The Best Guide to do LinkedIn Outreach

What is LinkedIn Outreach?

Let’s start with the basics.

By definition, LinkedIn outreach is the process of using LinkedIn to connect with potential customers and partners. It’s a great way to connect with people in your industry, expand your network, and find new business opportunities.

LinkedIn Outreach is different from inbound techniques: instead of waiting for prospects to come to you, you actively go and find them.

It’s also different from other social media outreach techniques, such as Twitter or Facebook: LinkedIn is a platform designed for business networking. As a result, it has different etiquette rules and a different tone of voice.

LinkedIn Outreach is defined by 3 main inputs:

• Volume: with LinkedIn Outreach, you’ll need to contact a lot of people in your target audience, just like prospecting; at the end of the day it’s a number game.
• Targeting: LinkedIn Outreach is all about sending tailored messages to the right people. You’ll need to carefully select who you’re going to reach out to, and segment your prospects by criteria such as company size, job title, or location.
• Personalization: just like any good outreach campaign, your LinkedIn outreach efforts will be much more successful if you personalize your messages.

What are the main advantages of LinkedIn Outreach for businesses?

LinkedIn Outreach offers many benefits for businesses

If you’re a salesperson, you definitely know what we’re talking about!

LinkedIn Outreach can help you:

• increase the number of leads and sales opportunities
• build relationships with potential customers
• connect with people in your industry
• learn more about your target market.

And that’s not all! LinkedIn Outreach can also be used to:

• generate awareness for your brand or product
• build partnerships with other businesses in your industry
• recruit new talent for your company

In short, LinkedIn Outreach is a powerful LinkedIn Prospecting medium that can help businesses in many different ways.

Still, there are a lot of different outreach techniques that can be used through the platform to do LinkedIn Lead Generation.

Let’s have a look at those techniques now.

What are the different LinkedIn Outreach Techniques?

Maybe you’re thinking LinkedIn Outreach is just about sending some messages to leads that match your target audience.

In fact, it’s a bit more complicated.

There are many different techniques that can be used for LinkedIn Outreach. Here are some of the most popular ones:

1. The LinkedIn InMail technique

Sometimes, when you’re trying to do outreach through LinkedIn, people won’t be interested in your message. Some won’t even accept your connection request and won’t read your message at all.

One of the tools that may be used to get a better conversion rate with messaging outreach is InMail.

InMail is a message feature that allows you to contact any member of the platform, even if you’re not connected with them.

To use InMail, you’ll need to have a paid LinkedIn account (a Sales Navigator account, for example). Then, you’ll be able to send messages to anyone on LinkedIn, even if you’re not connected with them.

2. The LinkedIn Search technique

One of the most powerful LinkedIn outreach techniques is also one of the simplest: using LinkedIn’s search engine to find leads that match your target audience.

Ok. But how to do it effectively?

If you’re using a free version of LinkedIn, here are some tips:

• Use the “Advanced Search” feature of LinkedIn to narrow down your search results
• Add keywords that are relevant to your industry or target market
• Look for companies that match your ideal customer profile
• Filter your results by location, job title, or company size

Here is an example:

• I’m looking for “Founder” in the keywords
• I’m narrowing it down to the San Francisco bay area
• Only 1st and 2nd connection of my network
• Within the industry of “Technology, Information and Internet”

Otherwise, you should definitely take a Sales Navigator plan. To learn more about it, you can read our guide about LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

3. The connection request technique

Another way to reach out to your prospects on LinkedIn is by sending them connection requests.

To do that, you’ll need to have a good profile picture, an attractive headline, and a well-written summary.

Then, one thing to keep in mind: if you’re doing it too often by sending a note, you may encounter a limitation issue. You’ll find more info about it in our LinkedIn Limitations posts.

For more information, you can read our post: how to reach out to someone on LinkedIn?

4. The LinkedIn Group technique

Apart from LinkedIn messaging, LinkedIn groups can also be a great way to reach out to your target market.

The goal here is to join groups that are relevant to your industry or target market, and then start participating in discussions and adding value.

This way, you’ll get connected with new people and start discussing with them until they become leads that match your ideal customer profile.

Now that we went through the different outreach techniques, we’re going to show you how to build an outreach process through the platform, based on the same way we designed our own model at LaGrowthMachine.

Let’s figure it out now.

How to do LinkedIn Outreach?

The goal of this section is to give a step-by-step guide in order to create a great LinkedIn Outreach process.

You’ll need to follow each step from the beginning to the end to do it properly.

Let’s go!

Step 1: Find your target audience

The first step is to find the people you want to reach out to on LinkedIn.

To do so, you can build your personas with the help of the marketing team. You’ll need to build several types of personas that match your ideal customer.

For better performance, define your ICP (ideal customer profile) based on their job title, the company industry & the role they have. It will be much easier to find them on LinkedIn.

For example, if you’re trying to reach out to small businesses in the United States, your persona could be “The busy small business owner”.

Once you have built your personas, you can start using LinkedIn’s search engine to find relevant leads.

Step 2: Choose the tool you want to use in your process

As we’ve seen, there are different ways to reach out to your prospects on LinkedIn.

If you’re using a free version of LinkedIn and you don’t have the budget for a pro version, we recommend that you start with connection requests or group discussions.

But the best workflow to do LinkedIn Outreach is by using the combo Sales Navigator + LaGrowthMachine. With the help of LinkedIn Automation you will gain:

• a lot of time
• a very accurate method of targeting
• an infinite amount of qualified leads to contact, and messages to send
• a better vision of your whole outreach process
• a lot more leads.

Step 3: Build your list of LinkedIn leads

Once you have your persona and your targeting method, it’s time to start building your list of leads.

For that, if you’re working as a salesperson for a B2B business, we recommend that you start with a minimum of 100 leads.

This way, you’ll be able to get several personas and enough data to understand what’s working and what’s not, and scale up your efforts!

You’ll need to choose the criteria you want to organize your lists for. You can build lists based on:

• demographics criteria
• behavior criteria
• business data criteria
• etc…

If you’re using Sales Navigator, you can either use the “Lead Builder” or “Advanced Search” feature to find relevant leads and build directly your lists in the tool. You can export them to another tool such as LaGrowthMachine.

Step 4: Build your LinkedIn Messaging scenarios

Now is the important part of this post.

There are two ways of sending LinkedIn cold messages:

• the old way, hand by hand, which is very accurate but very time-consuming.
• the new way, with the help of automation, thanks to an automation tool like LaGrowthMachine.

With this second way, you’ll be able to send thousands of personalized messages to thousands of highly qualified leads… with a few clicks only. You may be asking: “Yeah, but massive messaging looks all the same and doesn’t get good conversion” and you’ll be right, but only if you’re not using LaGrowthMachine.

Thanks to our variables, various actions, and copywriting review, we ensure you that your message will be 100% personalized.

In fact, we’re recording 3.5x more leads for our clients using LaGrowthMachine.

Step 5: Keep your LinkedIn discussions updated

When talking about social selling, sending a first outreach message is great, but what will happen if you’re not monitoring the answers you’ll get?

To have a successful LinkedIn Outreach campaign, you’ll need to keep your discussions updated.

This way, you’ll be able to:

• know when to follow up with a lead
• understand what’s the status of your lead
• close more deals

There are different types of statuses for a LinkedIn discussion:

• Open: the discussion is still active and you’re waiting for an answer from your lead
• Pending: you’ve sent a message but the lead hasn’t seen it yet
• Answered: the lead has answered your message, it’s now your turn to reply!
• Closed: the discussion is finished, you can archive it

Monitoring all your leads’ conversations on LinkedIn might be very complicated, as the platform is not designed to do so.

With our Inbox features, LaGrowthMachine allows you to read and answer all your messages directly through our tool, to save a lot of time!

Step 6: Think multichannel!

Applying a LinkedIn Outreach strategy is a great way to do business in B2B.

But that’s not the only way. Especially at that time, when people are using a lot of digital tools and features to work and communicate.

To improve your conversion rate and to practice great sales outreach, multichannel outreach is your best friend.

With LaGrowthMachine, you can simply import a list of leads, and let the magic happen:

1. We’ll enrich your data automatically to find new data such as phone numbers, email addresses, etc…
2. Thanks to data enrichment, you can build sequences using LinkedIn and other channels such as Email Outreach, Twitter messages, etc… and program all your follow-up messages in advance!
3. You can monitor your LinkedIn messages directly in our tool, and have access to live reporting to scale up your campaign performance and generate leads.

Automate the boring tasks and focus on creating conversation with your leads.

Try it for free and see for yourself

What are the different LinkedIn Outreach Tools?

There are a lot of outreach tools on the market, but they’re not all equal! Here’s a quick overview of the most famous ones.

• Sales Navigator: one of the best B2B platforms to find and connect with leads.
• Hunter.io: a very good tool to get lead information such as email address or phone number, based on simple URL research.
• Zapier: an amazing tool allowing you to automate different types of actions from different applications.
• LaGrowthMachine: our own LinkedIn Outreach solution, helping sales teams to take their performance to the next level by automating repetitive tasks and increasing their conversion rate.

All of these LinkedIn Outreach Automation Tools will give you the opportunity to send LinkedIn Outreach messages.

Conclusion

Now, you know everything about LinkedIn Outreach!

You learned how to find targeted leads, what the best practices for LinkedIn messages are, and how to scale up your campaign using LaGrowthMachine.

It’s now time for you to take action and implement all these tips in your own strategy!

Feel free to contact us if you need help or if you have any questions. Our team will be more than happy to assist you!