Attract qualified prospects, expand your network and boost your sales with an optimized B2B prospecting strategy on LinkedIn.
Introduction
LinkedIn is a must for B2B prospecting. With over 830 million active members, including millions of qualified decision-makers and professionals, the platform offers an unrivalled pool of potential prospects.
Mastering prospecting techniques on LinkedIn has become crucial for companies wishing to develop their business and generate growth. This comprehensive step-by-step guide will help you develop an effective B2B prospecting strategy on LinkedIn and achieve your business goals.
1. Define your objectives and your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Before you start prospecting, it’s essential to clearly define your objectives and your ideal customer profile (ICP). This will enable you to target your efforts and optimize your messages.
Your goals: What do you want to achieve by prospecting on LinkedIn? Increase the number of leads? Generate appointments? Getting sales? Set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound) to track your progress and measure your success.
Your ideal customer profile (ICP ): Who are your ideal customers? Describe their demographics, behaviors, needs and challenges. The more precise your KPI, the more effectively you can target your messages.
2. Optimize your LinkedIn profile
Your LinkedIn profile is your showcase on the platform. It must be optimized to attract the attention of prospects and arouse their interest.
Complete all sections of your profile: Make sure your profile is complete and informative. Include a professional photo, a catchy headline, a detailed description of your skills and experience, and links to your website and social networks.
Use relevant keywords: Include relevant keywords in your profile, especially in your title, description and work experience. This will make it easier for prospects to find you in their searches.
Be active on the platform: Regularly publish relevant and engaging content, interact with your contacts and participate in LinkedIn Groups related to your industry. An active presence on LinkedIn will boost your credibility and visibility.
3. Target your prospects precisely
LinkedIn offers powerful advanced search tools enabling you to target your prospects with precision.
Use search filters: Refine your search using filters such as job title, company, industry, location, experience level, etc.
Exploit Boolean search functions: Boolean search lets you combine keywords and logical operators to further refine your searches.
Take advantage of LinkedIn groups: Join LinkedIn groups related to your industry and target group members who match your ideal customer profile.
4. Personalize your login and prospecting messages
Never send generic messages! Take the time to personalize your connection and prospecting messages for each prospect.
Start with a powerful catchphrase: Grab the prospect’s attention in the very first lines of your message.
Show you’ve done your research: Mention a specific element of the prospect’s profile that caught your attention or shows you’ve understood their needs.
Add value: Offer the prospect relevant content, an interesting resource or concrete help.
Be clear about your objective: Explain clearly what you want to achieve from the prospect, whether it’s an appointment, information or a simple connection.
5. Adopt a multi-channel approach
Don’t limit yourself to LinkedIn! Combine LinkedIn prospecting with other communication channels to maximize your chances of success.
Send follow-up emails: Send follow-up emails to prospects who have not responded to your LinkedIn messages.
6. Measure your results and adjust your strategy
Track your key performance indicators (KPIs): Measure indicators such as response rate, conversion rate and number of appointments generated.
Analyze your results: Analyze your data to identify what works and what doesn’t.
Adjust your strategy: Adjust your prospecting strategy according to your results. Test different approaches and optimize your messages to improve performance.
7. Use automation tools to save time and improve efficiency
Prospecting on LinkedIn can be time-consuming. Fortunately, there are automation tools that can help you save time and improve efficiency.
Here are a few examples of automation tools for prospecting on LinkedIn:
- Leadin: Leadin is a LinkedIn prospecting automation tool that lets you generate leads, send personalized messages and track your results.
- Dux-Soup: Dux-Soup is a US-based LinkedIn automation solution that offers similar functionality to Leadin, including lead generation, personalized messaging and performance tracking.
- Zopto: Zopto is a LinkedIn automation tool from the UK, comparable to Leadin in terms of functionality but with a higher price tag. It offers advanced options for prospect research, data extraction and prospecting campaign management.
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a paid sales tool from LinkedIn that offers advanced search, messaging and tracking capabilities.
It’s important to use automation tools responsibly and ethically. Respect LinkedIn’s rules and never send unsolicited or misleading messages.
8. Respect LinkedIn's rules
LinkedIn has its own rules and guidelines that you must follow when prospecting. Make sure you read and understand these rules before you start sending messages.
Here are some of the most important rules to follow:
- Don’t send unsolicited messages to people you don’t know.
- Don’t be aggressive or promotional in your messages.
- Don’t use fake profiles or names.
- Do not respect the privacy of other users.
- If you do not comply with LinkedIn’s rules, your account may be suspended or deleted.
Conclusion
Prospecting on LinkedIn can be an effective way to generate leads and grow your business. However, it’s important to do it the right way and to respect LinkedIn’s rules.
By following the advice in this guide, you’ll be able to develop an effective B2B prospecting strategy on LinkedIn and achieve your business goals.
Remember that prospecting is an ongoing process that requires time, patience and perseverance. But if you commit to it, it can be a very effective way of growing your business.
9. FAQ
Performance varies enormously from one project to another. Companies with a proven target and offer are generally those that perform best.
However, here’s an order of magnitude based on 1,500 campaigns and 10,000 appointments generated: appointment setting rates between 2% and 5% of the number of new contacts on LinkedIn, as well as 0.5% and 1% by cold email on average. Combining channels always yields better results!
When it comes to starting up a project, the first month of collaboration is always less representative (and therefore less effective), because prospecting, like any effective marketing action, is inertial. Added to this is the length of your sales cycle (which can sometimes be long, especially for key accounts).
Yes, in fact we strongly recommend it. In general, we run A/B tests on a monthly basis. However, if the volume of contacts allows, we can also set up weekly tests.
In any case, A/B testing is systematically included in our pricing and is a central pillar of our approach.
Please note that we recommend collaborations of at least 3 months to give us time to find the most effective versions for your campaigns.
The time may vary depending on the campaign, but on average, the first appointments are obtained after the third week of collaboration.
We observe that results are maximized when we have an average of between 7 and 12 points of contact per prospect, preferably multi-channel (LinkedIn and email). Some prospects prefer to respond on LinkedIn, others by email. In any case, some prospects can only be contacted via LinkedIn, as their professional email address will not allow any market tool to identify them.
In this way, collaborating with LeadIn and a multi-channel approach always generates more results.
We act as a white label, ideally in the name of the person who will be in charge of sales meetings within your company.
On the technical side of LinkedIn, we use your personal account or that of your sales reps.
For emails, we buy domain names and email addresses similar to yours, but with different variants (for example, leadinlabs.fr instead of leadin.fr) to protect your official domain name in the event of blacklisting. We redirect all purchased domain names to your main domain name so that you can benefit from the traffic generated.
To ensure maximum protection, our infrastructure is unique on the market, with rotating dedicated IPs and a sending load spread over a maximum number of accounts and domain names.
To identify your decision-makers, we rely mainly on LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Then, to obtain their B2B e-mail addresses, we use various enrichment solutions, independent of LinkedIn. We do not buy or rent databases. Each list is tailor-made, with recent data and rigorous quality control before being shared.
Please note that you will be asked to subscribe to LinkedIn Sales Navigator in order to prospect on LinkedIn. This is how our LeadIn technology teams can achieve prospecting volumes up to 2.5x higher than any other prospecting tool or service, i.e. up to 1,000 engaged leads / month on LinkedIn, without ever compromising your account.
Avoiding spam altogether is our main email challenge. Our expertise and infrastructures, developed exclusively for cold email and unique on the market (dedicated servers, rotating IPs, real-time domain monitoring systems…) enable us to maximize the deliverability of your campaigns.
Beyond the technical aspects, respecting the fundamentals is essential to reach your prospects’ main inbox. This is based on a well thought-out sales strategy, quality data with a minimal bounce rate for email addresses, and effective, engaging copywriting.
Yes, we are. We have ensured our compliance with the help of a law firm specializing in digital law. This enables us to guarantee GDPR compliance for your campaigns and to protect you in the event of a complaint to the CNIL.
As part of our services, we offer you a tracking file hosted on Google Sheets with your databases and all content shared during the launch call. As each of our customers has a different sales organization, we tailor our services to your sales tools.
It’s entirely possible to integrate your campaign data with your CRM (e.g. HubSpot, Pipedrive) – most of the time, we use a webhook system (like Zapier) or “Bcc” to automatically send data via LinkedIn or email. We can also work simply by importing a .csv file, depending on your organization and the volume of data to be processed.
Our flat-rate prospecting services include multi-channel strategies (LinkedIn, email). We carry out complementary actions to a direct contact strategy that are less direct: LinkedIn profile views and LinkedIn profile follow-ups, in addition to our engagement actions via LinkedIn and/or email. This is the most comprehensive method for maximizing your chances of converting every prospect into an appointment.
In other words: our flat-rate prospecting services apply to all our customers, replicating “human” actions and therefore more engaging.
Our “growth” email prospecting model, on the other hand, is reserved for eligible companies (broad targets, wishing to build volume quickly by contacting as many prospects as possible). We’re building a dedicated infrastructure that enables us to do (much) more volume, by email alone. The aim is to reach more people faster!
In short: both approaches generate sales opportunities and appointments, but they’re not quite the same.
Just adapt the method you choose! If you have less than 10,000 potential prospects, we recommend you subscribe to one of our flat-rate prospecting services, to exploit your prospects in as much depth as possible and maximize the chances of conversion per prospect (= multiplication of contact points and increased conversion rate).
If you have any strategic questions in advance, book a call with our team to get the advice you need.
Since 2020, we’ve been structured to combine quality prospecting, support, training and consulting at an unbeatable price.
This experience (+1,500 prospecting campaigns for +350 companies) combined with our LEADIN tools specifically designed for growth marketing (who can argue with that?) enable us to do what really works for our customers, in most B2B sectors and industries. Our services are non-binding, and our sole aim is to bring you maximum results, as quickly as possible.
Depending on the application, we’ll even take the “risks” for you, so that after an implementation period you only pay for what you get! Contact us to find out more.
In addition to this guide, here are some tools and resources that will be useful for your prospecting on LinkedIn :
- Leadin: https://www.leadin.fr/
- LinkedIn Sales Navigator: https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/sales-navigator
- Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/
- Canva: https://www.canva.com/
- Zoom: https://zoom.us/
