Description
With over 67 million registered companies, LinkedIn positions itself as the ultimate professional social network. More than one billion professionals from over 200 countries regularly connect to exchange ideas, build relationships, and recruit.
LinkedIn is the largest professional contact database on the market, making it the essential platform for connecting with the professionals of your choice.
When working in product or marketing departments, it is crucial to connect with both current and potential users for various reasons:
- collect feedbacks,
- test Product Market Fit,
- build personae,
- …
Naturally, we tend to contact our clients/users first. The Sales team can direct you to various profiles with whom they have a good relationship or have stayed in touch (often for reactivation purposes).
However, when building personae, there’s a risk of only talking to our favorites, the enthusiasts. In this exercise, it is also valuable to engage with profiles unfamiliar with your product. But we often face the same issue: how to contact relevant profiles?
If you’re in a B2B market, LinkedIn is your best friend. However, reaching out to targeted professionals can quickly become time-consuming.
In this practical case, we will see how to connect with relevant profiles for your discovery process automatically while maintaining a strong human touch. Ready to start?
Challenge description
When I joined La Growth Machine as a Product Marketing Manager, my first task was to define personae. I had five personae to explore. This use case presents the campaign I set up, which worked very well for targeting Sales Ops.
My goal was to understand the daily life of a Sales Ops and establish a typical profile. I had many questions that required verbal exchanges with this target group:
- What is their actual job?
- What are their daily challenges and issues?
- What motivates them?
- What tools do they use?
- What is their decision-making power within the company?
- How do they stay informed?
- …
Sales Ops, relevant targets for our product, typically work in Tech companies and have digital profiles. Most of them are on LinkedIn. So, I decided to contact them via LinkedIn, allowing for a less formal initial exchange than an email and thus less intrusive.
To simulate human action and be spontaneous, I use the touch-touch message method. This means sending several short messages (including a Voice message) in quick succession, within one to two minutes. This approach adds authenticity to my messages. Your contacts won’t notice a thing 😉
If after several messages I get no response, I send a follow-up email (enriched via La Growth Machine). Adopting a multichannel approach increases my chances of response by 3.5 times.
The key in this outreach is to value the person being contacted. They should feel appreciated and important to you. It’s crucial to show that you are seeking insights, not making a sale. Remember, it’s an exchange, not a pitch.
⏭️ To learn more about persona building and its various steps, you can check out this article.
Audience description
In this sequence, I will contact Sales Ops with 2 to 5 years of experience, located in France, working in startups.
My goal is to engage with about ten Sales Ops. Hence, it’s not necessary to contact every Sales Ops in France.
To segment by company size (Startups and Scale-ups), I chose to run two campaigns, each targeting no more than 50 contacts:
- a campaign for Sales Ops in Startups,
- a campaign for profiles in Scale-ups.
To identify them, I use Sales Navigator, filtering searches by:
- current job title,
- location
- experience
- industry
- I can also add specific companies I want to target.
PS: The finer the segmentation, the easier it is to write different messages for your campaign (LinkedIn invitation notes, DMs, emails…).
Segmentation is 80% of the success of your campaign. To learn how to use Sales Navigator optimally, I invite you to check out the following articles:
👉 Our Expert’s Advice on Boolean Search in LinkedIn Sales Navigator
👉 LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Complete Guide & Best Practices [2023]
👉 The Ultimate Guide to Account-Based Marketing (using Sales Nav)
I can also use LGM Finder to precisely target the startups I want to reach in France, then identify their Sales Ops (or equivalent job titles) within these companies. The ABM search (Account-Based Marketing) helps in this precise targeting.