7 Key LinkedIn Prospecting Tips

LinkedIn is a crucial weapon in the prospecting arsenal of today’s modern seller. However, LinkedIn has been horribly abused by novice sellers who don’t understand how to use this weapon correctly.?With this is mind, here's my thoughts on 7 Key Tips to connect with potential buyers the RIGHT way on LinkedIn.

As a sales development leader, I’m very much a buyer and I routinely get “sold to” on LinkedIn.?Over the years, I’ve seen more than my fair share of good, bad, and ugly LinkedIn connection requests and messages. Because LinkedIn is the world’s largest professional social network, you can bet your bottom dollar your prospects are getting inundated with bad and ugly messaging too. So, here are my tips for successfully grabbing your prospects’ attention and standing out from your competition on LinkedIn.

Tip #1 - Make it Personal

Personalize your connection request. Most of the requests I receive are from people I don’t know. When a stranger reaches out to connect with me and hasn’t bothered to personalize their request, it comes across not only lazy, but naively assumptive that I would just accept their request.?Always keep this in mind: If I don’t know you and you don’t personalize your connection request, I’m not going to accept it unless we have something significant in common.

Tip #2 - Keep it Short & Sweet

So, what should you include in your LinkedIn connection requests? Definitely don’t start selling in your connection request with an elaborate pitch!?Don’t even hint to your prospect about what you’re going to do immediately after they accept your request. Rather, keep it simple. For example, explain that you’re expanding your network with people who are in your industry, or their particular role, and that you hope to learn from them in the future while providing value in return.

Tip #3 - Research Before you Write Invites

Always research prospects and try to find articles they have written or a webinar they participated in. Explain you saw their article and share what you learned. At a minimum, mention you’ve sent them an email and visited their LinkedIn profile because you wanted to put a face to the name. It’s okay to be somewhat ambiguous in your connection requests. Just make certain you write something to stand out from the crowd. Ideally it shows you did your research.

Tip #4 - Don’t Pitch Immediately

Don’t pitch a new LinkedIn connection as soon as they accept your request. Give it time, build awareness, and let your relationship breathe and grow. Share your company’s content and other articles you find relevant to your prospect’s persona regularly as posts on LinkedIn. By doing this, you’re adding value to your connections while building awareness of who you and your organization are.

Tip #5 - Actively Engage

Actively engage with your connection’s posts. Like them, and comment on them as appropriate. Again, it’s about both adding value and building awareness of who you and your company are and how you can help them.

Tip #6 - Include LinkedIn Messages in your Sales Sequence Steps

Okay, so hopefully you’ve already sent a couple emails and phone calls your new connection’s way as part of an outbound sales sequence, all the while building awareness on LinkedIn. At this point, if they haven’t responded to your attempts over the phone and through email, start working on your first LinkedIn message. Your LinkedIn message can be very similar to the emails you’ve sent them previously. Just like email, you need to personalize the message, calling out if they previously worked at a customer account of your company, have common connections with you or your executives, or reference areas of expertise and responsibility from their profile and how your organization helps similar companies solve these challenges.

For example, if my typical buyer persona is Demand Generation leaders and I see on a prospect's current job description that their responsibilities include driving top of funnel leads for the sales team, at LeanData I might reach out to them with a message like this:

Hi Jane,

You work hard to drive new leads for your sales reps. How important is sales response time (your speed-to-lead) in order to hit your marketing pipeline and revenue goals?

The State of B2B Lead Management 2022 was just released and it shares how the fastest growing organizations are effectively orchestrating their customer's, and future customer's (leads) journeys into the right hands for follow-up.

I thought you might be interested in a different approach to improving your inbound conversion rates through faster and more accurate Lead and Account management.?

Are you open to a conversation about getting every lead to the right rep at the right time?

Best,

Rob

Tip #7 - Make your LinkedIn Profile Perfect

According to recent research, prior to an important business meeting 64% of businesspeople will review the LinkedIn profile of someone they’ve never met before. Heck, I look at it before I accept a connection request in most cases. So, how does your LinkedIn profile look? Does it present a professional image of who you are?

LinkedIn is an important competitive weapon for all salespeople. Use it correctly and remember the adage, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.”

Happy Selling!