How to Use Linkedin to Generate More Revenue: An Incredibly Easy Method That Works for All

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Nov 21 2019

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USE LINKEDIN TO CLOSE YOUR DEAL- Is it essential for your success? Read this to find out why.

LinkedIn is always the #1 social media tool used for the Sales Insight process in all types of business. With a pool of opportunities, lead generation platform. It helps to find your prospects and their complete information in one place.

With more than 630M+ members, no doubt, LinkedIn is an ideal network place for sales reps. Let's consider two scenarios. In the first scenario- If your sales reps are not familiar with using LinkedIn and its features, then you would not reap the full-fledge benefits. In the second scenario, when you are using LinkedIn for lead generation and yet struggle to get the potential buyer(s). Then, this blog will be helpful.

On average, social selling leaders see:

  • 45% more opportunities created
  • 51% more likely to achieve quota
  • 80% more productive
  • 3X more likely to go to the club

Let’s buckle up!

LinkedIn is a simple go-to tool for potential prospecting, qualifying, and generating revenue. It is the most popular social media channel playing an essential role in the B2B purchase decision process. Here is the guide about how to use LinkedIn as a lead generation platform:

How your Sales Team should outreach prospects on the LinkedIn channel?

1. Study your potential prospect's profile- 

  • Here, the channel enacts as a research arm for your sales team. You can navigate in your prospect's profile and get the number of insights. LinkedIn notifies your potential customer and letting him know that you have viewed his/her profile.
  • If the person or prospect doesn’t know you, in this situation, the first conversation can be a cold one. If they know, then there are chances for further conversation.
  • Most important is to use the LinkedIn notification. It notifies your potential lead that you have been looking for their profile. It helps you to be on the target buyer’s deck.

2. Look for common connections-

  • Statistically, approx. 90% of sales reps are introduced by someone to the potential customers in their professional network.
  • B2B buyers have high trust in the opinions of their peers. Hence, the potential buyer will have more confidence in the sales guy that his or her peer has vouched for.
  • Find the mutual connection to get yourself introduced to the target customer.

3. Look for common interests

  • At the time of reviewing your prospect's profile, it is recommended to find common interests.
  • Find common ground that helps to kickstart the conversation and gradually move ahead in the sales process.

4. Short & sweet messages- 

  • It is recommended to get to the point on what your target buyer is looking for.
  • Keep your message very short up to five sentences.

5. Ask your prospects questions they’ll care about-

  • Get your target buyers to talk about what they are looking for or what they are interested in.
  • Ask your target buyer open-ended questions.
  • Don’t just ramble on and on about the stuff that they are not interested to listen.

Actionable ways to use LinkedIn for B2B lead generation

Here are the latest LinkedIn developments rolled out. In this section, we provide you insights on how to use these updates in your favor to drive success.

1. LinkedIn Lead Generation Forms:

  • The most frequently discussed issue is generating quality leads. So, LinkedIn’s lead generation forms help to reduce friction and get the potential customers' basic information such as email address, name, or phone.
  • When using these forms, ensure that you are offering the potential customers what information they are looking for.
  • As sales reps, you need to understand what your target customers' requirements are. To gain more insights into your buyer’s requirements, ask him questions in the sales conversations.
  • To get your customer’s data, your sales team can create high-value resources such as whitepapers, case studies, research results, or industry surveys, etc. Here, LinkedIn Lead Generation forms are beneficial. So, when your potential customer downloads any of your content, you gain the exact details. No false information provided, as the data comes directly from the user’s LinkedIn profile.
  • With the LinkedIn Lead Generation forms, sales guy can have data of his/her potential leads. Data includes name, designation, location, contact information, etc.

2. LinkedIn Matched-Audiences:

The best way to stay on top-of-mind of your potential buyers. LinkedIn Matched-Audiences includes new ad-targeting capabilities. This capability can combine LinkedIn’s robust professional data with your sales team first-hand data. These capabilities are:

  1. Website Retargeting- Target your potential customer who has visited your website or any specific webpage or visited any content piece viewed on your website
  2. Account Targeting- Upload your CSV list and LinkedIn will use your data and show up your ads to respective company employees
  3. Contact Targeting- Input individual email ids that you would like to target. LinkedIn will cross-refer the email IDs with the web site's data and accordingly show your ads to the listed contacts.

3. Track Lead activity with Sales Navigator

With the help of Sales Navigator, set up the search tracking for your sales team’s new initiatives or the earlier search initiatives too.

Here is the image explaining how to start your Advanced Search

Input data in the top filter section.

LinkedIn will create a list of your target prospects.

The resulting feed is divided into four sections- Total results, Changed jobs in the past 90 days, Mentioned in the news in the past 30 days, and Posted on LinkedIn in the last 30 days.

With the help of this information, you can now begin to search for your potential customers accordingly.

Moving a step ahead, you can create a ‘Save Search’ alert. This alert notifies you when new lead matches to your search criteria.

Select the ‘Save Search’ box at the top left corner.

The Dialogue box pops up- Name your list of companies and set up the frequency of the alerts.

More and more potential leads will join your list resulting in more opportunities coming up in your inbox.

Various Filters in Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives access to LinkedIn’s 630M+ member network to help Sales professionals find and build relationships with potential customers through social selling. Sales reps can filter the results using a variety of filters on the left side of the page:

  • Geography: Users can select countries that match the search parameters.
  • Custom lists: Users can select by filtering your lead searches within his/her existing lead lists.
  • Company: This filter shows you lead in companies that match your search parameters. The leads are sorted as Current, Past, Current or Past, and Past not current.
  • Industry: The user can select the industry within which he wishes to find leads.
  • Company headcount: Users can select the headcount or size of companies he’d like to find leads in.
  • Function: Users can select the types of roles matching his/her search parameters.
  • Title: This filter shows the job titles to choose from. They are sorted in Current, Past, Current or Past, and Past not current.
  • Seniority level: Add seniority levels, which allow you to find specific leads and accounts as per your parameters.
  • Tags: Add tags to saved accounts and leads to help organize your workflow in such a way that works for you. The tags filter allows the users to quickly locate specific kinds of accounts and leads that have been saved.
  • Relationship: This filter can show how closely you are connected to a lead on LinkedIn.

Advanced Search:

  • The advance search option helps your sales reps to build the prospect list. He/ She can narrow down the searches for new leads by company, title, industry, region, and more.
  • Click Advanced search option within the Search bar at the top of your Sales Navigator homepage.
  • Select Search for Leads or Search for Accounts depending upon your requirement.
  • A pop-up window opens. It shows more than 30 advanced search filters and sales reps can apply to his/her search. Switch the toggle in the top right side of Advanced Search and apply your sales preferences.
  • Our sales reps can select and enter search criteria to target his/her search using the below options:
  • Profile filters
  • Role & tenure filters
  • Company filters
  • Other filters

If you're a Sales Navigator Team user, you can switch the toggle at the top right of Advanced Search- To Show only TeamLink Connections.

On the search results page, the Sales team user can narrow and refine his/ her search by using the Sales filters on the left of the page, and Sales Spotlights at the top of the page.

Nurture leads with Messenger:

  • Messenger allows your sales team to connect to your potential buyer. As your team member can easily communicate casually and quickly with the potential buyer on the go.
  • They can quickly follow-up, check-ins on the potential lead, and nurture it accordingly.
  • Check out the video of Smarter Messaging on LinkedIn

When it comes to the inside sales process, LinkedIn has drastically changed the entire process of lead generating and closing deals. It is now the first channel for sales reps to reach his target buyer.

To be a top sales executive, it is all about closing deals and moving up. If the process of finding a quality lead is robust and straightforward, the results incurred are enhanced sales team productivity and efficiency.

Before moving with LinkedIn as a Sales Generation platform, the Sales reps need to understand and calculate the TAM.

TAM (Total Addressable Market)

This concept plays a critical role in start-ups and enterprise businesses. TAM is used to signify the total revenue opportunity available for your product or services in the market. With the help of TAM, you can prioritize your business opportunities for specific products and customer segments. Sales executives can use TAM to find out where are the potential investors and buyers of their business and provide valuable inputs.

As a B2B company, your sales team estimates the market size, overall investment size, expected growth, and competition for the product or service. TAM helps the sales rep to determine the actual market size available and the competition for your product.

Calculate Your TAM

There are various tools and extensions available online to calculate TAM by pulling data directly to the excel sheet. With the help of AI-Enabled Chrome Extensions, your team can extract potential prospects data directly through LinkedIn or from LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator Tool.

Limitations of LinkedIn Channel 

Time-consuming: For any sales executive, it requires much personal time and works to get your connections flowing and start with the communication. Sales reps always need to ask connections to be introduced to the companies or to the individual that your sales team executive is interested in, can be a cumbersome job.

False results: At the time of searching for potential customers from the sector, your sales reps may get lots of contacts, which can be or cannot be from the respective industry he is looking for. For instance, if your sales reps are looking for a connection from the marketing field, he may get many connections that are not in the marketing.

User data details: You don’t get emails and phone numbers of the contacts unless you are connected. Even if you get connected with potential customers, you will be getting their email address. However, you won’t be able to get the phone numbers, unless the customer has mentioned in the profile.

InMail Limitations: The only way to connect is to send a message or Inmail. LinkedIn does not allow the sales reps to send InMail to any premium account member from his/her free account. If you want to get InMail service, then your team member needs to opt for a premium account. To use InMail, you must upgrade to a Premium LinkedIn account, and you receive a specific number of InMail credits depending on your subscription type:

  • Career: 5
  • Business: 15
  • Sales Navigator: 20
  • Recruiter Lite: 30

New Limits on the LinkedIn Group and Messaging: Now no free rides! LinkedIn has added new limits on the LinkedIn Group and Messaging to the group members. The sales team member can send 15 free One to One group message to fellow (respective) group members each month. To send messages to fellow group members, the user must be a member of LinkedIn for at least 30 days and a group for at least 4 days.

Free Version Limitation: Free version is not very helpful for your sales team. With limited access to InMail and LinkedIn group, it is difficult to get in connect with your ideal customer. So, it is time-consuming to build a professional network on this channel. Your sales reps spend much time searching leads, connect, and then move ahead with the sales process.

Let’s have a look at how the Chrome Extension of the AI-enabled tool works for the LinkedIn platform and Sales Navigator Suite.

  • Add the extension to Chrome.
  • Login with your Email ID.
  • Get the complete information that your team is looking for a specific company.
  • In this way, your team can also fetch data of employees for the same company.
  • Now, directly add the contacts from the same platform. Check out the example image below:
  • So, the sales reps can add contacts one-by-one or in bulk.
  • Once, your list is ready, you can check for the contact details available on the Clodura-Suite.

Leveraging extension tools with LinkedIn will not only help you to gain insights on your customer’s profile but also on the company’s overall information. Furthermore, AI-Enabled Platform helps you to connect to decision-makers with real-time sales intelligence and customized pitch.

Besides, getting quality lead details becomes an easy task for your Sales and Marketing team. You can find the company with specific requirements. It will be easy to pay attention to potential buyers and fair chances to generate revenue.

Geographic location also matters when you are looking for your potential buyers. For any sales reps, the location becomes a pain point as he needs to understand the market trends and subscribe to the specific locations. Here, in Clodura- Suite, your sales team gets complete freedom as it covers the whole world.

One-Stop-Platform offers Email IDs, Phone numbers, and even Event Attendees. It covers all possible modes of communication. Save your team’s time eliminating repetitive work.

No need to import or export contacts from one platform to another to carry out various activities! You can do email campaigns from the same platform.

Wrapping things up 

LinkedIn has genuinely changed the entire process from building relationships to lead generation to closing deals. Of course, as a sales rep, you need to ensure that you’re using the tool correctly. Also, your team needs to be aware of the new opportunities presented by LinkedIn and encash these opportunities before your competitors do.

It is crucial to dig up and act on the insights of the potential buyers and convert them into your lifetime customers. With AI-enabled platforms, the Sales and Marketing team can get the scientific approach to research quality leads, get valuable information, and ultimately help to generate revenue.

Ensure you never miss out on the latest big opportunities. Get in touch with us for your Data-First Sales Platform.

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