How to Use LinkedIn for Lead Gen (Our Process)
If you're looking to generate more leads, you've probably seen people reaching out to you on LinkedIn, trying to pitch something.
But if you're like me, you probably rarely reply to these messages.
Here's a little secret though: our team relies heavily on LinkedIn for lead generation and we've found tons of success with it.
In this article, I'll walk you through what we’ve found works best.
Let’s dive in!
Contact the Right Audience
The most important thing when running outreach, not just on LinkedIn but in general, is the audience.
If you're contacting the wrong audience, the chances of getting a response are much lower.
We’ve seen tons of tools like Dripify that just scrape random contacts from LinkedIn and send messages to them.
These tools simply don’t work, or at least they don’t work well.
If you actually want to run LinkedIn lead generation correctly, you need to target high-quality prospects. This means contacting people who are in your ideal customer profile (ICP). If you’re not sure what an ICP is, you can learn more about it here.
Casual Messaging
Next, let’s talk about messaging. I chat with a lot of people who think highly personalized messages are the way to go, but honestly, they just don’t work.
Think about it—are you more likely to respond to a super short, casual message like “How’s recruiting?” or a highly personalized five-sentence message? I bet it’s the former.
So, when it comes to your messaging on LinkedIn, keep it extraordinarily casual, almost to a surprising degree.
Testing! Testing! Testing!
On top of casual messaging, you’re going to want to test, retest, and test some more.
This could be as simple as testing three different casual messages with slightly different questions.
One might perform twice as well as the others, which can have a massive impact on your lead generation efforts over time.
The key tip here is to test with the exact same audience. Don’t test different messages with different audiences, as this will skew your results.
Rotate Contacts if No Response is Received
If you don’t get a response from one contact, that doesn’t mean you should ignore the entire company. In order to avoid this, you can add a task at the end of your playbook to prospect another contact from that company.
This allows your team to work high-quality accounts even if you don’t initially get a response. Eventually, you’ll receive a response and have a valuable conversation with someone who has a high likelihood of converting.
How to Set Up LinkedIn Outreach (Simple Process)
We like to keep LinkedIn outreach extremely simple. Here’s our process that you can replicate:
1) Create a Playbook
First, create a Playbook within LeadLoft that starts with a LinkedIn connection request. If you want to add calling steps or email steps, feel free, but for this guide, we’ll stick to the connection request.
We recommend sending no connection note, as our tests have shown higher connection rates this way.
After the first connection request, have one to three message follow-ups. If you sent no connection note, the first message should be a short pitch or question. The second and third messages should be extremely short, just checking back. Make it feel like you sent them off the cuff from your phone while grabbing a coffee. The more casual and lazy it feels, the more human it will seem.
Here’s what that looks like:
- Connection: wait 90 days for connection
- Message Delay 2 days
- Message Delay 7 days
- Message Delay 14 days
2) Start your Playbook
Once your Playbook is finished and your messaging is written, click "Start Playbook" to begin using it for outreach.
3) Use 1-Click Engage
Enroll high-quality contacts into your Playbook using LeadLoft’s one-click engage feature. LeadLoft has a Chrome extension that allows you to prospect anyone from LinkedIn and begin engaging them with a single click.
First, install the Chrome extension. Then, select a Playbook within the extension and click save. The contact will be enrolled in the Playbook you selected. It’s that easy.
4) Testing Audiences & Messaging
Once you have this set up, you can begin testing audiences or messaging. If you’re unsure who the right audience is, start by following our recommendations around messaging and testing the audience first. The audience will impact reply rates more than the messaging itself.
Once you’ve identified the right audience, duplicate the Playbook, create a version B, and test the messaging with the exact same audience.
Wrapping Up
When it comes to LinkedIn automation, we recommend keeping things simple by using a tool like LeadLoft and its one-click engage feature. This allows you to go to market faster and begin testing audiences and messaging sooner. Don’t get stuck using multiple tools for different tasks. Stick to what’s easy, like LeadLoft, and start honing in on the perfect pitch.
If you're curious about how we set this up, feel free to book a time with our team here and we'll walk you through it. Happy prospecting!
