
For example, suppose you are targeting the leads who have written posts about automation tools. Hence you can mention a solution from each lead’s in your message or article.
When they see that your posts or messages have something unique, they will be more than happy to connect with you.
Here’s how you do it:
Do some homework and research about your prospects. You should review their latest blog post or article.
Then, pen down the necessary details about them, such as the website’s name, author’s name, and the mentioned solution from the post.
For example, if the blog post is about automation tools, you can mention some of the best automation tools with their features.
Now use the dynamic placeholder tags in your messages. Start writing a sales template and use it for your campaign.
Some common dynamic placeholders:
- Gender – suitable to use gendered pronouns.
- Department – This allows you to distinguish between various departments.
- Industry – This allows you to connect and shortlist the prospects as per industry.
- Title – This allows you to identify your prospect’s seniority and role in the company.
- Prospect’s location or country – beneficial to adapt the terms as per their culture.
- Headcount or employees – This allows you to address bigger/smaller firms as per their respective objectives and goals.
This is a pretty straightforward method, but it is effective as you will be focusing on the laser-specific target audience.
Automating the process:
Another fruitful sales tactic that works in most cases is follow-up.
Stats show that only 2% of deals are closed after the first point of contact. And about 44% of sales representatives give up after only one or two follow-ups. And that’s a wrong practice.
If someone accepts your LinkedIn request and reads your messages, it doesn’t mean that it has become your customer, and you should not stop messaging them.
It’s quite possible that they didn’t read your complete message or got distracted while reading the message. That is why following them up is vital.
And if you are someone who receives numerous messages and cold pitches daily, chances are higher that you can miss out a message or two.
LinkedIn follow-ups are a continuous process or an experiment of your persistency. In our opinion, you should follow up at least five times.
Lastly, keep experimenting with the words and sales templates to determine what works best for you.
Now, you know and understand all about the best LinkedIn outbound sales tactics, another important thing is what to include when sending cold messages to your prospects.
So, let’s look at them.
What to use in Your LinkedIn Outbound Sales Messages?
Initially, some of you might not find it ‘unique,’ but crafting the perfect connection request can make or break things in no time.
The first thing to note here is that don’t push too hard. And never try to sell yourself in the first attempt or message.
Apart from it, always ensure that your outreach messages and connection requests include the following:
Personalization – As mentioned above, always mention something particular about your prospects in your messages. And they will be more likely to talk with you.
Concise and clear – Most of your prospects are busy and receive countless requests and messages in a day. Hence ensure that your messages are to the point and contain a clear purpose. Plus, try to maintain the conversation flow.
It’s all about experimenting – The best way to increase your connection rate is to keep experimenting with your requests and follow-ups.
The perfect length – Keep in mind that the limit for connection messages is up to 300 characters. So, ensure that when crafting your script.
Point of reference – Try to mention how you were able to find your lead’s LinkedIn profile. If you have an authentic reference, mention it in your request, and users will be glad to talk with you.
Returns – What benefits will you provide to your prospects if they connect with you? Ensure you offer them something valuable and let them know about it along with other necessary details via your message.
In the End:
LinkedIn offers countless opportunities to all businesses for lead generation. However, to capitalize on it, you need a practical and effective strategy according to the platform, and you should know how to use it rightly. You need to engage with anonymous people in a meaningful way. And the best way is to offer them valuable information.
After reading this guide, you have the tested and most effective LinkedIn outbound sales strategies in your arsenal that you can incorporate in your marketing strategy and grow your business more efficiently.
Initially, this will take some time, but in the end, you will be working on targeted and qualified business leads.
