Introduction
Linkedin is essential for sales prospecting. However, over the past 2 years, this professional platform has been increasingly limiting the number of messages it can send and the number of connection requests it can receive.
So the question is: How do you develop a scalable prospecting method on Linkedin?
In this article, we’ll show you how to turn LinkedIn into a scalable and effective prospecting tool. You will learn to :
- Understanding your ecosystem for successful prospecting
- Building a successful prospecting strategy on LinkedIn
- Enhance your profile to help with prospecting
- Adopt advanced tactics for scalable prospecting with Mirrorprofiles
- Generate relevant content to support your prospecting
- Evaluate your results and fine-tune your methods
Ready to master the art of prospecting on LinkedIn? Here we go!
Understanding the Linkedin ecosystem for successful prospecting
LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network, has over a billion users, including 103 million decision-makers. It’s the perfect territory for B2B prospecting, which aims to identify and contact potential customers to sell your products or services. So how do you prospect effectively on LinkedIn? How can you spend less time on it and still avoid looking like a spammer? And how can you guarantee scalable prospecting, capable of adjusting to the evolution of your business and the expansion of your prospect base? The key lies in a thorough understanding of the LinkedIn ecosystem and its particularities.
The relevance of LinkedIn for B2B prospecting
Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn focuses on B2B interactions – between companies and professionals. It helps you identify and contact qualified prospects who match your ideal customer, have the right budget and are open to your offer. LinkedIn is also essential for establishing yourself as an expert in your sector, increasing your visibility and credibility, and building relationships of trust with your prospects. It’s a powerful, high-performance prospecting tool, but you need to know how to use it wisely.
Specific Linkedin features to exploit
LinkedIn offers a range of features to optimize your prospecting. Here are a few to consider:
- Your LinkedIn profile: Your digital business card, it should be complete, professional and attractive, highlighting your career path, skills, achievements and recommendations. Including keywords specific to your field and offering makes it easier for prospects looking for your solutions to find you.
- Your LinkedIn network: Consisting of your connections on the platform, your network should be targeted and of high quality, bringing together prospects, customers, partners, influencers and experts. It’s vital to actively maintain it through regular interaction, sharing relevant content, obtaining recommendations and requesting introductions.
- Your LinkedIn content: Whether articles, videos, infographics, case studies or testimonials, your publications must be relevant, useful, original and engaging. They should address your prospects’ needs, questions and objections, while demonstrating your expertise and what sets you apart. A regular publication, adapted to your audience in terms of format, tone and message, is recommended.
- Linkedin data: For those who have mastered Linkedin filters, this platform is a gigantic database for your prospecting or recruitment needs. This means you’ll have up-to-date data, already enriched with all the information you need for quality prospecting.
Key figures for Linkedin prospecting in 2024
To measure the effectiveness of your prospecting on LinkedIn, knowing the platform’s key figures is crucial. Here are some key statistics for 2024:
- LinkedIn is home to over 78 million companies, representing a considerable pool of prospects for your business.
- 96% of B2B marketers choose LinkedIn to share their content, making it a preferred distribution channel for your expertise.
- 91% of decision-makers use LinkedIn as their first source of information prior to a purchasing decision, offering a unique opportunity to influence and convince your prospects.
This makes LinkedIn an essential tool for B2B prospecting in 2024. How to implement an effective prospecting strategy remains to be seen, and will be discussed in the remainder of this article.
Developing an effective prospecting strategy on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s leading professional social network, with over a billion members. It’s the platform of choice for identifying and contacting qualified prospects, whether to market a product or service, or to recruit talent. However, successful prospecting on LinkedIn requires more than just a profile and random messages. It is essential to adopt a structured prospecting strategy based on three main stages:
Define clear, measurable objectives
The first step to successful prospecting is to establish precise, quantifiable objectives in line with your sales or recruitment plan. It’s a question of asking yourself about your ambitions: what result do you hope to achieve with LinkedIn? You could aim to :
- Generate a defined number of leads per month
- Increase the number of leads generated per week
- Increase your lead-to-customer conversion rate
- Raise your profile and brand image
- Build trusting relationships with your prospects
- Attract qualified candidates for your vacancies
Clarifying your objectives makes them measurable, for example, reaching 50 new contacts per month, increasing your success rate by 10%, or filling 5 positions in three months. These performance indicators will help you track your progress and measure the effectiveness of your Linkedin acquisition strategy.
How to use SalesNavigator or Recruiter Lite for targeted prospecting
The second phase is to make effective use of the prospecting tools available on LinkedIn, such as SalesNavigator or Recruiter Lite. These advanced versions offer superior functionality for searching and contacting prospects with precision. Depending on your objective :
- SalesNavigator is perfect for sales professionals, offering the ability to filter searches across the entire LinkedIn network according to over 40 criteria. It also makes it easy to track signals from prospects, and enables personalized messages to be sent via InMail credits. You don’t need a SalesNavigator license for each salesperson, just one to power your automated outbound marketing campaigns.
- Recruiter Lite is ideal for recruitment professionals, allowing you to find candidates using over 20 filters. This tool also helps you to identify profiles open to new opportunities and to manage your recruitment projects efficiently.
Linkedin offers a large number of data sources, all of which are interesting but have their drawbacks. The more you prepare your databases in advance, the better your results will be, and the greater the impact in the short/medium/long term.
Deploy an automation tool on your Linkedin accounts
The third step is to adopt an automation tool to optimize your time and efficiency on LinkedIn. These programs are designed to automate various repetitive actions, such as :
- Visit profiles to attract attention
- Send targeted invitations
- Write welcome or follow-up messages
- Building prospect lists
- Publish content tailored to your audience
There are a multitude of automation tools offering a range of functions and prices, among which PhantomBuster, Taplio, HeyReach, and LGM stand out. These solutions help you save time, extend your reach and boost your response rate. However, you must use them with discretion, respecting the limits imposed by LinkedIn and taking care to personalize your messages to avoid any impression of spam. If you don’t want to take any risks with your personal Linkedin account or those of your sales reps, opt for our Mirrorprofiles Linkedin account rental solution.
Optimizing your LinkedIn profile for prospecting purposes
To maximize Linkedin opportunities, it’s crucial to optimize your LinkedIn profile specifically for prospecting. This will increase the acceptance rate of your campaigns and increase your visibility among other platform users. Your prospects, leads and customers will see you posting and commenting on Linkedin.
Create an attractive, professional Linkedin profile
Think of your LinkedIn profile as a digital business card that accurately represents your image, your expertise and your unique contribution. To create a profile that is both attractive and professional, follow these steps:
- Choose a high-quality profile photo that shows you smiling and is appropriate to your field of activity.
- Formulate a captivating headline that accurately summarizes your current position or the one you’re aiming for, while incorporating strategic keywords to facilitate your discovery.
- Write a summary in the form of an effective pitch, describing who you are, what you offer, the value you bring to your prospects and how to contact you.
- Carefully complete all the sections of your profile (experience, training, skills, recommendations, etc.), focusing on your results, your main achievements and testimonials from your customers.
- Integrate a customized cover banner that reflects your field of activity, your vision or your motto. Keywords play a fundamental role in improving your visibility and positioning on LinkedIn. They help search engines and users understand the content of your profile and what you offer.
To integrate relevant keywords into your profile :
- Identify terms frequently searched by your prospects using free tools such as Google Ads or Keyword Tool.
- Incorporate these keywords into the various sections of your profile (title, summary, experience, skills, etc.) in an organic and judicious way.
- Vary your keywords and give priority to long-tail expressions, which are strings of words corresponding to more precise, less competitive queries. By applying these recommendations, your LinkedIn profile will be optimized for prospecting, effectively capturing the attention of your potential prospects.
For even more technical advice on optimizing your Linkedin profile, check out our guides written by a Linkedin expert.
Advanced tactics for scalable prospecting on LinkedIn
Linkedin is fertile ground for companies looking to expand their customer portfolio and generate quality leads. However, effective prospecting on LinkedIn in 2024 requires astute navigation through the platform’s competition and restrictions. Discover three advanced tactics to refine your prospecting strategy on LinkedIn.
Intelligent automation of repetitive tasks
Intelligent automation uses technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to simplify the repetitive tasks involved in your prospecting. Tools like Dripify or HeyReach enable you to automatically send personalized connection requests, follow-up messages, event invitations and enrich your contact data.
These solutions not only save you time and reduce human error, but also boost your conversion rate. In short, intelligent automation optimizes processes, saves resources and improves operational performance.
What’s more, MirrorChat makes it easy to manage all the responses you generate, by centralizing all Linkedin messaging on a single interface, enabling your sales force to manage multiple Linkedin accounts. MirrorChat is equipped with AI that gives you access to individualized, pre-constructed responses. It’s based on all the information gathered through your prospect’s Linkedin profile.
Using Social Selling to strengthen your sales approach
Social Selling is the art of leveraging social networks, with LinkedIn at the forefront, to forge and maintain links with prospects. Beyond sharing content and interacting with publications, it’s about generating value, trust and engagement. The keys to success in Social Selling on LinkedIn include optimizing your profile, developing your personal brand, expanding your network, actively participating in discussions, understanding prospects’ needs, and offering tailored solutions. Social Selling positions you as an expert, sets you apart from the competition and boosts your sales.
LinkedIn quotas in 2024: going beyond the limits with MirrorProfiles
LinkedIn sets weekly quotas on connection requests, messages and searches, which vary according to your account type (free or premium), your level of activity, and your SSI (Social Selling Index) score. In 2024, these weekly quotas will range from 100 to 200 connection requests, 300 to 500 messages, and 1,000 to 2,000 searches per week.
For 1 Linkedin account, this represents an average of 20 replies per week, because if your prospect hasn’t accepted your connection request, you won’t be able to send him any messages.
The strategy for overcoming these restrictions? Use multiple accounts via MirrorProfiles. This solution offers customized, prepared and secure LinkedIn profiles for automation, enabling you to increase your prospecting volume without compromising your main account. On average, a sales rep can manage up to 10 Mirrorprofiles accounts with MirrorChat. This represents over 150 leads generated per week.
Create value-added content to support prospecting
Content plays a fundamental role in any digital marketing strategy, serving to attract, inform and persuade prospects to choose your solution. To produce content that specifically addresses your target audience’s needs, your value proposition and your prospecting objectives, follow our recommendations.
Developing a prospect-oriented content strategy
Start by identifying your prospect’s ideal profile by analyzing sales data, customer feedback and market research. The aim is to capture the needs, challenges, motivations and buying behaviors of your prospects to create personas, fictitious but realistic profiles. Then build a content plan that addresses your prospects’ expectations and questions at every stage of their buying journey, offering them useful and relevant information that reflects your expertise and what sets you apart. Don’t forget to include clear, well-targeted calls to action.
The importance of regular and relevant content
Content creation goes hand in hand with its distribution. Select the most relevant channels to reach your target audience, such as your website, social networks, blog, or newsletter, and make sure you publish regularly to keep your prospects engaged. However, quality is better than quantity. Make sure your content is original and adds real value, compared with what’s already available. Keep abreast of what the competition is doing, but remain unique, relying on reliable, verifiable sources. Build a clear, sharp editorial line, and plan to have a dozen or so pieces of content before you start publishing. You should try to maintain a minimum of 1 post published per week, not counting Linkedin comments, which are a very good source of acquisition.
Run Ads campaigns in parallel with your outbound prospecting
Content is only one aspect of your prospecting strategy. Online advertising campaigns, or Ads, also play a key role in increasing your visibility and brand awareness. Use platforms such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn to serve targeted paid ads based on criteria such as keywords, location, age, interests, etc. Ads complement your outbound prospecting, improving the effectiveness of your efforts to reach prospects directly, generating traffic to your site and increasing the chances of making contact. They also offer the advantage of accurately measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimizing your return on investment.
Measuring performance and adjusting strategies
Prospecting is vital to expanding a customer portfolio and increasing revenues. But how do you determine the effectiveness of your prospecting efforts and how closely do they match market requirements? What strategies should be adopted in response to the results obtained and to changes in the business environment? In this section, we explore the use of analytics to gauge prospecting performance, and the implementation of ongoing adjustments for an evolutionarily effective prospecting approach.
Use analytics to evaluate prospecting effectiveness
Analysis devices offer a valuable opportunity to collect, analyze and present prospecting data. They enable the evaluation of various key performance indicators, such as contact volume, conversion rate, cost of acquisition, return on investment, and much more. What’s more, these devices help identify the most effective prospecting channels, the most promising market segments, the most relevant prospect profiles and the most impactful messages. The use of analytical devices is therefore essential to measure the success of prospecting and to refine tactics.
Continuous adaptation for a scalable prospecting approach
Continuous adaptation is the process of adjusting prospecting strategy based on insights gained from analytical data, but also in response to market developments such as customer expectations, competition, regulatory standards and innovations. It aims to keep the company in line with market trends, stand out from the competition, retain existing customers and attract new ones. This adaptation involves a constant cycle of evaluation, learning and improvement. It ensures agile, high-performance prospecting, capable of adapting to variable scales.
Conclusion
LinkedIn remains essential for B2B prospecting, despite its new limitations. To continue increasing your lead generation, it’s crucial to optimize your profile to improve visibility and credibility, strategically use advanced tools like Sales Navigator or Recruiter Lite for precise targeting, and adopt automation solutions to efficiently manage interactions without losing personalization.
At the same time, generating regular, relevant content helps to keep prospects engaged. Finally, in the face of LinkedIn’s restrictions, considering methods to increase your prospecting capacity, such as using multiple Linkedin Mirrorprofiles, is a wise strategy. Adopting these approaches maximizes your prospecting opportunities on LinkedIn, while respecting the platform’s rules.
FAQ
How can you successfully prospect on LinkedIn?
For successful prospecting on LinkedIn, follow these key steps:
- Optimize your profile: Make it attractive and professional. Highlight the elements that meet your prospects’ needs by using relevant keywords, a professional profile photo, an engaging summary, as well as your experience and recommendations.
- Expand your network: Send personalized, targeted invitations to qualified prospects. Use search filters, existing customer networks, LinkedIn groups and job alerts to find relevant contacts.
- Initiate dialogue: Communicate with your prospects by offering them value-added messages. Prepare a convincing sales pitch, share useful information, keep up to date with your prospects’ news and propose an appointment.
How can I effectively target my prospects on LinkedIn?
- Determine your ideal customer by specifying relevant demographic, professional and geographic criteria.
- Use LinkedIn’s advanced search filters to refine your search according to these criteria.
- Join and actively participate in LinkedIn groups relevant to your target audience.
- Create a personalized dialogue with your prospects, highlighting how you can meet their needs.
How do I find customers on LinkedIn?
Follow these basic principles to find customers on LinkedIn:
- Optimize your profile: Be clear, precise and highlight your strengths, expertise and references from satisfied customers.
- Identify your target: Use advanced search with precise selection criteria to find qualified prospects.
- Create a personalized connection: Send personalized connection requests by offering value. Avoid overly commercial approaches.
- Increase your online activity: Be regularly active by posting content, joining groups, commenting and getting recommendations.
These actions will boost your credibility and visibility, and extend your network.
