How To Use LinkedIn as a Salesperson?

What are the main LinkedIn features for salespeople?

As said in the introduction, there are so many ways you can use LinkedIn as a sales that it’s difficult to sum it up in this post, but we’ll try our best.

In this paragraph, we’ll go through features, tools, and plans built by LinkedIn to serve salespeople’s needs.

To do so, we’ll go through two main categories:

• LinkedIn features: The features & tools that will help you in your sales daily routine. You can have access to these by using a LinkedIn basic plan or the premium one.
• LinkedIn premium plans: Including LinkedIn basic plan and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is the pro version for salespeople.

LinkedIn features for sales

To generate B2B leads through LinkedIn as a sales, the following outreach features will be the most useful for you:

• Inmails: this feature gives you the ability to send messages to a lead even if you’re not connected with him on LinkedIn. Inmails will show up in your lead’s email inbox, just like emails.
• Voice messages: this recent feature allows you to send voice messages to your leads instead of textual messages. This doesn’t seem huge, but it has a high scalability potential with other tools. Done well, it’s killing it.
• Textual messages: this is the main way to outreach to your lead through LinkedIn. Textual messages can be seen only if you’re connected with your leads.
• Connection request (with/without a note): this feature is the very basis of LinkedIn. It helps you to connect with people and to start sending messages to them. You can choose to join a note with your request, telling him why you want to connect with him. More information on this is in our LinkedIn Note post.
• LinkedIn advanced search: LinkedIn Search and advanced search are features that have been created to find the right people before sending them a connection request. Depending on your plan, LinkedIn Search may be very accurate.
• Profile visit: each time you visit your LinkedIn lead profile, he’ll get noticed. This is a good way to poke him before doing other actions such as sending him a connection request or a message.

These are only the main features that exist for sales, but LinkedIn updates its platform regularly, making it easier and easier to search, connect, and send messages to people (= leads).

The idea to lead a real, natural, and effective LinkedIn prospecting is to use all of these features simultaneously.

That’s what we’re proposing with LaGrowthMachine: use all of these actions with the help of automation to scale a high volume of LinkedIn outreach, keeping it very natural and smooth.

LinkedIn plans for sales

If you’re using LinkedIn for sales, you might think about upgrading your plan. LinkedIn premium is composed of 4 plans for recruiters, job seekers, marketing people, and sales.

For this last category, the premium plan is called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It will cost around 175$ a month but it’s definitely worth it.

See the main difference with a LinkedIn Basic Plan:

If you’re using LinkedIn Sales Navigator with LaGrowthMachine, you can build a very powerful process that will enable you to elevate your LinkedIn lead generation to the next level. Like, for real.

To get more information about this process, check out our guide on LinkedIn ABM.

That’s what we’re going to talk about, but first, let’s focus on the main insights of doing it.

Why use LinkedIn as a salesperson?

LinkedIn might be used as one of your main tools for B2B prospecting, as it has many benefits for salespeople. We all know that your main goal, as a salesperson, is to generate leads. However, it’s interesting to understand how LinkedIn is helping you to achieve this goal.

Below, you’ll find a list of the most important advantages of using the platform:

• It allows you to reach out to almost anybody (and most of all, decision-makers!): thanks to its advanced search, you can find high-quality leads very easily. Remember that LinkedIn is the largest B2B professional database worldwide (more than 1 billion profiles).

• Build trust with potential prospects: they can read your profile, and see who you are and what you do, access your company pages, and might know people from your network… All of this has a huge impact on image, trust, and decision process.

• Scale up your sales approach: You have access to a huge amount of data about each lead before engaging with them (from their job title, company size, location, etc.) which is perfect for targeting, segmentation, and personalization. For marketing people, this data could or should be used for building personas and ICPs.

• It is an inexhaustible source of leads: as it is the main lead database worldwide, this also means that you’ll never end up finding and reaching out to new leads from LinkedIn.

Indeed, LinkedIn is a great tool to target, cluster, and reach out to leads… in many ways.

However, if you really want to get to the next level and scale up your lead generation, it may be more effective to use a multichannel approach. That’s what we’re proposing with our sales automation tool.

How to use LinkedIn for sales?

We’ve talked about plans, tools, and features you can use as a salesperson. But we didn’t go through the method and strategies you can use as a sales to perform on LinkedIn.

That’s what we want to do below, giving you our own step-by-step process, so you can get a solid methodology. Just follow these 4 steps to improve your prospecting performance:

• Step 1: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for targeting
• Step 2: Design your outreach campaign
• Step 3: Outreach with your leads
• Step 4: Track your results

Step1: Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for targeting

As a reminder, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a special version of LinkedIn dedicated to sales. With this tool, you can access advanced filters -much more accurate than the basic plan -, save leads in lists, and operate directly from the platform’s interface.

At this stage, there are multiple ways to use LinkedIn Filters to find your leads, but according to us, the most effective way to do it is by doing Account-Based Marketing.

To do so, first, log in to Sales Navigator.

Then, use the lead or account filters to target the right leads. With ABM, you’ll go with the account filters first, and then target the job title into those specific companies, as mentioned in the screenshot below.

Applying filters on LinkedIn is super easy. What’s not so easy is the process of wondering what filters you should input. It requires personas’ knowledge and empathy. You could use questions such as:

• What are the main characteristics of your ideal customer?
• What does its daily routine look like?
• What software does he use? Is he even using software?
• Are they staffing right now?
• etc…

Step2: Design your outreach campaign

Once you’ve targeted your leads in Sales Navigator, you should be thinking about the best way to outreach to them.

This process is composed of two parts:

• copywriting;
• outreach framework.

About the framework… The best recommendation we can give you is to take a pen and a piece of paper – or use a solution such as whimsical.com.

This is what it could look like:

But in the end, it should look like this:

Our very own outreach software is based on this technology.

You’ll notice that there’s a hook here: if you’re using a single channel to contact your lead, some of them just won’t answer on this channel. It’s a matter of fact.

But what if you could contact them on a second or a third channel?

You multiply your chances of success and you find out which one works best for your target. Easy maths.

This is why we recommend our multi-channel approach to reach leads, and that’s what we’re going to see next.

Step 3: Outreach with your lead

Once you’ve designed your outreach campaign, it’s time to implement it.

Sure, you could drive a LinkedIn outreach strategy to contact them. Sales Navigator allows you to do that pretty easily.

However, you should wonder:

• I’m going to send hundreds or thousands of messages. Is it the best way to track my messages?
• How to follow up with my leads?
• Will I be able to answer all my leads fastly?

As sales experts, we – at LaGrowthMachine – believe that LinkedIn is maybe the best tool for targeting people, but not the best one for reaching out at scale.

That’s why we advise our customers to use a multichannel approach – combining LinkedIn, emails, and texts – to outreach their leads.

Our statistics show that our clients are able to generate more than 3.5X leads than they use to before… in much less time. Why is that?

Well, simply because with LaGrowthMachine, you can:

• send thousands of messages automatically (keeping a high degree of personalization);
• use different channels and therefore, expect a better chance for your lead to answer;
• reply to your lead on LinkedIn or Email from a single interface, in LaGrowthMachine;
• and many other benefits!

Step 4: Track your results

Tracking your results is one of the most important steps of your lead generation process, as it gives you the ability to understand what works and what does not.

However, LinkedIn Sales Navigator doesn’t provide great tracking features for salespeople. It’s quite hard to track our results with this tool.

You only have access to a section that displays the messages you send.

See below:

In addition to that, you can consult the LinkedIn Analytics section from your company page, but it’s much more of a marketing job – hence, not a sales one – and it will display some metrics from your global inbound & outbound actions. This is not what we’re looking for, here.

At LaGrowthMachine, we have built our own tracking & results dashboard that will display the performance of each one of your messages, with the following metrics:

• Open rate for each message
• Response rate for each message
• Conversion rate of the campaign
• Audience reach;
• Etc…

It’s a much more accurate and easy way to visualize your performance and iterate on your prospecting strategy!

Conclusion

Using LinkedIn for sales is definitely something that works and should be done in the first place. There are many benefits to using the platform:

• Awesome targeting;
• A huge B2B database;
• The ability to reach out to anybody pretty easily.

However, using LinkedIn for sales as a single tool might be a mistake: the solution lacks tracking & performance analysis, and outreach features, which are essential if you want to understand what works in your lead generation process, and to reach out to your leads.

That’s why we advise our customers to use a multi-channel approach with LaGrowthMachine: the solution allows you to reach out at scale on multiple channels, track the results of your messages, and easily iterate on your strategy to ensure you get the most out of your lead generation process. We’re offering a 14-day free trial, so give it a try!