Did you know that 90% of top-performing sellers use social media in their sales strategy? (Source). 

That is a huge amount of people turning to social media in order to find leads and grow business, but there’s more. Reports show that 80% of all social media leads for B2B marketers come from LinkedIn.  

It’s not surprising. We hear from people all the time that they know they should be using it… but they don’t know how, haven’t taken the time to “figure it out” or they know they should be doing more.

If you “know you should be doing more” on LinkedIn or you know you need to “look at LinkedIn” this is the blog post for you. 

It can be a powerhouse lead generation tool - if you use it properly. The good news is, you don’t need to spend hours a day sending messages and following up, and posting content.

This blog post will cover:

• Exactly what you can do to book an appointment a day utilizing LinkedIn
• How to use LinkedIn within a multi channel strategy
• Why LinkedIn should be an important component of a robust lead gen approach, not the only approach
• What you can do now to optimize your use of LinkedIn for lead generation

Ready? Let’s dive in...

How We Went From Being the “LinkedIn Guys” to A Full Lead Generation & Sales Development Company

LinkedIn is a fantastic lead generation tool. We should know. We became “the LinkedIn guys” when we first started because we helped companies build out their pipelines using one-on-one outreach via LinkedIn messaging. This is how we got traction for our business at the start.

This is how we taught our clients to find consistency and control in their lead generation.

All our efforts here at LinkedSelling are to help you make smarter decisions about where to focus your resources by looking at real-world data from the top-performing lead generation and sales organizations in the world.

With that in mind, these stats will give you an idea about why LinkedIn is a channel you cannot ignore in your lead generation and sales development strategy:

• LinkedIn is the #1 social media platform for lead generation and sales development. It’s not a trend; it’s a goldmine for prospectors and is constantly improving with updates and positive changes to the platform that make it the perfect place to find, engage and convert your prospects.
• Your prospects are there. LinkedIn is home to 690M+ professionals, most of whom are motivated to keep their profiles up-to-date and accurate. (This means that when targeting your prospects, you have access to real, professional for real results.)
• They’re the decision makers you want to talk to. DemandWave reports that 4 out of 5 LinkedIn members drive business decisions, that’s 63 million decision makers, including more than 10 million C-level executives and 180 million senior level influencers.
• They have buying power. LinkedIn reports that their audience has 2x the buying power of the average web audience. 
• LinkedIn users want to talk. Research firm, Replicon, found that LinkedIn messages generate an 11x better response rate compared with other methods. 
• Your buyers are looking for you. 74% of B2B buyers do half of their research online before they buy according to Forrester Research. With LinkedIn being the world’s #1 social network for business you better believe they will find you (and your team) on LinkedIn. 
• The results don’t lie. Again, 80% of leads generated through social media by B2B marketers came from LinkedIn. 

You can find pretty much any business on LinkedIn, and what’s better, you can connect with pretty much anybody. That opportunity alone is enormous. If experience working with hundreds of businesses tells us anything, we’re seeing that most companies aren’t taking advantage of LinkedIn as they could be.

That was just the beginning however.

As we grew, and as our clients grew, we expanded to include LinkedIn within a multi-channel  approach that drastically increased the effectiveness of our outreach efforts on LinkedIn. 

The NEW way to Use LinkedIn to Book Appointments

As mentioned, we use it within a robust framework. We use LinkedIn in many ways:

• We use LinkedIn for Market Research and Prospect Identification to find, target, and create a pool of prospects to follow-up with.

• We still use LinkedIn for outreach. Before we used it as the sole method of our lead generation, but it couldn’t scale, and we continually had to deal with restrictions LinkedIn set on connection requests and more. Now it’s a valuable part of a robust multichannel strategy.

• We now also use it as a part of our sales development efforts. This is lower in the funnel, where we use LinkedIn messaging (along with email and phone calling) to connect with leads who’ve requested content or who have shown interest in our ads. This follow-up has drastically improved our appointment numbers.

• The ultimate New Way we utilize LinkedIn is an aggressive ads strategy. We aren’t just looking for traffic though, we use the LinkedIn ad platform to build our list of leads and to directly fill our sales pipeline. We couple LinkedIn ads with a multichannel backend approach that follows up with new leads, qualifies, and nurtures them to book appointments with our sales team.

The next few sections will expand on these points and provide resources that will help you optimize LinkedIn as part of your own marketing mix and lead generation.

Comparison: Outreach vs Ads on LinkedIn

Again, to be clear, outreach on LinkedIn is extremely effective when done consistently and systematically. However, with increasing restrictions and platform changes we’ve found that it takes too much time and companies can’t keep up consistently. 

However, when done correctly, it can connect you with hand-targeted leads and get you past the gatekeepers at the exact companies you want to work with.

But there is a new way that not many companies are taking advantage of… LinkedIn Ads.

In fact, only 1% of companies with revenue over $2MM are running LinkedIn Ads (that’s a little over 1200 companies worldwide).

Many companies shy away from LinkedIn ads because they are so much more expensive than Facebook ads, for example. 

However, the benefit of LinkedIn ads is quality.  And when paired with a specific strategy that can reduce those costs *see ads strategy blog here*, you can really generate significant volume.

What about costs of outreach vs ads? To compare, let’s take $250 a day as a baseline.

With outreach, you can pay $250 for someone full-time to execute LinkedIn outreach. The cost includes that person’s time, overhead (insurance, technology, training, and more). As a result, you can expect a certain amount of touchpoints with potential prospects everyday. Every month, you can expect to have reached perhaps 100-500 contacts. 

First, all your activity is reliant on them ACCEPTING the connection request. To build a database large enough to scale or “move the needle” is completely out of your hands.

Once you have the connection, you can begin to execute strategic messaging strategies.

These contacts will be in various stages of the lead generation process, and on average it takes a few weeks on top of all this to warm them up and get the conversation started. And then you can push them into the sales process to book an appointment or get on call. 

The important factor here is the difference between cold leads and warm leads. Both outreach create touchpoints with cold leads and turn them into warm leads. The difference is that with outreach, you’re dependent on your 

With LinkedIn ads, for $250 a day, let’s assume you already have someone you can set-up and manage the ads and this will be your daily budget in ad spend. $250/day in ad spend alone is on the low side to really see results, however, it also depends on the strategy.

There is a passive nature to running ads with specific strategies.  White page downloads allow you to generate contact information consistently and accurately to then be able to call/email/message those prospects almost immediately from opt-in.

Over time is where you really see the benefit.  Because after one week, with 10 opt-ins a day, that’s 70 prospects that you can call, email, or message immediately knowing they downloaded content relevant to your services. These are warm leads who have shown an interest, and who will likely remember your company name if you get in touch with them quickly after. 

If you have an advertisement for a white paper, you’ll get more downloads at a lower cost. From there, your sales development team can follow up immediately and set appointments. On the other hand, if you have an ad for a direct call or consultation, the costs will be a bit higher, but it’s still possible to book appointments this way. 

Note that with either ad approach, the conversation is started sooner than with outreach and it doesn’t take as much manpower to get a high lead volume. 

To learn more about our ad strategies, click here.

The Multichannel Backend System is Your Sales Development Powerhouse

Another way we use LinkedIn is for follow-up. To expand the effectiveness of both our LinkedIn outreach and our ads, we add multichannel “Backend systems” that include email, LinkedIn messaging, and phone calling. 

This way, we capitalize on the leads and traffic that result from our lead generation efforts. We know that on average, only 3% of leads will ever be ready to buy at any one time, so we need a robust follow-up system in place to stay top of mind and continually nurture the leads that don’t buy right away. This results in consistency because of the systems we have in place, and in increased appointments booked. 

To learn more about our sales development approach and how you can use LinkedIn, email and phone calling to increase the number of appointments we book on the sales calendar read here.

Step-by-Step Checklist to Use LinkedIn To Get An Appointment Per Day

To begin, you need to be aware of your options. You can do all the following in-house, or you can outsource it. To see which would be better for you, including a price comparison for typical costs, click here to read more.

Here are some resources you can use to include LinkedIn as part of your multichannel system to get a lead a day:

Outreach

Our outreach approach centered around four pillars to help you take the L.E.A.D.:

1. Leadership - Create Your Foundation & Define Your Prospect Profile.

This is where you need to define your prospect profile. Be specific here and understand how they’re industry, and their position dictates their pain points. Use their language and focus on what they are looking for. Understanding your prospect allows you to take a leadership role because you understand them and their problems; you’re a natural solution.

2. Elevate - Optimize Your Positioning in the Marketplace to Appeal to Your Prospects

This pillar is about putting your research into action and elevating how you are positioned online. Remember that your client will do a search for you, so take what you learned from your prospect profile and optimize your social media channels to reflect that.

3. Attract - Zero in on Your Prime Prospects and Add them to Your Database of Connections

Once you’ve defined your prospect profile, you can start identifying them on LinkedIn. Do a search and build a database of people to reach out to who fit your profile.

4. Develop Relationships - Launch Your Lead Gen Messaging Machine

Finally, execute a multi-touchpoint messaging machine. It starts with a connection request. Learn about how to properly execute an outreach campaign using LinkedIn messaging here Targeted Outreach As A Surprising Growth Strategy.

Ads

We have a lot of strategies we fall on to see success with ads. Read here for more information: Social Media Ad Strategies That Drive Leads and Sales

In the meantime, here is a quick checklist to follow that will help you SCALE:

1. Success metric and planning. Start with identifying your prospect profile
2. Control. Create a “lead magnet” or some type of content to attract them that will add value and address an immediate need they have.
3. Audience and Qualification. Set up the ad campaign targeting your prospect
4. Lead collection and appointment setting. Set up a way for them to request the ad and download it. Follow up with them. (See the next step)
5. Everyday Optimization. Continually test and optimize every part of the ad campaign to lower ad costs and increase conversions and ROI.

Backend System

Backend system applies to both outreach and LinkedIn ads. We use a multichannel approach here so that 1) we don’t rely too much on one channel and 2) so that we can connect in multiple ways at various times.

1. Once you have a warm lead, either from your outreach efforts or an ad campaign, call them as soon as possible.
2. Send out an email
3. Send out a LinkedIn Message
4. Repeat this sequence over time.

To learn more about this, read how calling our prospects increases our appointment numbers by 33%.

In Conclusion

To recap, it is definitely possible to book an appointment a day using LinkedIn. Just remember that you’ll get better results if your efforts in LinkedIn are used as part of an overall lead generation strategy, coupled with a multichannel sales development strategy. Together, they are a powerful two for one approach! 

If you’d like to learn more about what this kind of approach would look like for your business, consider speaking to an expert on our team. Together you’ll discuss your lead generation and how you can realistically incorporate LinkedIn to garner a positive ROI.

Click below to schedule a free consultation.