The sales industry has come a long way, hasn’t it? If you have a background in sales but are new to SaaS, you’ve probably figured out that you’re playing in a different arena. While many of your skills are transferable, there are a few tricks you need to pick up that are unique to SaaS sales. Don’t worry; I can help.
I want to tune you into something that gets overlooked too often by SaaS founders and sales reps: LinkedIn prospecting. And look, I get it. You’ve already got a to-do list longer than your arm, and by no means am I trying to add more to your workload. But LinkedIn prospecting shouldn’t be seen as a chore. Instead, you should view it as an opportunity to scale your SaaS business by organically connecting with potential customers.
To help you get started, I’ve put together the ultimate guide to LinkedIn prospecting. First, we’re going to get into why LinkedIn prospecting is important and how to get started. Then, we’ll review a few strategies that we already know can have productive results. We’ll also talk about how not to use LinkedIn, including discussing the platform’s culture and etiquette expectations.
There are several tools built into LinkedIn that can help maximize your prospecting efforts, and I’ll go over those, as well as the best ways to track your progress and make any necessary improvements to your strategies. Lastly, we’ll look at some of the most common challenges SaaS founders face while using LinkedIn for prospecting and how to overcome them. By the end of this article, you’ll have several actionable prospecting tips that will change the way you connect with potential clients.
Let’s dig in!
Why You Need to be Doing LinkedIn Prospecting
First things first: what is LinkedIn prospecting? It is a strategy used by many B2B SaaS founders to utilize LinkedIn, the most widely used professional social media platform in the world, to connect with potential customers. The idea is to find your target audience on LinkedIn and build genuine relationships. You start by identifying their needs, which you will learn about by getting to know your potential customers. Once you know what they need, you can show them how your product will fill the gap.
There are several reasons that LinkedIn prospecting is worth exploring, starting with the many tools already built into the website that can help streamline the sales process. LinkedIn offers InMail messaging, a proven way for folks in B2B sales to get the attention of decision makers. InMail statistically gets more responses than cold emails, and it’s a great tool for automating personalized messages to the right people.
Does this mean that every element of your current prospecting strategy is obsolete? No, not necessarily. But LinkedIn is a gold mine of sorts, allowing you to easily access the kinds of people, information, and resources that can be incredibly difficult to gather with traditional prospecting efforts.
Take this scenario for example: with a three-second web search, you’ve found your prospect’s profile on LinkedIn. There, you can access everything you need to know about them. Information — from company size to job openings to what CRM they use — is available to you without any need for extra research. With a couple of clicks, you’ve identified the company’s decision-makers and any mutual connections you have. Within minutes, you’ve already found a way to make a connection.
It’s a long way from the sales prospecting methods of yesterday. The most obvious benefit is the time saved, but there’s more to it than that. As cheesy as it may sound, building authentic relationships with potential customers is the best way to let them know what you’re about. LinkedIn allows you to do just that in a platform designed for social and professional networking.
Where to Start Your LinkedIn Prospecting Process
When was the last time you revamped your LinkedIn profile or sent a meaningful connection request to someone on your lead list? It’s probably time to get to know LinkedIn on a deeper level, and that starts with optimizing your profile.
To improve your profile, you should take steps to make sure it is updated with current information. An outdated LinkedIn profile is about as useful as handing out blank business cards. You want people to get a sense of who you are, what you do, and what you know — and they can’t do that if your profile hasn’t been touched in five years. Use a recent, professional photo, your current job title, and update your skills and interests so that the story your profile tells is accurate.
Now it’s time to figure out who your target audience is. As salespeople, it can be tempting for us to start throwing sales pitches at the wall to see what sticks. But a calculated approach is going to lead to more conversions, improved delivery of services, and long-term customer relationships. Luckily, the process of identifying your target audience for lead generation is made simple with LinkedIn search features.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which offers an advanced search across the platform, needs a license to use, but it’s well worth the cost. Getting acquainted with the search filters offered in Sales Navigator will help you narrow down LinkedIn’s billion users so you can build a strategically crafted prospect list.
If you’re hoping LinkedIn has a feature to make that process easy, too, then you’re in luck. LinkedIn’s Boolean search is free and easy to use, especially if you’re familiar with standard search engine logic. It offers a quick way to find people within your target audience that you want to connect with and eventually pitch to.
To streamline future searches and save your filters, you can set up search alerts within LinkedIn. This feature gives you a weekly update of any new prospects that might have come up since your last search, saving you time and expanding your network with very little effort on your part.
5 Proven Strategies
So, what are the best LinkedIn prospecting techniques, and how can you make them work for you? I’m so glad you asked. Let’s look at five proven strategies for turning potential leads into customers.
Get Rid of Generic, Impersonal Templates
I’m not saying you can never use a template for a cold outreach. I’m a big fan of templates, in fact. But if you want to build genuine relationships, you need to approach every LinkedIn connection authentically. Use templates, but personalize your messages. When you get a LinkedIn message that reads like it was written by a bot and then sent to a hundred other people, how likely are you to respond? No one wants more spam in their inbox, so treat every LinkedIn outreach attempt the same as you would treat an in-person meeting with a potential client.
Don’t Forget to Follow Up
No matter how much you personalize an initial note, follow-up messages are an important way to make sure people know you’re serious about connecting. Everyone is busy, but a thoughtful follow-up message stands out in a full inbox.
There’s a caveat to this — when you follow up, be sure to add value. You can share a recent project you think they might be interested in checking out, or explain a new feature about your product you didn’t touch on in your first message. Either way, endlessly sending the same message without adding value is a good way to get blocked.
Engage with Content
When I tell you to engage with content shared by your prospects, I don’t mean to comment, “Great points!” on every LinkedIn post you see. There are much better ways to engage that show you actually read and appreciated what they had to say. Instead, add a comment that highlights your takeaways or asks a thoughtful question about their post. Even better, share their post with your own network if it seems like something your audience would appreciate.
You can find prospects in the comments of posts like these, and adding valuable insight is one way to generate interest in your direction. Who else reacted to the post, and how did they feel about it? Remember, authenticity is always the way to go. Don’t feign interest, but if the connection is there, leverage it.
Create Valuable Content of Your Own
Not only is creating content within LinkedIn easy to do, it’s a great way to increase your visibility. With its algorithms, LinkedIn will show your content to the people who want to see it. Consider writing up a thought leadership piece, discussing common pain points in your industry and how to overcome them, or creating a poll that gets people talking about a feature that your product offers.
Throughout your prospecting process, you’ll want to prioritize your first impression on qualified leads. The content you produce might serve as an introduction to you, your company, and your product. How do you want that introduction to go?
Join LinkedIn Groups
LinkedIn groups may not be the go-to gathering place for professionals to collaborate and network, but they’re an excellent place to find people who just might be interested in what you have to offer. I’d never suggest joining these groups with the intention of collecting names and offering nothing of value, though.
Instead, engage with the folks in LinkedIn groups. Find out what their pain points are. Share your tips and tricks for overcoming issues you’ve faced. Don’t spam, but actively participate in conversation. If you identify prospects, connect with them individually and let your outreach efforts come naturally in appropriate ways.
What Not to Do in LinkedIn
There are several common pitfalls that sales teams run into when venturing into LinkedIn prospecting. Unfortunately, these can have a detrimental effect on relationships you’re trying to build, so be sure to take notes. These mistakes can cause you serious problems.
Ignoring LinkedIn Etiquette
At over twenty years old, LinkedIn has developed its own culture that makes it stand out from other social media platforms. It’s well-established that LinkedIn is geared toward professional connections, so misusing the platform for unprofessional reasons is a definite faux pas. The platform has its own set of built in rules, but there are unspoken ones you’ll need to adhere to as well.
Many of them have already been covered, like personalizing your connection requests and sending follow-up messages. Others are no-brainers, like not using LinkedIn to find a date. But there are other LinkedIn etiquette rules that are more subtle, and you’ll quickly learn what they are once you’ve spent some time on the platform.
Failing to Follow Up (Or Doing It Poorly)
There’s a delicate balance when it comes to following up with prospects. Reach out too often and you risk alienating them by coming on too strong. Fail to follow up and you risk falling through the cracks altogether. So, how do you strike the balance between annoying and forgettable?
Like I mentioned earlier, make sure you’re adding value to your follow-up messages. Don’t inundate them with questions about whether they got your last message. LinkedIn prospecting isn’t all that different from cold calling in this way. Ideally, you should follow up a few times after your initial message, giving them time to process each message before reaching out again.
Nailing the timing of your follow-ups is important. After your first message, circle back in three days. If you still haven’t received a response, give them another three to four days before reaching out again. You can follow up as many times as you want, but after several touches, no response is a response, so it’s good to know when it’s time to move on.
Cold Outreach Without Proper Research
Social selling is about building relationships, and that means getting to know your potential customers. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in LinkedIn prospecting is diving in with a cold outreach and not bothering to do your research first. Look at your prospect’s LinkedIn profile as if it were a cheat sheet, telling you everything you need to know about who they are and what their needs are. Can you identify pain points that you could help with?
Overlooking LinkedIn Automation Tools
In the next section, we’ll get into more detail on the automation tools LinkedIn has to offer, but they deserved a mention here, too. Ignoring these prospecting tools means putting a virtual cap on your own success. LinkedIn automation tools can send personalized messages, engage with content, and find connections for you. There are really no downsides to taking advantage of them.
Leveraging LinkedIn Tools for Prospecting
Now that we’ve talked about how you can use LinkedIn, we can look more closely at how you can make it work for you. You’ll learn how to automate LinkedIn features to save time, manage outreach campaigns, and take full advantage of the platform’s sophisticated search engine.
As we’ve discovered, LinkedIn Sales Navigator is one of the easiest ways to identify and target your audience. Using its long list of available filters, you can zero in on the leads you want. A subscription to any level of Sales Navigator includes a LinkedIn Premium account, so you’ll get access to the extra features there, as well. Sales Navigator offers integrations with other apps like Hubspot, so you can even use LinkedIn tools to manage your lead list in your CRM.
Using the automations LinkedIn offers, you can stay on top of follow-up messages, keep track of your metrics, and even like or comment on relevant content without adding any of those things to your to-do list. Ultimately, the goal is for you to spend your time building the right relationships and closing deals. LinkedIn automation tools can take care of the rest. Earlier, we compared a prospect’s LinkedIn profile to a cheat sheet, providing you with all the information you need to connect. LinkedIn has automations that can collect that data for you, eliminating yet another tedious step in your sales process.
Measuring and Optimizing Your LinkedIn Prospecting Efforts
In SaaS sales, we spend a lot of time tracking metrics. This necessary step is how we learn what is working and what isn’t, and where we can make improvements. LinkedIn automations can help with a great deal of these tasks, including keeping track of key metrics and conducting A/B testing, but it’s important that you stay involved in these processes. Here’s what I suggest you focus on:
- Track Key Metrics: Keep an eye on how your outreach campaigns are performing. Track open rates, responses, and spam complaints. Even more importantly: when you identify something that isn’t working, change it. Not every idea is a winner, and it’s critical that you stay flexible enough to recognize your shortcomings and optimizing your outreach efforts based on metrics.
- Conduct A/B Testing: This is another task LinkedIn tools can help you with, but whether you automate it through the platform or handle it yourself, it has to be done. If you don’t deliver what your prospects want to see or the kind of content they’re most likely to engage with, you’re robbing yourself of conversions and limiting your own success.
- Refine Strategies Until They Work: There is always room for improvement. Unless every single prospect you reach out to converts to a customer, you can find ways to refine your prospecting strategies. This process can be painful, as it involves looking critically at your own decisions and identifying where you went wrong, but it’s absolutely necessary for growth.
Overcoming Common Challenges
LinkedIn prospecting is undoubtedly one of the best ways to find and engage qualified leads, but it’s not without its challenges. Let’s look at some of the most common struggles SaaS salespeople have when using LinkedIn in this way. These challenges are difficult – but not impossible – to overcome.
- Connection Limits
- LinkedIn only allows 30,000 1st-degree connections, which means you’ll want to use them sparingly. That number may seem high, but it’s not as hard to reach as you might think. There are also weekly limits on the number of connection invitations you can send. The idea is sound; LinkedIn wants to encourage you to connect with people you know so that your network isn’t falsely inflated with strangers. But for someone using automation tools, these limits can put a damper on attempts to connect with real leads. If you run into a weekly connection limit, you’ll need to turn off your automations and re-engage once the week is up. In the meantime, I recommend using LinkedIn Premium features, like the ability to interact with open profiles, to get around the wait period.
- Low Response Rates
- If you’re finding it hard to get responses to LinkedIn messages, you may need to revisit your outreach strategy. Are you following the etiquette rules we discussed earlier? Are you following up frequently and adding value each time? Try to avoid sending messages on the weekend, because those are more likely to go unanswered and get buried in inboxes. Don’t overwhelm your prospect with an overly long subject line. Finally, be sure to leverage LinkedIn automation tools to send personalized messages and keep track of key metrics.
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot of information, and by now you have a clear idea of why LinkedIn prospecting is so valuable. Now that you know where to start, what to avoid, and what strategies and tools to focus on, it’s time to put it into action. Update your LinkedIn profile, make some meaningful connections, and get to know the people on the other side of your pitch.
Like all SaaS founders, you should consider LinkedIn prospecting a necessary step in scaling your business. There’s no reason to ignore its many features and benefits, and the time you save by using LinkedIn automation tools can be spent focusing on personalizing messages and cultivating genuine business relationships with the companies you want to serve.
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