linkedin for outbound
Samuel Darwin
Posted in: Marketing

How to Use LinkedIn for Outbound Sales Success

Social selling has become the new frontier for sales, and LinkedIn has emerged as the new tool for outbound sales professionals.

1. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile

Think of your profile as your online business card and work to make the first significant impression. Here is how you do it, 

  • Professional Photo

Use a professional, high-quality headshot that captures you as being both approachable and competent. Usually, your profile picture is the first impression that a prospect will see. Make it a good one. Does it clearly show your face and shoulders against a simple background, well lit, and without distracting elements? Does it look like a casual snapshot? Those are unprofessional.

  • Synopsize your experience, skills, and motivations in sales: 

This should be brief and clear, with the main aim of captivating the reader, who is in this case a potential employer, and bringing out your value proposition. Start with a punchy headline identifying the key areas of expertise and unique selling points that you possess. Use the summary area to highlight your background, achievements, and what uniquely defines you as a sales professional. Remember to include dofollow keywords if you want to rank well for certain searches.

  • Highlight Success

Emphasize specific sales achievements by including necessary metric details that tell your success and the achievement of your input. Any time you deliver quantifiable results, you provide credibility and social proof. Add your most impressive sales achievements in bullet format or small paragraphs, such as meeting or surpassing sales quotas, closing important deals, increasing revenue, and more. Provide background details that describe the obstacles you needed to overcome and the approaches you have developed to realize such results.

2. Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an amazing tool that can take your outbound sales to the next level. Here is how to maximize the full use of its capabilities:

  • Advanced Search Filters

Use advanced filters to narrow down leads based on criteria like industry, role, and company size. This focused targeting makes sure you are aimed towards the most relevant quality prospects. Can filter by multiple: location, job function, level of seniority, and company size which would guide you in getting exactly your ideal target audience. Sales Navigator allows you to save your search criteria for the future. new leads matching your criteria are easily found and engaged with.

  • Lead Recommendations

Save leads and allow Sales Navigator to provide recommendations for similar prospects that might be of interest to you. It extends your search and opens up new opportunities. After you selected favorable leads, Sales Navigator will be able to recommend other professionals with such criteria as job titles, companies, or industries. This is the easiest and fastest way to create a strong funnel with embedded relevant leads.

Track the buying signals and interact with the prospect whenever they are active in terms of promotion or sharing some content with you. This way, you catch the iron while it’s hot and make the best out of time. This is further empowered with the in-built real-time updates in Sales Navigator, letting you know whenever your saved leads or prospects take recent action that might show potential interest in your product. You get notified of updates such as job changes, company updates, or engaging with content that is relevant to you, giving you context and opportunities to reach out in a timely way.

3. Tailor Your Outreach

The name of the game is personalization in a crowded inbox. Here’s how to tailor your outreach for maximum impact:

  • Customized Connection Requests

Send personalized connection requests with a clear reason why you want to connect. This personal touch, in most cases, ensures that you will be accepted and that your requests will be granted. Instead of sending a generic connection request, spend some time on the prospect’s profile to send them a message about their interests or pain points. You can mention mutual connections or shared experiences with their background, or anything you admire about their background, which will create rapport immediately.

  •  Engage with Content

Post a comment or share a post they’ve made to engage with them and build a relationship before you officially contact them. This shows interest and industry awareness. One way to do this is being active in liking and commenting on the content of your prospect, notably showing him that you’re interested in what they believe in. You would also want to leave comments that drive a point or add value to the conversation, share their updates with your network (only if needed), and like or react to their updates. This type of engagement can get you on their radar and set the stage for conversations later on.

  • Value-First Messaging

Make sure the messages you’re sending at first are providing some sort of value to the prospect and not sliding into pitching right off the bat. Share insights, best strategies, or possible solutions to relieve your prospect’s pain points. You’re taking a value first approach here, which means the value you’re providing. So this could be in the form of sharing relevant industry insights, useful resources, or proposed solutions that might address their specific challenges. This strategy will position you as the trusted advisor, not just another salesperson, and an approach that will separate you from competitors who most likely play the low-level transactional game.

4. Developing Relationships Through Active Engagement

The real key to success in sales is building relationships. Here are a few tips to meaningful relationship building:

  • Rather Connect, Follow

Comment on their posts, ask a question, or add your thoughts. It’s a much better way to let someone know you’re interested in them than sending them a cold invite. It will also help to build that like, know, and trust before you hit them up with that predatory LION request. To be sure, you do want to eventually connect with the person, and so, without having to build rapport and solidify your credibility by following them, you might as well use the technique. Through this engagement with their content and your demonstration of subject-matter expertise, you can help build trust and familiarity.

Say nice things under posts, showing your knowledge and genuine interest in the field of the prospect, which will position you as a valuable resource or a thought leader. Try to provide deep and thoughtful insights when you comment on a prospect’s post, not just for the sake of speaking your mind but to underline your knowledge of the industry and create an added value element in the conversation. Don’t give general and self-promotional comments, those probably will be taken quite aggressively. Share insights that are meaningful, which, in turn, will help you be perceived as a thought leader in your industry.

  • Join LinkedIn Groups

You should join groups where people are already engaged in the conversation, and contribute well. This helps you gain visibility and reach more people over time. As a result, you get to meet many like-minded professionals and establish yourself as a thought leader. For this reason, LinkedIn groups can prove to be very powerful networking and thought leadership tools to stay connected with your peers in the industry while sharing your expertise in the face of modern, ever-changing trends and challenges for your target market. This keeps you active in discussions with other key contributors so it gives you the platform to be the trusted voice and grow your pool of potential prospects.

5. Leverage on LinkedIn Features

With its set of very efficient features, LinkedIn becomes a great tool to improve your outbound sales. Here are the key ones to exploit:

  • Endorsements and Recommendations

Recommendations and Endorsements for Credibility. Collect as many endorsements and recommendations as possible to enhance your credibility and social proof. These third-party validations are crucial; they boost your credibility and elevate your level of influence to your prospects. Words of endorsement from your peers, clients, or industry peers are a final stroke to conclude your expertise and competence with social proof and make you more attractive to your prospective clients. Also, recommendations that are long, detailed, and highlight strengths, achievements, and work ethic are valuable for building trust.

  • PointDrive Presentations

Use PointDrive to share irresistible content with your leads while tracking their interaction to understand their level of interest and intent. It’s the data-driven way to decide what to spend your time and attention on when it comes to growing and nurturing the most promising of leads. PointDrive lets you share your slide decks, documents, and other content in a seamless way—right within LinkedIn—and gives you detailed analytics on the engagement, including how much time, what pages they saw, and more. That rich data could enable you to have an idea of the most interested and engaging leads so you could then follow up the particular contact in a more personal manner.

  • LinkedIn Events

Attend or host events and trade shows. Use “connect nearby” in real events. It means one can connect with probable local prospects with a lot of ease. With that, the chance of networking opportunities increases as well. The Events feature on LinkedIn can be a very effective way to crawl for potential customers at different industry conferences, trade shows, or any other in-person event. The “connect nearby” functionality will help to note other delegates and connect with them to make valuable face-to-face interactions as well as uplift the professional network.

6. Integrate with CRM

You can have LinkedIn seamlessly integrated with CRM to make the process of outbound sales smooth, and it doesn’t let you let any lead go down the cracks or through the crevices. Following is how you can benefit from that powerful mix:

  • Export Contacts

Extract and verify contact information with Wiza and export directly to your CRM. It helps avoid scenarios of manual data entry, ensuring that the people in your CRM have the correct information about leads. Apart from being very time-consuming, manual data entry is full of errors. With features that tools like Wiza provide, you are doing the extraction and verification automatically from LinkedIn, which means your CRM will be populated with accurate and current data on its leads.

  • Track Interaction

Keep a record of interactions with prospects in your CRM, stay organized, and efficient when following up with prospects. Maintain a cohesive view in one place to keep from allowing anything to slip through the cracks. Keep track of interactions with leads in your CRM in order to maintain the overview and history of interaction, right from messages and content shares to.

Track all interactions with your prospects in the CRM so that you never drop the ball on who said what. Now keep a continuous view of the history of engagement: what kind of messages were sent or received, what you shared with them, and what responses you received. That is visibility, which allows you not to waste time doing the same thing two times and put the most personalized, consistent approach in front of your leads.

  • Automate Follow-Ups

Schedule reminders and allow automatic follow-ups based on the engagement metrics culled from LinkedIn and data in the CRM. This means taking proactive steps to put you top-of-mind while guiding leads up the sales funnel. Integrate LinkedIn data with the CRM for automatic follow-up sequences based on a predefined trigger, such as the moment a lead reviews the content or responds to a message. This automation keeps you organized, allows timely follow-up, and nurtures leads better throughout the sales cycle.

7. Measure and Refine Your Strategy

Outbound sales should always be about continuous improvement. Here’s how you measure and refine your LinkedIn strategy:

  • Monitor Metrics

Track acceptance rates, response rates, and levels of engagement to gauge how successfully you’re reaching out. And a data-driven approach helps point out the areas that need improvement. Monitor closely these key metrics to derive both the successes and those that require adjustment. 

For instance, if your connection acceptance rate is very low, that could serve as an indication for the need to reconsider your connection request messaging and targeting. Low message response rates may mean you need optimization of the current messaging/outreach approach.

Tweak approaches to messaging and outreach tactics in a series of iterative experiments to find what works with your target audience. For example, comparing A/B testing between performance approaches, subject lines, or call-to-actions for messaging can help you find the standouts and keep shaping your strategy based on them.

By continuously evaluating the tests of such variations against each other, you will see what approach is most effective and learn from that to refine your outbound sales strategy continuously.

Continue to refine your LinkedIn outbound sales strategy by regularly checking the results you get and the feedback you receive. Ask colleagues, customers, and industry experts how to stay relevant. An open feedback loop is crucial for continuous improvement. 

Get feedback from your sales team, customers, and industry peers so you can find new insights and views that will be of benefit. You’ll also want to not forget to check your results and metrics on a regular basis, with the hope of displaying areas where optimization is a must or new trends can be leveraged.

Comparison Table: LinkedIn vs Traditional Outbound Sales

Here’s a table that should give you clarity on the benefits you’d get using LinkedIn for Outbound Sales over other practices:

Feature LinkedIn Traditional Outbound
Targeted Lead Generation Advanced search filters and lead recommendations Limited targeting capabilities
Personalization Easy access to prospect information for personalized outreach Limited visibility into prospect details
Relationship Building Engage with content, participate in groups, and nurture connections Primarily transactional approach
Social Proof Endorsements, recommendations, and content engagement Limited social validation
Data Integration Seamless integration with CRM and sales tools Manual data entry and tracking
Metrics and Optimization Rich engagement data for A/B testing and strategy refinement Limited visibility into outreach effectiveness

 

In the table below we benchmark the many advantages of using LinkedIn to improve the quality of leads generated against the traditional methods of outbound sales that are impersonal, and more cumbersome to execute.

FAQs

1. How can I not become annoyingly sales-type on LinkedIn?

People want to form relationships and deliver value before you ever hit them with a pitch. Similarly, like their content and structure your outreach so that it speaks meaningfully to what your prospect needs and wants. 

2. Can you propose some tools that may optimally work for me with respect to my sourcing from LinkedIn?

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is critical to searching and tracking advanced leads. Some other tools include Wiza, where you can extract information and integrate with your CRM.

3. What should be the frequency of follow-up with prospects on LinkedIn?

Keep it regular, but again it should depend on the amount of interaction or engagement that your prospect is doing. Increase the frequency if the prospect is interacting with the content you shared and is giving positive responses. Use the tools available for running reminders, so at the time of the next follow-up, the record for the last date is available.

4. How do I measure the success of my LinkedIn outbound sales efforts?

Monitor important KPIs like connection acceptance rates, message response rates, and lead conversions. Additionally, watch the engagement levels, including likes, comments, and content shares, to understand the effectiveness of outreach from a content standpoint.

Conclusion

Outbound sales on LinkedIn thus leverage strategic prospecting with optimized profiles, profile and person targeting, research, and strategic content reach-out—all of which are tied to data-driven optimization for relationship building. Look through this guide for strategies and get a great leap toward realizing the full potential of this powerful platform in driving sustainable sales growth.

Don’t forget that success on LinkedIn is a journey of continuous improvement. Be curious, try new tactics, and do not be afraid to ask for feedback or learn.

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