Are you still trying to figure out how to do sales on LinkedIn or how you can make LinkedIn work for you as an outreach platform for your organization? Well, here is a blog where our VP of sales has shared interesting insights about how he and his team mates use LinkedIn to sell!
Let’s start from the basics of the sales process/cycle.
Typical Sales Process
Prospecting → Preparation → Approach → Presentation → Handling objections → Closing → Follow-up
Why is LinkedIn the best choice for sales prospecting?
LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional network with more than 850 million members in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. High response rate, compared with any other outreach approach. LinkedIn conversations have the second highest response rate after email outreach.
You can learn more about your prospects from their LinkedIn profiles, and pitch them a product or a service after checking their feeds and activities on LinkedIn. In fact, LinkedIn provides an amazing opportunity to engage with your prospect’s content by reacting to their posts and leaving an impact.
Sales Prospecting on LinkedIn: Finding Best Prospects for your Business
- LinkedIn/ Sales Navigator Search
- Targeting your LinkedIn Network
- LinkedIn Groups
- LinkedIn Events
- LinkedIn Posts
Using LinkedIn/ Sales Navigator Search
One of the most commonly implemented practices for finding prospects on LinkedIn is to use LinkedIn Search or Sales Navigator Search.
Here’s how it is done :
- Open your LinkedIn account, and look for the search bar on the top left corner of your screen.
- Enter relevant keywords that target your prospects
- Once the keywords are submitted, LinkedIn provides all the relevant People, Events, Posts, Groups, and more, that match the provided keywords. Get into the People Section.
- Under the People Section, apply filters such as Connection Type, Location, and more to segregate the LinkedIn results to the ones that match your ideal buyer persona.
- The final result is what you can call your prospects.
Prospecting Your LinkedIn Network
This prospecting method is commonly used to re-target the prospects that were previously contacted due to any reason the deals were not processed further.
LinkedIn also offers some filter options for your existing LinkedIn network, that can later be used as your prospect for retargeting.
This is how you can create one :
- Open your LinkedIn, and look for My Network in the top menu.
- In your Network, open the Connections Tab from the left menu.
- Here we get everyone from our LinkedIn Network.
- To take it to the next stage, LinkedIn also offers a filter option which is normally found next to the search bar, selecting the filtering options to add filters/ criteria to the LinkedIn Network.
Prospecting The LinkedIn Groups
The benefits of using LinkedIn Groups for prospects are,
- It is an interest-based prospecting method, all group members are helping build a powerful community on LinkedIn, hence these members are the ones that are actively working/ learning about the topics they are interested in.
- LinkedIn allows all the group members to freely communicate with each other. This can be used to reach out to communicate and promote the services to the group members.
Utilizing the above benefits with LinkedFusion, here are the steps:
- Open your LinkedIn, and search for the Groups that could help increase lead flow.
- Now to make this targeting method work, you either need to be part of the Group or you have to request the Group Admin to join the group.
- Try to find the total group member, and below the number, you will see the “Show All” button.
Prospecting The LinkedIn Events
Not a lot of users of LinkedIn know about this, but LinkedIn allows users to organize and promote their events on LinkedIn. If the event is promoted properly it can also have 2000 plus attendees, and a lot of users use these events for their product promotions, coaching, etc.
The benefits of using LinkedIn Events for Prospecting:
- Only the most interested users opt-in for such events.
- LinkedIn allows sending direct messages to the event attendees, this can be used to communicate with them pre and post events.
- Your Influence among the community grows.
How to send these direct messages to the Event Attendees:
- On the LinkedIn search for the events you would like to target, you can even target your own events.
- Enroll in the events you would like to target and get to the attendees’ page.
- On the event page, look for the total attendees of the event, and click on the number to get to the attendees’ page.
- Once on the attendees’ page, filtering options are available to filter these attendees.
- These attendees have a Message option next to each of them and can be used to send direct messages to these attendees.
Prospecting LinkedIn Posts
A lot of growth marketers that work with close communities mostly use this method for targeting their prospects. Targeting the prospects that actively took their time in reacting to content, would definitely be interested/ actively working around the topic/ content. Targeting these prospects could give maximum results if your services or products fit into what they do.
The only drawback with this method of prospecting is that LinkedIn does not offer a direct messaging option with those that have reacted to the content, and hence you need to go through the trouble of adding them first to your connections and then starting a conversation with them.
Targeting both the ones that liked or commented on the Content could be your potential target, so you should try to connect with both of them.
Make Sales Prospecting Easier: Rapidly Convert Prospects to Potential Leads
After reading everything above, you will have a feeling that all these prospect methods sound amazing but wouldn’t it consume a lot of time to simply extract the information and then get in touch with them?
The answer is very simple.
You need to look for a tool that assists to automate the above prospecting process, the tool that can be added to your sales funnels and would allow you to transfer leads easily to your SDRs.One such tool is LinkedFusion, it has various abilities and supports all the targeting methods stated above.
To explain it in simple terms, you would only require 1 accounts manager or an administrator that could look over or manage everyone’s LinkedIn profile, monitor the activities that have been happening, and check the conversion rate. If your team consists of 10 SDRs, all you have to do is ask for them to connect their LinkedIn to LinkedFusion, and now the account manager could easily manage all the 10 LinkedIn profiles of the SDRs on his own.
So let’s jump into it and Make the Prospecting Easier.
Engaging with LinkedIn Network
- Get back to the Prospect List, and copy the URL of the page
- Come back to your sequence, paste the copied URL in the Target field, and hit Enter
The next step is to create your Message Cadence that will start the engagement with Prospects.
Note: The URL for the Prospect List could contain a URL from a LinkedIn/ Sales Navigator Search, LinkedIn Groups, LinkedIn Events, and LinkedIn Post.
Conclusion
As discussed in this blog, sales on LinkedIn can become rewarding for your organization! If you are planning to use LinkedIn to grow your revenue, generate more qualified leads and scale your business, you can use these suggestions.
If you want to start using the safest LinkedIn automation tool for your outreach purposes, you can schedule a demo with our team!