How to Automate Your Prospecting Efforts on LinkedIn
In this article, we’ll cover the approaches and some tools for effective automated sales prospecting on LinkedIn. Before we start talking about automation, let’s have a quick look at the basics of prospecting itself.
The basics of awesome prospecting
They say there’s no single recipe for success — true, though there are the basics we have to keep in mind: approaching in a customized way and all sales processes working in a time-saving way. Plus, don’t forget to work with the data about your prospects, gather and process it to get valuable insights.
Customization
As for the customization, it sounds reasonable as there is, probably, no audience in the world of B2B & B2C services totally ready to accept uncustomized, general, one-size-fits-all and simply dumb approach in prospecting. People love to be noticed, love when others call them by their name and remember some tiny nice, but still important habits. Customization is a new high standard for the top success stories.
Automation
Another side of the same coin — automation. Think customization may take more time than simple generalized approaches? You are almost right. Now think about the quality of leads, their lifetime in a sales pipeline and, finally, their lifetime value. See the difference?
Data-driven approach
According to the statistics, 99% of sales strategies based on data are more successful than those which are not :) Jokes aside, this McKinsey research shows companies that inject data into their sales process and operations are 5 to 6% more profitable and productive than their competitors.
Well, now we are ready to talk about the tools and approaches for customized automation in sales prospecting on LinkedIn. Let’s start!
Hack your brand awareness on LinkedIn
Sounds crazy! How could brand awareness be hacked? But it could be. Simply by autoscaling the outreach to your audience, e.g. by smart posting and promoting your or your company’s posts on LinkedIn. But how?
Thanks to LinkedIn itself, or actually it’s feed posts promotion algorithms, you could increase the outreach up to 10 times!
There’s the free tool called Alcapod for promotion of the posts on LinkedIn, and it works as follows: people gather in groups called ‘pods’ within the tool, and then when one of the pod members creates a post and shares it to the pod, other members like and ‘upvote’ it. Thanks to such activity the post gets recognized by the LinkedIn algorithms which mark this post as ‘trending’ and show it to the more wide audience including users who are not your followers.
Sounds like magic and it works!
Tool: Alcapod for post-promotion on LinkedIn
Price: Free
Make prospecting Customized & Automated at a time
Ok, we’ve got viral now, what’s next? Sending the tones of connection requests and then messages on LinkedIn sounds like a total mess, but some of us not only just had such experience but continue to practice it day by day. The simple reason for this is that so many companies consider LinkedIn as one of the most profitable resources for cold prospecting, sometimes even more profitable than the email.
The tool called One2Lead knows how to help you a little bit, pal. This app imitates the work of a real person with LinkedIn and thanks to a diverse set of customization options (variables) you could also create a unique and warm experience for your prospects who’ll receive your messages and invites.
One2Lead as an automation tool could save up to 3–4 hours of your work with LinkedIn per day. Just run it in a separate window and focus on other important tasks, voila!
To sum up, what this tool can do for you:
- Automate sending customized requests to connect;
- Automate sending customized messages;
- Track accept and reply rates;
- Manage users and custom campaigns via CRM;
- Download/upload CSV files.
Tool: One2Lead for automated prospecting on LinkedIn
Price: Free plan or 15$ for Premium
Get the data for analytics
For us to know what, where and how exactly to customize, we need a strong argumentation and facts provided by data. Using a variety of tools for data gathering and further data analytics on LinkedIn allows you to keep up with the recent trends and know your prospects.
Basic LinkedIn analytics
Available on LinkedIn Premium plans.
LinkedIn’s analytics tool can help you measure:
- The number of users who saw the content you posted on LinkedIn;
- The demographics of the users who follow and visit your channel, including the country where they are located;
- Their seniority and their industry;
- The number of times your content was liked and shared.
Analytics could be fun, look at this pyramid pie chart!
Klipfolio Dashboards
Meet Klipfolio, the user-friendly tool able to make analytics dashboards for the data from LinkedIn Analytics and LinkedIn ads. Basically, it’s not a single tool but an integration, though it’s quite useful when you have several other data resources to track at the same time.
Don’t be afraid to get lost in a pile of charts: working with it is just as easily as taking candy from a baby.
With this tool you can:
- Visualize your LinkedIn analytics data;
- Track and compare your impressions from month to month;
- Monitor your follower count and total clicks;
- Get a view into your share of followers by industry, location, and many more.
Besides, Klipfolio can create mashups with Google Analytics, spreadsheets, CRM platforms, social ad platforms and much more. That means no more manual reports in Google Sheets!
Tool: Klipfolio for LinkedIn analytics dashboard
Price: Custom (depends on the pricing plan and integrations you need)
This time we’ve discussed:
- Why customization, automation, and data should work together;
- Four tools for making your prospecting campaigns even more awesome.
Need more great tools for better prospecting? Check this out, our list of Top 5 Tools For Recruiters&Sales Teams
Stay tuned!
