In just 20 to 30 minutes per day, via LinkedIn lead generation methods, you can add hundreds of people to your warm market, and potentially book between 10 and 30 sales meetings every single month right on LinkedIn. I know that it works because I do it on a regular basis, and it works so well that now I do it for my clients. In this short article I'm going to show you exactly what it is that I do, and you can either choose to do it yourself which is very doable though admittedly quite a bit of a Daily Grind, or you can schedule 20 minutes to talk with me about putting your LinkedIn lead generation on autopilot for you so that you don't have to worry about slogging through a clunky, non-user-friendly database and can simply focus on setting appointments and closing deals. But more on that at the end.
Every single business revolves around sales. In fact, I would contend that just about every single job in the world has to do with sales to some extent; the teacher has to sell his or her students on the value of Education; a neurosurgeon has to sell the hospital and the patient on their ability to do the job; but of course what I am referring to is sales in the more traditional sense: encouraging a potential customer or client to take the plunge and become an actual customer or client, trading their money for your goods or services.
The absolute number one rule in sales is always, always be prospecting.
Of course, most people hate prospecting because at the end of the day it's a grind. Whether it's researching to find cold emails, or picking up the phone and making those dreaded cold phone calls, generally most people find this task annoying enough that they put it off until tomorrow every single day. And then, a few months later, they wonder why they haven't sold anything or why their business is running into the red.
You must always be putting new people into your sales pipeline, and building your warm market - and LinkedIn lead generation is the key to doing that consistently.
There are lots of different ways to do this, but in my opinion, the single best way for most people who work business-to-business or B2B is to utilize the power of the one social marketing Network dedicated to business: namely, LinkedIn lead generation.
LinkedIn can be one of the most powerful tools in your arsenal because the quality of the leads you can get from LinkedIn is astronomically high if you know what you're doing. LinkedIn is the number one social media channel for B2B marketing, it is one of the fastest ways to get a hold of the industry leaders and top Executives at companies ranging from The Fortune 500 to the hundreds of thousands of businesses that make up the backbone of Industry. It's been noted statistically that the average income of somebody on LinkedIn is around $100,000, which is up quite significantly, almost 50% higher, then other social media networks like Facebook. But the fact that you're cutting through secretaries and Gatekeepers and getting directly to the business decision maker is really what makes LinkedIn lead generation as powerful as it is.
However to balance out the quality of the potential leads, LinkedIn seems to do everything they can to make sure that their system is as stupid and convoluted as possible to use.
The best way to treat LinkedIn lead generation is to imagine it's a networking event, much like a chamber of commerce event, or a BNI meeting. You can travel half a day to go to one of those events, to get the chance to network with 20 or 30 people or you will exchange business cards with them and then go home and never talk to them ever again. That's a waste of time.
Far better than that is to be able to be equally effective in about 20 minutes a day - but only if that 20 minutes is spent effectively.
In order to use Linkedin correctly, you need to first understand how LinkedIn search works, you need to understand the difference between free LinkedIn and premium LinkedIn - Including how search results would differ between the two platforms, And you need to understand the basics of search parameters in order to refine the search results that LinkedIn does give you so that you can be as effective as possible. Then you need to strategy to connect consistently with thousands of people every single month, and a way to follow up with them, moving them to your pipeline. Doing this correctly can generate between 200 and 400 warm Market connections every single month, And can usually result in booking between 10 and 50 sales appointments or conversations with people who are 100% your ideal Target's.
The first thing one has to understand is that LinkedIn is a site dedicated entirely to the concept of networking. Much like a game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, your network on LinkedIn is directly related to how many people you are directly connected to.
If you have just a couple hundred people in your network, your network connections are going to be rather limited and you may only have a few thousand or hundred thousand people in your extended Network. That may sound like a lot, but when you're trying to get specific and look for a particular job in a particular industry in a particular place, very quickly you're going to run up against the wall.
The simple solution to this is to network. You need to grow your network and you need to connect with people who are in the field that you are connected to. Each person you connect to may be connected and turn to 50 people or 5,000 people, and if that person becomes our first level connection those people become your second level connections. And if each one of them is connected to just 10 people, that could be adding over 50,000 people as a third level connection - and those are people that you will have access to and be able to see and connect with. Hence the power of building your network on LinkedIn.
You should make it a goal to connect with between 1000 and 1500 people every single month. That is to say you should offer a connection request to them, and understand that between 200 and 400 of them will likely connect with you in that month, adding them to your warm Market list. People who are your first of all connections give you access to things like their phone number and email so you can actually move them into your CRM and then follow up with them on a regular basis. And of course you can send them a message directly inside of LinkedIn as well - but note that messages in LinkedIn can be rough, as it is just not a user-friendly CRM.
The next thing you need to understand about LinkedIn lead generation is that LinkedIn has two different sides that can be used, a free side which is what most people views, and a paid side which is what most people who are serious about B2B networking use. The paid side can run around $60 to $100 per month for a single account, and if you're even moderately good at what you do you should be able to eat that cost no problem.
The primary reasons to have a paid account on LinkedIn are that LinkedIn gives you access to their sales Navigator account and that sales Navigator account gives you some increased functionality including deeper and more complex search criteria, as well as higher limits on how many people you connect with on a regular basis.
Whether using a free account or a paid account, you must understand that LinkedIn limits you to 1000 search results per search - Note that they will often return tens of thousands of results, but you can only ever see the first thousand.
So, you need to be a little creative when doing searches. Maybe you want to speak to HR directors at various companies. You may want to be as granular as looking at various a zip codes, or at the very least city-by-city. Or maybe only looking at people who have been active in the last 30 days, or people who are HR directors at companies with more than a thousand employees. Every time you were fine things a little bit, it'll shrink the total number of people that LinkedIn shows you and that's actually a good thing because you don't want to waste a good search.
This is where the benefit of a paid LinkedIn account comes into play, because in a free account you're greatly limited in how you can search. Many smaller cities and medium-sized cities are simply excluded from search, as well as the ability to Niche down into the ZIP code sized areas. And while there's not stated maximums, free accounts definitely have a harder time connecting with people for a variety of reasons, including the fact that LinkedIn seems to place commercial use limits on free accounts. Meanwhile a premium account has abundantly more search criteria:
On a free LinkedIn account, I don't recommend connecting to more than about 20 to 25 people per day. If you go over that number, LinkedIn may temporarily (or permanently) suspend your account. That's still a decent number of people if you can do it consistently over the course of a month, but I know that most people simply won't. On a LinkedIn Pro account, The number seems to be significantly higher, and I have been able to connect with 50 to over a hundred people a day with no problem.
There are other ways of narrowing down a search query that are available to both paid and free accounts, chief among these is using Boolean Search terms.
At the risk of sounding like an incredible geek, Boolean Search terms are very cool. And if you take just a few minutes to learn them they become very intuitive. Boolean search uses terms like AND and NOT as well as parentheses and quotes to construct statements that telling them exactly what (or who) it is that you want to find.
AND - this is conjunctive, that connects to things and tells LinkedIn to find BOTH. For instance, if you want to find people who are vice presidents and who are in sales you could do the following searches: Vice President AND Sales
OR - this conjunctive tells linked in that you’re interested in either this OR that. Want CEOs and CFOs? Try CEO OR CFO as your search criteria.
NOT - Sometimes you’ll find a lot of results that aren’t relevant - to fix this find the thing they all have in common and tell LinkedIn you don’t want to see those. I commonly get a lot of people who run social media companies, so I’ll tell LinkedIn NOT “social media”
“Quotes” - as in the previous example, quotation marks tell LinkedIn that all words between the quotes are part of a phrase. Social Media as a search string could return people who have social in their bio (e.g., a “social speaker”), OR media in their bio (e.g., people who work in “mass media”). However, telling LinkedIn to look out for “social media” means it’ll ONLY filter people with that exact phrase. Also, “Vice President” will often yield better filtering than Vice President.
(Parentheses) - these tell LinkedIn that the ideas contained in the parentheses are all part of one part of the search string. So for instance, I may want to be more generous with my criteria for a sales VP, and so I could search for (VP OR “Vice President”) which will return results that have either VP or “Vice President” in them.
And of course, you can string these together to get pretty preciseLinkedIn lead generation targeting.
(CEO OR Owner OR President) AND (Sales OR Marketing) NOT (“social media” OR “SEO) would give me a person who was either a CEO or owner or president of a company who was ALSO in sales or marketing, and who did NOT do “social media” or “SEO”. This is honestly very similar to search strings that I use on a regular basis for LinkedIn lead generation.
Once you've probably Master the ability to create a search string that gives you a highly refined Target set of people, the next step is adding them to your warm market.
Congratulations! You now have a refined and Target list of 1,000 people for LinkedIn lead generation, what do you do next?
Again, LinkedIn lead generation works through networking. The more Network you are, the more people you will find. The good news is people in related fields tend to be networked together so if you're going after one particular group of people, the more of them you connect with, the more of them you will be connected to as a second level or third level connection, which you can then connect to on a first level basis giving you access to even more people. After while it begins to snow ball and you'll have millions or hundreds of millions of people connect to you via LinkedIn.
So how do you connect? Well, quite simply you press the little button that says Connect.
Now, of course, you can go a little deeper and I recommend sending a short message to that person explaining why you want to connect. You could reference your work in that industry, your interest in that industry, or do what I do in simply commenting that LinkedIn and your experience on LinkedIn gets better the more your networked and that my networking with you they can gain access to everybody that is in your first and second level.
The most important thing to note here, is you cannot over use this feature. That is to say you can overuse it and you will be penalized severely, so you must not overuse this feature. LinkedIn looks at how active users are both short-term and on an historic level, and if they see very suspicious levels of activity, they will often times shut down your account at least temporarily for a couple of days and of course they have the right to completely kill your account if they so choose, though that is rarely deployed.
Once you sent your connection request you simply do it again. And again. And again. On a free account, I recommend about 20 to 25 connection request per day. On a professional or paid account you can usually do two to three times this number quite safely.
Then you wait. LinkedIn is not the same thing as Facebook or Twitter and Linkedin users tend to be less engaged on LinkedIn than they are and other social media sites. And that's fine, because we're not here for traditional social media needs. Statistically, between 20 and 30% of the people you connect with will connect back or accept your request for connection meaning if you send out a thousand connection request a month you can expect on average around 200 to 300 people joining your network every month.
What is particularly cool about this is once they join your network you generally have access to nearly all of their contact information. That means you'll have their email and often times their phone number. On a random social media account that wouldn't matter very much, but again if you did your job correctly and targeted them very specifically, you are growing two to three hundred people on a monthly basis that are now your connections who you can actually reach out to and market to. I cannot underscore enough how powerful that is.
You will have a trickle of people accepting every single day, and the first thing you want to do is once they have accepted your request to send them a message. Thank them for connecting with you, and at this point you can do one of a few things.
First, you can immediately offer something of intrinsic value as an enticement to meet with you. Maybe you offer consultations to businesses that tend to save them $30,000 per year or $5,000 per employee per year - it is not inappropriate to thank them for connecting and then mention the fact that you can do precisely that and offer a time to meet. A percentage of them will say yes. If it's even two or three percent, and you have people that you have connected with every single month, you can expect a minimum of 10 appointments with highly targeted people who are your exact ideal prospects. And that's not bad.
A second option would be to Simply thank them and then export them - either via LinkedIn's export feature, Or by simply adding them one at a time manually - to a database that allows you to keep track of them and put them into your CRM or sales pipeline. The biggest annoyance I have with LinkedIn is that this is not easy to do, particularly to do well or consistently or easily. In fact, I have found that the easiest way to take care of this is to hire a virtual assistant to keep track of it for you. And in fact, that is so ridiculously effective that I now offer it as a service to my clients.
The big point is that once you connect with somebody via Linkedin lead generation, they are essentially forever in your marketing Pipeline and you can revisit with them on a regular basis both inside of and outside of LinkedIn. And you should be doing that. You should be sending quarterly emails to all of these people simply trying to book a short appointment to meet with them. Statistically only 2% to 5% of the people that you're connecting with her actually going to me in the market for what it is that you do right now. However, over the next year, as many as 20 to 30% of them will be. So you will want to upload these people into whatever CRM software using that will encourage you to continue to stay top-of-mind with them, and drip on them via email on a regular basis, at least quarterly.
This is incredibly powerful and has helped me add six figures to my annual income. You can do the same for you, but this is also the point where most of my clients start to feel exasperated at having to keep track of all these moving parts. Most of the time they asked me if there's an easier way, and that's why I offer a completely 100% done-for-you B2B lead generation campaign via LinkedIn. It is done completely by hand with no automated tools (such tools are in violation of Linkedin's terms of service).
In the Linkedin lead generation DFY service we offer assistance targeting the right prospects on LinkedIn, as well as reaching out to them to connect, and then following up with them once they do connect both inside of LinkedIn and Via an email campaign that we can run for you. We can also integrate with nearly every CRM software that is out there, so that on a regular basis you're having 200 to 300 new people added to your warm Market that you can follow up with.
If you would like assistance doing Linkedin lead generation or to Simply talk about a possible solution, I make available a 30 minute consultation window to help guide you through the process of LinkedIn lead generation.
NOTE: I normally charge $297 for a 30-minute Linkedin lead generation consultation, but if you are reading this article, I'll waive that initial consultation fee for you. You can book a time to talk by visiting https://HundredsOfCustomers.com/LinkedIn and using the promotional code linkedin.
