The Ultimate Guide for Prospecting on LinkedIn

LinkedIn has 23 million users just in France, with 1 new user registered every 7 seconds. Originally a social network, the platform has become an unavoidable and essential pillar of B2B prospecting.

 

LinkedIn is one of LaGrowthMachine’s privileged acquisition channels to help you develop your lead gen strategy. Today, almost 100% of our clients use LinkedIn to approach their clients with an average response rate that is often higher than email. The latter is historically one of the most popular means of sales prospecting.

 

Why should you do business prospecting on LinkedIn? How can you conduct an effective strategy? What are the ideal tools for prospecting?

 

Discover all our tips and tricks to succeed in your sales prospecting on LinkedIn in 2022.

Chapter 1

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What is LinkedIn prospecting?

In this first chapter, we will give you a concrete explanation of what prospecting on LinkedIn is. It consists of defining the scope of this activity and discussing its main actors.

Prospecting on LinkedIn means using all available resources on the platform to develop business contacts, generate more leads, and boost sales.

Here again, LaGrowthMachine has sequences specific to LinkedIn that can allow you to set up campaigns for very large databases of prospects, for a more natural and personalized result.

Who should prospect on LinkedIn?

Salespeople and professionals who do growth hacking on LinkedIn, of course, but not only. The platform has also become the essential marketplace for all recruitment activities. It offers specific and advanced functionalities to support these activities as well.

Keep this in mind: When you connect with other users on LinkedIn, it’s like shaking hands with them during a trade show. The difference is that your LinkedIn profile acts as your business card (hence the importance of having it well-optimized beforehand!).

Why prospect on LinkedIn?

To date, LinkedIn is the professional social network of note. It’s simple, it has no valid competitor. The stats are eye-opening:

• LinkedIn is 277% more effective in generating leads than Twitter or Facebook (Hubspot)
• B2B digital marketers have found that 80% of their leads on social networks come from LinkedIn (LinkedIn Business)
• More than 40% of social media traffic to websites comes from LinkedIn (LinkedIn Business)

As you can see, it is the ideal hunting ground to practice social selling.

Not convinced? Here are some of our LinkedIn prospecting campaign statistics:

If the number of subscribers on the platform can frighten neophytes, you will be reassured to know there are many tools to help you to refine your strategy and generate qualified leads.

Chapter 2

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LinkedIn prospecting: How to make the most of it

In this second part, the idea is to make you understand the stakes associated with LinkedIn prospecting. Why is this network on the rise for the B2B sector? Why do many companies now rely on this tool for a large part of their prospecting? That’s what we’ll be looking at!

LinkedIn is the world leader in professional social networking. It’s the perfect place to approach your prospects informally, share your ideas, skills, and expertise, and attract the attention of decision-makers. Before trying to approach your prospects, though, it is essential to build a credible profile.

You wouldn’t trust a stranger who comes up to you in the street to sell you a product without having a minimum of information about him.

It’s the same thing on LinkedIn!

Before you start, here’s what you need to do to optimize your profile:

• Choose a suitable LinkedIn profile picture. You are not on Facebook. No one is interested in your last night out with your friends, nor your little cat. Choose a professional portrait, without overdoing it.
• Don’t neglect the importance of the cover photo. Your cover photo is an important ally in getting your message across. More than a visual, it can be used to express your ideas, highlight a commercial offer, or advertise an upcoming event.
• Have a clear title. The more precisely you define your role in the company, the easier it will be for you to appear in the search results. This is also the time to define your added value for your prospects. (Ex: “I multiply your ROAS by 4 on social networks”, “I write to help you transform.”)
• Fill out the “info” part. This is the time to describe — with precision — everything you can bring to your future customers. Let them know a little more about you, who you are, and what you do.
• Update your skills. Ideally, you’ll allow users who visit your profile to see what you can do at a glance. There are many skills to choose from that are divided by field of activity.
• Ask for recommendations. There is no shame in asking your former clients/employers to appreciate your work. This is your best showcase to demonstrate your effectiveness, teamwork, and results.

The easiest way to do this is to refer to the most popular profiles of the moment. They are often excellent sources of inspiration to improve your visibility, as is the case here:

As you can see, optimizing your LinkedIn profile is the essential foundation for any prospecting effort on the tool.

Then, provided that you have completed this preliminary step, you can start prospecting on LinkedIn.

For this, we can only recommend you to use our tool LaGrowthMachine, which will allow you to create automated sequences on LinkedIn and gain significant amounts of time compared to all your manual actions, such as:

• View profiles
• Request connections
• Send messages
• Lead management within the tool
• and more…!

Likewise, it is up to you to publish engaging, inspiring content from your personal or professional experience.

Don’t worry, we’ll get to that later.

Chapter 3

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How to use LinkedIn for prospecting?

In this third chapter, we’re going to tell you how to properly prospect on LinkedIn. We’ll give you tips, tricks and techniques that will help you improve your approach on the network today!

How to prospect on LinkedIn

Now that we have reviewed the basics and the different tools that allow you to optimize your B2B prospecting, let’s get down to business.

Here are the essential steps to contact your potential customers on LinkedIn:

Preparation phase

The art of your prospecting strategy lies in the relevance of the message you want to convey to potential customers.

To refine your approach, it is necessary to lay the groundwork before taking action. You need to be able to attract your prospects before you convert them into customers.

But to attract your prospects, you need to know them. The preparation phase will allow you to define your personas, by determining:

• The business sector you want to prospect
• The company size
• The hierarchical level you wish to approach (corporate title)
• Your entry points in the company (common relationships, executive assistants, common experiences)

Once again, the Sales Navigator / LaGrowthMachine combo will allow you to create massive, high-quality, and data-rich lead databases:

Now that you know who to address, you need to define how to approach them.

Define objectives

You need to know why you are on this network, and what you want to get out of it.

Define:

• Your business goal. What is the reason you created a profile? It could be for gaining notoriety, establishing your reputation as an expert on a specific topic, finding new prospects, building customer loyalty, or converting leads into prospects. Whichever it is, know your end goal.
• Your quantified objectives. Without this, it is impossible to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Set a number of invitations to be sent per day, leads triggered, posts to be published, and messages to be sent to members of specific groups. It’s often easiest to determine this by working backward from your revenue goal.
• Your pace. How often will you approach your customers? What will be your level of aggressiveness? What will be the most suitable publication rhythm for your needs? Don’t burn yourself or your readers out.

Structure your process

Each prospect has its own scenario! You will not approach large companies in the same way as startups.

To be effective, it is important to target the needs of your potential customers.

This will allow you to build each scenario based on the solution you can provide to your leads’ pain points. You will only be able to do so if you have a clear structure.

Here are the steps for a process we recommend at LaGrowthMachine:

• J-1.1: Create and segment your contact lists using refined search criteria.
• J-1.2: Visit the profiles (aka “enrich the profiles”) of a reduced segment of your contact list.
• J-1.3: Send an automatic or manual connection request to the profiles visited the day before (be careful to respect the caps imposed by LinkedIn, i.e. about 15 contacts per day).
• J-2: Personalize your message and send it, manually or automatically, to the contacts who accepted your connection request. Make sure you target their needs and offer them resources that will arouse their interest from the first contact.
• J-5: Follow up with contacts who have not responded by submitting even more personalized content, tools to download, or even suggesting a telephone or video meeting (via Calendly, for example).

In the meantime, repeat the operation as many times as necessary to maximize your reach and contact all the people on your list. The response rate will depend largely on the type of content you send.

To boost your results, check out our guide dedicated to creating the best LinkedIn message possible.

Alternate between manual action and automated prospecting

Like any social network, LinkedIn has specific terms of use and strict regulations. By violating them, you can expose yourself to an outright ban.

This is the most direct way to compromise your entire prospecting strategy.

To avoid this painful occurrence, it is better to call on growth marketing professionals like LaGrowthMachine.

Our solution will allow you to organize your contact lists by hand before contacting them on autopilot. Rest assured, all its behaviors mimic perfectly those of human users.

You can save up to 40% of the time you spend on your daily prospecting routine while boosting your response rate.

The time saved can be spent on setting up a more thorough qualification process of your prospects or on writing more relevant approach messages.

This is not the only advantage of using task automation.

By creating scenarios, you can easily see their effectiveness and analyze the results.

Then you can iterate on the recipes that work.

Chapter 4

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What are the most effective LinkedIn prospecting tools?

In this fourth part, we will list the main tools to improve your prospecting on LinkedIn. Some of these tools are solutions developed by LinkedIn, others belong to independent actors.

Once you’ve defined your personas (who you’ll target), it’s time to figure out which tools are best for you.

Each tool or feature, internal or external to the platform, has its own specificities and will be perceived as (more or less) intrusive by your prospect.

• LinkedIn Search filters: This is the basic tool you need to find your targets and/or start your sales prospecting. You can search by name (of companies or individuals), industry, profession, common relationships, educational background, groups, or events that might interest you.
• LinkedIn posts: Each publication allows you to reach a small portion of LinkedIn users. By regularly posting content with high added value mixed with more general posts, you will gradually succeed in capturing the attention of your target audience (and improving your reach!). You can vary the formats between written publications, photos, videos, polls, internal newsletters, lives, or even by creating dedicated events (like online webinars).
• LinkedIn Groups: These are excellent ways to create prospect listings. Gathered by interests, you will be able to interact directly with profiles positioned on the themes that interest you. You are free to become an integral part of the group by positioning yourself as an expert on the subject or by contacting group members via private messages.
• Private messages. You can send them as soon as a LinkedIn member has accepted your connection request. This is the easiest way to contact a prospect directly or to keep a customer.
• LinkedIn InMail. This is the most aggressive outreach commercial solution. It is reserved for subscribers who have opted for a paid Premium account. Without it, you can only send direct messages to people who are part of your connections. With InMail, you can send a limited number of messages per day to people outside your network.
• Sales Navigator. Sales Nav’, if you’re ‘in the know’, is a paid platform developed by LinkedIn and connected to the social network. It’s a more powerful tool that allows you to refine your search criteria and is mainly intended for salespeople. By subscribing, you will have access to all the profiles that interest you and are easily identifiable using advanced searches. Whether it be on the hierarchical level, the company, or the person’s interests. After creating your lists, you can then contact the members directly.

That’s when you have to choose your side between outreach, inbound marketing, or skillfully combining the two. Here are the options available to you within the platform:

Sales Navigator is our darling tool at LaGrowthMachine. By using both programs in a complementary way, you can :

• Import unlimited lists of leads with very specific criteria
• Enrich your lead data with LaGrowthMachine’s automatic enrichment feature
• Manage your leads
• Create your own multi-channel campaigns
• Press the button… and admire the result!

Chapter 5

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Go further in your prospecting using multi-channel

In this fifth and final part, we’d like to focus on LaGrowthMachine, our own LinkedIn prospecting tool. We explain why we think it is the best solution to automate your processes and gain efficiency!

The more you multiply the points of entry with your contacts, the more likely you are to retain them and then convert them.

Be careful, though, we are not suggesting you drown your prospect in an ocean of information. Rather, to provide them with enough relevant content and support to become indispensable to them.

Once the contact is engaged on LinkedIn, you are free to continue enriching the data via:

• an emailing strategy (a newsletter, for example)
• a phone call (to qualify them or offer your solution)
• other social networks (by redirecting them to your Instagram or Twitter account)
• blog content
• white papers to download
• advertising campaigns (SEA or SMA)

There you have it, you now have all the keys in hand to start marketing to your prospects on LinkedIn.

By coupling this approach with other lead generation techniques, you should be able to quickly boost your sales.